Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2014 December 1

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December 1

How scientific is economics?

I recently asked an economics question here, and it was moved to the humanities desk. I thought that was odd. I can't see how economics could tell us anything useful if it doesn't follow the scientific method. Is economics a science?--79.97.222.210 (talk) 01:42, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

It depends on who you ask. Our article, definitions of economics, cites several famous historians and economists who use "science" in the definition of economics. The article also cites several textbooks and reviews that categorize economics among other sciences. The very same article lists many more reputable sources who do not use "science" in the definition.

Most accredited universities do not administer the department of economics alongside physical sciences. Some universities administer economics departments alongside the mathematics department. Many universities jointly administer their departments of art and science, blurring the distinction. So, at least among academic circles, there is room for debate about how things should be categorized.

Economics can be approached using the scientific method. This approach is applied less universally to economics than, say, to physics or chemistry.

For the purposes of the Wikipedia:Reference desk, our present categorization places economics within the scope of WP:RDH. This is consistent with the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification: both systems place Economics between Law and Politics, and quite distant from the "Science" category.

Nimur (talk) 02:54, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I tend to think of economics as a bit of both. In a closed system where currency is based on the value of bullion and there is no borrowings or interest, then it is simple mathematics. As soon as Kings (and later) politicians started to debase the coinage (inflation) and invented new financial tools such as credit/debt, etc., and used these tools to buy popularity, wage war, stimulate the fishing industry to ensure a ready supply of seafarers for the navy to recruit in time of crisis (referring here to Queen Elisabeth I ) things got more complicated and less reality based. Now, Economists (with a capital E) just make it up as they go. Then they try and find reasons why they think they are right and why they think everybody else is wrong. So, today it has become an open dynamic system that is too complicated to model with any certainty. Since as soon as the model gets updated and refined, it is already out of date.--Aspro (talk) 02:57, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Economics is a social science. Social sciences indeed are sciences, since they employ the scientific method, but when topics are classified (classification = when you put each thing in one basket, and it can't go in more than one) for practical purposes, the social sciences are generally put with the humanities and not with the sciences. This is apparently because of what the social sciences and the humanities study — they're not the same of course, but in general, they're a lot closer to each other than either one is to the hard sciences. If you have different baskets for English literature and chemistry and you're trying to decide which basket gets economics, you'll probably put it with English literature simply because the subjects are a lot more similar: they deal with different aspects of the human experience (neither one would be around without humans), while chemistry is independent of humans, and human biology (being just the human branch of zoology) would be about the same if we didn't have enough intelligence to study human biology. There are still some difficulties (psychology deals with human behavior and the biology of the brain, so where does it go; archaeology is a kind of anthropology, a social science, but it relies heavily on geology and other hard sciences; and is history in the social sciences or the humanities), which you can see reflected in how JSTOR divides its journals by subject, so sometimes we simply have to be a little arbitrary. Nyttend (talk) 04:29, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Social sciences in general (and economics in particular) is generally characterized by the extreme difficulty in creating and running controlled, reproducible experiments. Economics may make a prediction (factor X will produce economic result Y under conditions Z), but then how does one run a controlled experiment which produces reliable results? You can't create carefully controlled human experiments which can be run over and over and which can reliably produce identical results. That's part of the problem with classifying economics as a science, and why "social sciences" in general get classified with humanities and not other hard sciences. If I want to run an experiment on, say, the way a spring reacts to forces, I can run the experiment as much as I want, get scrupulously reliable results, and then use those results to make predictions about other springs which I can have faith will work as predicted based on past results. Social sciences isn't able to do that. At best we can make rough predictions based on historical results, but conditions are NEVER identical, and forecasts for that reason are quite fuzzy, and only marginally better than dumb luck. --Jayron32 12:25, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, I find I'm often the one usually calling the assertions particular social sciences (or particular research in the social sciences) as speculative and not supported by altogether rigorous empirical practice, rather than defending them as I'm about to, but I do feel you've gone to a bit of an extreme in how you've described them here. There are in fact many, many spheres of the social sciences that are quite to respectable side of "hard" science, with perfectly reproducible methods, such as the cognitive sciences (though granted they are based as much in physical/biological phenomena as social), psychology, and certain areas of linguistics, to mention just the three of the areas that most stand out to me. Not that reproducibility is even considered an absolute feature of all good work done in the "hard" sciences, much of which relies on modelling and other theoretical work that cannot be immediately tested or wherein a large margin of variation with current testing methodology and technology is initially expected; failure to understand the role of such modelling can sometimes lead to very poor understanding of the modern application of the scientific method with regards to modelling, with sometimes problematic consequences. Furthermore, not even the most rigorous physical science exists in a state of absolute reproducibility, and most all experimental science inhabits various areas on the spectrum of statistical inference. Consider also that human beings often vary as much in their "purely" biological make-up as they do with regards to psychological responses, but I've never seen epidemiology called out as "soft" science for it's reliance on data which covers huge variances amongst individuals.

