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by AmosLightnin 742 days ago
Well put. This notion of "ignorabimus"[1] which he opposes would seem to have gathered a great deal of evidence in the meantime. What I wish was more widely understood today was the cost of attempting to use models that are effective in the natural sciences in domains where they seem to be consistently ineffective. The replication crisis [2] , where in some cases less than 40% of key studies in psychology and the social sciences could be replicated, is often chalked up to improper statistical analysis or lack of integrity on the part of the authors. But it seems more likely to be the result of relentlessly applying linear mathematics and statistical methods to a domain where things simply do not work the way they works in physics or the natural sciences. To be sure - there is some baby in that bathwater, but the social "sciences" have thus far failed to articulate the domains that are baby and the domains that are bathwater. The amount of human effort and time that is wasted because "We must know" and "We will know" - trying to fit a square peg in a round hole - seems immense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoramus_et_ignorabimus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis