We lose sight of the vast reaches of our ignorance

From The Battle over Junk DNA by Alex Tabarrok

Why discuss such an esoteric (for economists) paper on a (nominally!) economics blog? The Graur et al. paper is highly readable, even for non-experts. It’s even funny, although I laughed somewhat sheepishly since some of the comments are unnecessarily harsh. Many of the critiques, such as the confusion between statistical and substantive significance, arise in economics and many other fields. The Graur paper also makes some points which are going to be important in economics. For example they write:

“High-throughput genomics and the centralization of science funding have enabled Big Science to generate “high-impact false positives” by the truckload…”

Exactly right. Big data is coming to economics but data is not knowledge and big data is not wisdom.

Finally, the Graur paper tells us something about disputes in economics. Economists are sometimes chided for disagreeing about the importance of such basic questions as the relative role of aggregate demand and aggregate supply but physicists can’t even find most of the universe and microbiologists don’t agree on whether the human genome is 80% functional or 80% junk. Is disagreement a result of knaves and fools? Sometimes, but more often disagreement is just the way the invisible hand of science works.

I agree. We stumble along the shoreline, making much ado of our deep knowledge of the occasional Ghost Crab or Whelk we encounter, oblivious of what lies at the end of the shoreline or beyond the distant horizon. We know so much more than we ever used to know that we lose sight of the vast reaches of our ignorance.