As someone who comes both from a background of the hard (biological) sciences and one involving those fields which neatly straddle physical and social phenomena (cognitive science, linguistics, and sensory perception studies), and who firmly believes that the latter have, through the cleverness and insight of good researchers in their approach to methodology, attained basically the same level of empirical integrity as the former, I will say that in my experience, most academics and researchers inhabiting this middle area have an a pretty robust respect for economics as one of those fields in the social sciences which has made some fairly strong predictions on behaviour that seem to have been born out consistently by evidence. There are a few reasons for this, but three stand out as particularly relevant in making results stable and predictable. First, at least as regards macroeconomics, the population sizes and datasets can be quite massive, which is obviously always quite desirable when attempting to control for variation and confounding factors. Second, behaviours in economics, as indeed with all kinds of psychological phenomena, are not perfectly random amongst humans; point in fact, modern understanding of the human mind continues to show us again and again how hard-wired the brain can be to approaching certain problems and how universally (or near universally) individuals respond to certain situations, sometimes even when logical analysis shows that universal trait to be a behaviour which, intuitively at least, is quite irrational and problematic (see Game theory and Decision theory, for example). And third, economists favour approaches to prediction which are based largely on mathematical models suggested by the data rather than making sweeping assumptions about the state of mind of the participants, which is often an area they speculate on only after their statistical analysis of that which was known absolutely to have happened -- or which they wisely avoid altogether. This is a very, very different approach from such social sciences as sociology and cultural anthropology, which often do form complex (and dare I say it, convoluted, speculative, and impressionistic) theories which either make empirically questionable assumptions or else don't really provide a lot of concrete information in terms of clear and scientifically valid mechanisms that increase our knowledge of the phenomena studied in a significant way.

In short, and as regards which fields and which particular areas of research exist where on the spectrum of hard to soft science, the social sciences are not nearly all created equal and suggesting as much betrays a significant misconception of how some of these fields operate and present their evidence. Indeed, some of them have more rigorous standards of proof than many theoretical areas of the physical sciences that most would not dream of calling soft. Neither A) the statement that social sciences are altogether lacking in reproducibility or firm, clearly delineated and testable assumptions, nor B) the assertion that reproducibility is an absolute feature of all insightful science take into account the complexities of modern research in these areas. I certainly understand the kind of soft (or as you put it, "fuzzy") research you were trying to reference -- I often find myself rolling my eyes at work at the extremely soft ends of these fields too; as much of my undergrad work was in linguistics, I had to take many a sociology course which I'd just as soon avoided and by the end I think I would have pulled my hair out by the roots if I'd had to read one more "theory" that utilized the overly-wrought idiolect that predominates in that field to try to hide the fact that the author wasn't actually making any kind of insight but rather using convoluted prose to imply some kind of significant new way of looking at an issue without actually genuinely informing on it any significantly empirical way. But all of that said, you way, way overstated the argument and threw into the same bag massive bodies of good science and huge traditions of empirically valid research, in a way which I do not feel is remotely factually representative of those fields. Beware of over-generalization with regard to subjects of such massively far-reaching implications; it's not very scientific. :P And certainly as regards economics in particular, at least as concerns researchers utilizing quantifiable data it is absolutely a science of applied mathematics and statistics -- I don't even know what other broad handle for human endeavors you could reasonable use to describe it, if not calling it a science. It's only where this avenue of inquiry intersects with politics, ideology and policy-making that the term refers to a less empirical pursuit, and that's honestly true of any number of other fields. In other words, this can be described as a philosophy of economics and this is clearly an application of economics as a science (regardless of how accurate you view the findings of either). Snow talk 21:44, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

