Well spoken, no less.

Basic foundational "observations" by Economics aren't based on the Scientific Method.

I wish the Scientific Method didn't have "Method" in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.

Science is "method agnostic", a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories and methods that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress.

Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary "method resets" that come periodically in any scientific discipline.

Chemistry can admit that atoms aren't tiny planets with electons orbiting like moons because Chemistry didn't start as the pursuit to find evidence for atoms being like solarsystems and flesh out the theory that atoms are like solarsystems.

Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.

Alchemy is a great analog here to compare Economics too. Alchemists in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to turn things to gold did interact with and in some ways advance chemistry, but alchemy could never divest itself from its own pre-existing beliefs and methods as chemistry discovered more and more of the universe and began to accurately predict more and more of it.

If alchemy was capable discarding old methods to pursue understanding phenomena more lucidly and precisely chemistry would probably be called "alchemy" in english nowadays and alchemy would be called "pseudo-alchemy".

Economics equates to alchemy they express a desire of a system of methods, axioms and explanations to produce a certain end goal and it forms fatal shackles to the follies of the past.

What definition of pseudoscience would capture economics without capturing medicine, ecology, or meteorology?

Everyone's just using models here, and the way we incorporate statistical observations to define the limits of the models' scope, and refine the models over time, or reject the models entirely, applies to economists, meteorologists, seismologists, and many branches of actual human medicine.

Popper would define pseudoscience as predictions that can't be falsified, but surely that can't apply to the idea of the weatherman predicting rain and being wrong, right?

Kuhn came along and argued that science is about solving problems within paradigms, and sometimes rejecting paradigms in scientific revolutions (geocentrism vs heliocentrism, Newtonian physics versus Einstein's relativity), but it wasn't a particularly robust test for separating out pseudoscience.

Lakatos categorized things further at explaining how model-breaking observations could be handled within the structure of how science performs its work (limiting the scope of the model, expanding the complexity of the model to fit the new observations, proposing specific exception handlers), but also observed the difference between the hard core of a discipline, in which attempts at refutation were not tolerated, and auxiliary hypotheses where the scientists were free to test their ideas for falsifiability.

But when you use these ideas to try to understand how science works, I don't think economics really stands out as less scientific than cancer research or climatology or other statistically driven scientific disciplines.

It's amazing how nonsensical the actual foundational axioms of modern day economics are.

Classical economics tried to tie economics to functions of physical things we can measure. Adam Smith for example proposed that because you can recursively decompose every product into the amount of physical units of time it takes to produce it all the way down the supply chain, then any stable economy should, on the average (not the individual case), roughly buy and sell in a way that reflects that time, or else there would necessarily have to be physical time shortages or waste which would lead to economic problems. We thus may be able to use this time parameter to make quantifiable predictions about the economy.

Many people had philosophical objections to this because it violates free will. If you can predict roughly what society will do based on physicals factors, then you are implying that people's decisions are determined by physical parameters. Humans have the "free will" to just choose to buy and sell at whatever price they want, and so the economy cannot be reduced beyond the decisions of the human spirit. There was thus a second school of economics which tried to argue that maybe you could derive prices from measuring how much people subjectively desire things, measured in "utils."

"Utils" are of course such ambiguous nonsense that eventually these economists realized that this cannot work, so they proposed a different idea instead, which is to focus on marginal rates of substitution. Rather than saying there is some quantifiable parameter of "utils," you say that every person would be willing to trade some quantity of object X for some quantity of object Y, and then you try to define the whole economy in terms of these substitutions.

However, there are two obvious problems with this.

The first problem is that to know how people would be willing to substitute things rigorously, you would need an incredibly deep and complex understanding of human psychology, which the founders of neoclassical economics did not have. Without a rigorous definition, you could not fit it to mathematical equations. It would just be vague philosophy.

How did they solve this? They... made it up. I am not kidding you. Look up the axioms for consumer preference theory whenever you have the chance. It is a bunch of made up axioms about human psychology, many of which are quite obviously not even correct (such as, you have to assume that the person has evaluated and rated every product in the entire economy, you have to assume that every person would be more satisfied with having more of any given object, etc), but you have to adopt those axioms in order to derive any of the mathematics at all.

The second problem is one first pointed out, to my knowledge, by the economist Nikolai Bukharin, which is that an economic model based around human psychology cannot possibly even be predictive because there is no logical reason to believe that the behavior of everything in the economy, including all social structures, is purely derivative of human psychology, i.e. that you cannot have a back-reaction whereby preexisting social structures and environmental factors people are born into shape their psychology, and he gives a good proof-by-contradiction that the back-reaction must exist.

The idea that you can derive everything based upon some arbitrary set of immutable mathematical laws made up in someone's armchair one day that supposedly rigorously details human behavior that is irreducible beyond anything else is just nonsense. No one has ever even tested any of these laws that supposedly govern human psychology.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/02/09/are-economists-overrated/overreliance-on-the-pseudo-science-of-economics

He was just a delusional living knot bot.

The failure rate falls within the tolerances

turns out the thursday goat service brings in Dianne from networking who remembers she needs to reboot a apecific device weekly, but its not documented anywhere. When Dianne doesn't do this everyone freaks out and grabs another goat to sacririce which brings her back because who is she to say no to some good goat, and the cycle is continued and reinforced

Aye, Iris.

Worse: If the chosen axioms are contradictory, then the theorem is effectively worthless.

And it is impossible to know whether axioms are consistent. You can only prove that they are not.

even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

No. Gödel's completeness theorem says that if something is true in every model of a (first-order) theory, it must be provable. Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that for every sufficiently powerful theory, there exists statements that are true sometimes, and these can't be provable.

The key word is "everywhere".

But that's math. And its proof is math. And that proof is true everywhere forever.

I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments. Eventually, other fields advance enough to do away with many philosophical arguments, like whether matter is infinitely divisible or whether the physical brain or some metaphysical spirit determines our actions.

Since this is a question that math hasn't advanced enough to answer, we can have a philosophical argument about whether other fields will eventually advance enough to get rid of all philosophical arguments.

I think saying that a theorem is true presumes the axioms from which it was proven and so the entire system is "true everywhere forever".

I often find it helpful to think of chess as my axiomatic system. When we say the king is in checkmate, it presumes that we accept all the underlying rules of chess. And these pieces that theoretically form a checkmate will always do so forever... Assuming the usual rules of chess, assuming they're unchanging, etc.

When you put things in terms of chess, these "deep" statements about "math" often become banal. And it works for any game that's a "formal system" (eg. most board games).

This is why engineers are insufferably smug.

As an economics student, I tend to disagree.

Economist are themselves Economic Agents. Their mind, by nature of market, is often split between what they understand to be correct analysis versus what their pay master wants. Add to it competition, and we've two persons either who sees but cannot talk, or who talks but is blindfolded. That's shit, but that's how things are.

The wavestate is entirely deterministic, and we don't fully understand where the probabilistic measurement happens. The Copenhagen intrpretation makes it probabilistic but is not proven.

(even many worlds doesn't explain why we ourselves only see one macroscopic section of the wavefunction)

Logic isn't MAEth.

Butt MAEth is logic. Don't misunderstand my meaning.

This language is literally cognitive shit.