Misapplication of the Scientific Approach

Friedrich Hayek’s acknowledgment speech for the first Nobel Prize in economics was titled “The Pretense of Knowledge”. In it, he condemned the increasing tendency of economists to use the scientific approach even though it made no sense in economics!

Yet economics was increasingly embracing that very approach. Why? Hayek felt that many economists craved for the respect accorded to the physical sciences. So they decided to do what the scientists did: base everything on measurements. Some economists even went so far as to say that economic theories should only consist of measurable parameters. That slowly degenerated into basing theories on what was available to be measured. If it couldn’t be measured, ignore it. Better to be wrong with a scientific approach than right without one. Measurability trumped truth value! Qualitative knowledge was ignored; quantitative knowledge was king.

But there are plenty of fields where measurements don’t convey much. Or anything at all. Areas where qualitative does matter. Which are those fields? According to Hayek, they are the ones dealing with what he called “phenomenon of organized complexity”. They are the phenomenon where the characteristics of the system depends on individual characteristics, their relative frequency and their interconnections. Identifying the exact impact of each variable in isolation in such a system is almost impossible.

Another reason why the scientific approach spread like wildfire across so many disciplines was its enormous success in so many areas. That success led many to erroneously believe that adopting a scientific approach was the way to go in all disciplines.

But a scientific attitude is the not the silver bullet to answer all our questions. As Hayek said:

"to entrust to science—or to deliberate control according to scientific principles— more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more