It is getting more scientific and can produce reasonable results. However a lot of the people involved have political ideas that override any scientific detachment or don't understand about motives except for greed and poverty. I think there is still quite a bit of truth in the old joke about the difference between philosophy and economics. In one they ask a different question each year and expect the same answer, for the other they ask the same question each year and expect a different answer. ;-) Dmcq (talk) 13:05, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

The hard science use of Wikipedia

What is the use of Wikipedia as a whole in the context of hard science?

I don't understand the justification of time spent here by intelligent people whom are desperately needed in our society in so many other areas.

I see no logic in purpose as an open and accurate knowledge database of humanity, as noble as founding intent may have been. While much open history of discussion exists and is quite telling for the individual with the time and drive to search through it, there remains a power structure and ability to delete certain data, which always invites corruption and bias at some level.

If someone has a clue, or "theory", please let me know.2601:8:8F00:CA:55CA:998D:E18C:7BC0 (talk) 03:29, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Are you asking if it's a good use of effort to be maintaining coverage of hard-science topics here? Many of our science experts are professional scientists who edit here in their spare time; if they want to relax by writing about their professional specialties, more power to them. It's the same in other fields, both scientific and not; Doc James is a doctor who writes a lot about medicine (see his biographical article for information relevant to your answer), Arthur Rubin is a mathematician who has written a good deal about mathematical topics (again, see his biography), and Acroterion (there's no article about him) is an architect who writes a lot about architecture. Nyttend (talk) 04:18, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Err. How do think we the intelligent people (your words not mine) got to be so, if it wasn't for the previous generation of intelligent people taking time out from other worthy pursuits to pass their knowledge and wisdom on to us. Education and access to knowledge is now an essential part of 'our' societal needs. Is that rational not justification enough. Don't you think progress of human-kind would stagnate, if new advancements in technology (like papyrus then paper for writing, printing presses, correspondence courses which took advantage of a reliable postal system, etc., etc.) were ignored? As for a power structure and ability to delete certain data. This has always been the case. Even back when knowledge was passed on by oral tradition only, individuals probable edited out and added stuff to satisfy their on whims and fancies.--Aspro (talk) 04:23, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Access to information is a key required for development. Yes Wikipedia is not perfect but it is 1) the best we have for a freely accessible general overview 2) is very extensively read Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:25, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Hm. Perhaps Theory X and Theory Y might be an interesting article for you. Lots of people like to be useful. Dmcq (talk) 12:54, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not aim to improve "hard science". It aims at spreading knownledge. There should not be a general "justification of time spent here" because this would be Taylorism. If you like, the number of readers every day seems justification enough. If you think its a waste of time, keep your opinion. --Kharon (talk) 09:13, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Meaning of endorse and endorsement in psychiatry

What is the meaning of endorse and endorsement in the following context: "Significance of Endorsement of Psychotic Symptoms by US Latinos. In US regional studies, Latinos frequently endorse psychotic symptoms associated with impairment and mental health service use, yet do not meet criteria for psychotic disorder." I did check endorsement but it didn't help much... Thank you! Lova Falk talk 13:29, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

From a "Handbook of Psychology" - 'report or endorse symptoms' [1]. Here is another fairly random article from a psychiatry journal that uses "endorse" to basically mean "report" [2]. The first link is the best I've come up with for a ref that defines the usage, but it does seem very common, search "endorse symptom" on google or google scholar for many similar examples. This is not the definition given by this (not terribly high quality) medical dictionary: [3]. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:10, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I think "endorse" means that when you ask a question about it, they answer "yes". "Report" means that they tell you about it on their own initiative, without needing a specific yes-or-no question. Looie496 (talk) 17:51, 4 December 2014 (UTC)