[sigbottle]

Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it)

But I've never thought critically (in a long time) about applying it back to social science / political philosophy. Mind discussing more about what you're reading and targeting? I've personally avoided a lot of studies in this area because I didn't think they were actually rigorous but I probably just don't know where to look.

[jmalicki]

Microeconometrics tends to be quite rigorous and easy to validate.

They won't hold up to physics levels of rigor, of course - probably a bit more at the medical studies level of rigor.

David Card, Gary Becker, McFadden, etc.

Rigor is also... there's something about letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

If noone will apply math unless you can 100% reliably reproduce controlled experiments in a lab, the only thing left is people just talking about dialectics.

The challenge is how to get as much rigor as possible.

For instance, David Card saw New Jersey increase minimum wage. You generally can't truly conduct large-scale controlled social experiments, but he saw this as interesting.

He looked at the NJ/PA area around Philadelphia as a somewhat unified labor market, but half of it just had its minimum wage increased - which he looked at to study as a "natural" experiment, with PA as the control group and NJ as the experimental group, to investigate what happened to the labor market when the minimum wage increased. Having a major metro area split down the middle allowed for a lot of other concerns to be factored out, since the only difference was what side of the river you happened to be on.

He had lots of other studies looking at things like that, trying to find ways to get controlled-experiment like behavior where one can't necessarily do a true controlled experiment, but trying to get as close as possible, to be as rigorous as is possible.

Is that as ideal as a laboratory experiment? Hell no. But it's way closer than just arguing dialectics.

[AndrewKemendo]

Well if you’re interested in the history of it the best start is really just Jeremy Bentham’s consequentialism.

To be clear I don’t believe in consequentialism

He built what was called Fellicific calculus (iirc) that would allow you to more or less take measurement of decisions. It was a mess and it obviously doesn’t work but this is kind of the first serious attempt to bring mathematical rigour to political philosophy.

You could argue that the tao te ching teaching does this in the way that it’s utilized in the sense that you have a set of things that you measure to give you predictive capabilities, but that’s closer to mysticism and tarot card reading its worth acknowledging the input as it’s the basis for like half the human population.

I have my own perspective of this which I wrote out in a fairly lengthy document (General Theory of Cohesion) on my website if you wanna go read it. Warning it’s not particularly scruitable if you’re not already pretty deep into cybernetics and systems theory.