Originally posted by Palynka
I'm just pointing out people's contradictions when it comes to economics.
Before you considered it a crucial experiment and when it was pointed out to you that economics does the exact same thing it suddenly became doubtful. Coincidence? Right.
You're probably an engineer, right? Engineers often fail to realize that theory leads testing and is a crucia ...[text shortened]... s. Sciences go from approximation to approximation, not from absence of knowledge to truth.
If you recall, my very first post was hopeful but healthily skeptical of the scientific validity of the process as a whole (both the simulation and the proposed future experiment):
I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Admittedly, sociology is always a bit sketchy when it comes to hard facts, but this computer simulation is just the first step in the study which will eventually involve 36 human test subjects. I think the simulation is enough to show that moral behaviour can be more highly influenced by a neighbourhood-like subset of a population than by the moral behaviour of population as a whole. Hopefully the actual live testing will shed some light on whether or not this actually is the case. I think once that stage is complete your question will be a valid and important one.
As you can see, my skepticism was present from the very beginning. At no point did I prejudice my opinion based on the occupation of the researchers. In my second post, I clarified that the process should be considered as a whole before deciding whether the article describes a scientific activity or not:
It's not valid now because you are criticizing a small part of the scientific process for not being scientific. Wait until the process is complete. The scientists haven't made any claim (at least no claims that were reported in the article) that this simulation is the experiment which validates or invalidates their hypothesis. It is merely a tool to discern whether or not the hypothesis is viable. As noted in the final paragraph of the article, the actual experiment is yet to come:
"Now, with this game theory simulation showing that moral behavior evolves from individual interactions, Helbing and his team are building a lab that might be able to test how the theory might work with actual people. They want 36 test subjects who can interact, and help determine how cooperative and moral behaviors arise, and whether people behave as the statistical physics say they will."
From a practical standpoint, how do expect the scientists to get funding for the real experiment without demonstrating that the hypothesis at least has merit?
As you can see, I'm well aware of the importance of theory in the scientific process, including simulations that precede experiments. As you can also see, at no point did I claim that "being scientific" is the same as being "the truth" (whatever that means, exactly), nor did I claim that knowledge can't be revised through further scientific discoveries. In my third post, I alluded to the immense difficulty of running a well-controlled experiment in economics:
I think where this differs is that the physicists in the article ran a simulation with the intention of following up the simulation with a controlled experiment. The nature of economics is such that controlled experiments are often very difficult (if not impossible) to run. This is not a small point. You can model and observe real-life outcomes for comparison until the cows come home, but unless the experiment is well-controlled it is extremely difficult to get a sense of how accurate the prediction is and what factors are fundamental to the theory. The economic reality in most cases is simply too complex to break it down into manageable, well-controlled parts (probably due to the fact that human behaviour plays a fundamental role in economics). Economic study is vitally important in today's world, but its predictions will never have the same certainty as those from, say, the law of gravity.
For the record, string theorists take a lot of flack (and rightly so) for thinking up marvelous ways the universe could be composed, but for making predictions which are impossible to test (as of yet, anyway).
As you can see, I also alluded to the fact that economists aren't the only ones subject to scientific scrutiny. Despite being physicists, string theorists are often criticized as being pseudo-scientists since many of their predictions can't be tested even in theory. In my last post, I tried to clarify the criteria for scientific study:
Here's the description of the future experiment they gave in the article:
"They want 36 test subjects who can interact, and help determine how cooperative and moral behaviors arise, and whether people behave as the statistical physics say they will."
I have to admit, the description isn't adequate to determine whether or not the experiment is well-designed. But if it is, then it's science. If it's not, then it isn't science. The key will be whether the experiment is well-controlled, which will in turn lead to it being reproducible and falsifiable. I'm sure you know of some economic experiments that meet these criteria, and I'm sure you know many more that don't. The ones that do are scientific, the ones that don't aren't scientific. Simple.
As you can see, I clearly admitted the possibility of a scientific economic experiment, and at no point did I claim that an experiment run by a physicist is scientific based solely on the occupation of the researcher.
You're probably an economist who's miffed that someone said you weren't scientist, right? Grow up.
The new science of morality: Statistical physics
07 May '10 17:47
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