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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Paul Smith who wrote (141935)8/3/2010 2:45:43 PM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (2) of 541759
 
Nicely written piece by Manzi. Anyone interested in this point of view, might be interested to know who Manzi is.

en.wikipedia.org.

The short of it is that he writes for, among other places, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic Monthly, etc. The first two require conservative credentials to gain entry. Which doesn't make his arguments wrong; just helps interpret them.

The problem is that he takes a narrow view of scientific epistemology and then judges the "social sciences" by that standard. I frankly don't know of any serious sociologist who would argue that controlled experimentation is possible at the macro level. And I would expect to same to be true of economists (just don't know that tribe as well). And the macro level is the one at which most governmental policy proposals reside.

If you were to take a look at the genuinely serious literature in this subject, you would find that multivariate analysis is not only ubiquitous but terribly, terribly sophisticated. And that multivariate work is written into the modeling process in both disciplines.

Are the results of such work likely to ever be as predictable as some of the hard sciences? Of course not. No end of reasons why not--reflexive human action not the least. But is the result of that analysis better than prejudices, blind luck, common sense, whatever? Of course. Much, much better.
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