Thursday, May 17, 2012

Or maybe there's a problem with her model

From There is No Easy Button for R&D by Jim Manzi.

Manzi is right, that the inclination to stray far beyond the knowledge frontier into the realms of rank speculation driven by personal ideologies and biases is common/prevalent/ overwhelming in the humanities but is not an unknown phenomenon in the more rigorous fields of study. His is an excellent take-down of one such example.
I often criticize social scientists for making overly-aggressive claims for understanding causality in complex systems by building regression and other pattern-finding models. This is not evidence of some unique weakness of social scientists. The same thing happens in business all the time, but business analyses tend not to be published for obvious reasons. A good example of one that has been published is in the current Harvard Business Review. This matters a lot, because HBR holds a unique position as the most important serious business publication in America.
[snip]
Maybe Knott has discovered an incredible, remediable market inefficiency, and somebody is about to get very, very rich. Or maybe there's a problem with her model.

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