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by mjburgess 3100 days ago
The most reasonable thing to think about any mental health disorder is whatever the consensus in clinical psychiatry is.

That is the point. It is so overwhelmingly well-researched, that even if its conclusions are wrong, no lay person is going to be in a position to have "an argument" that hasn't already been considered and researched and folded into the consensus.

This isnt the case with social sciences, and it isnt the case with macroeconomic policy. Both of these are about groups of humans, not individual humans, and are fundamentally about behaviour in the face of cultural/economic/social changes. That kind of analysis is purely speculative and historically accidental in the way that giving people adderall and measuring their cognitive performance isn't.

A man on the street may well have good reasons to speculate differently about the evolution of his society that those speculations produced in some university in a foreign country.

A man on the street can have no good reason to act against the consensus of research-based medicine. To do so is to fly blindly into an area of profound research depth and consideration.

We have a problem today of these domains being equivocated. About people believing they are experts because the "Experts" they see are really political speculators and commentators of macro-cultural changes. And so everyone thinks everything is speculation.

This is profoundly not the case for, let's say, what the best treatment plan for bipolar disorder, adhd, autism, clincial depression, psychosis, etc. etc. etc. is.

...which has folded in lifetimes of research on the way the brain works, the way that drugs work, CBT, social therapies, counselling, etc. etc. etc. ...

An opinion on what "should be done" about a family member with bipolar disorder may as well be an opinion about what should be done about their thyroid problem, carpal fracture, lymphoma, etc.

1 comments

Sounds like you're not familiar with sociology nor macroeconomics literature.
My concern was to defend the topic at hand. Trying to distinguish between different forms of economics and sociology would muddy the waters a great deal.

For sure, no doubt, there is highly defensible macroeconomic and sociological work done.

There does seem to be a boundary where sociology meets macroeconomics meets english literature meets arsty-psychology wherein a huge amount of highly speculative work is done. Work which seems, as far as its truth apt, mostly false.

I don't think this work properly belongs to any of those subjects and is really a kind of speculative blogging that certain academics like to do that happens to get published somewhere. However that also tends to get seen more often than their detailed work on interest rates in the 1970s.

Macroeconomists often can't run experiments, and some kinds of "macro-sociological" theories can't be tested either. That puts them in a fundamentally different epistemological class.