[vacri]

HN isn't particularly philosophy-friendly. I've talked about how philosophy was crucial in laying down the philosophy of science and working out the scientific method, only to be drowned in a sea of "wasn't necessary, it's self-evident" sorts of comments.

[jhanschoo]

It's funny because it took philosophy centuries to see that—and even now, the scientific method is showing limitations; its too difficult to perform in the social sciences and the less rigorous method of extracting trends off big data also often has great value.

[eli_gottlieb]

"Trends off big data" can be very useful in a machine-learning sense, if you want to predict very accurately, but you're ok with being far off when you do make a mistake. They're not very useful at all for designing interventions, which in the end is more what we care about.