| > That sounds like the scientific process to me. > Then you control for everything else and do an experiment. What grellas was doing was coming up with alternate explanations based on intuition and rejecting the conclusions of those that did do an experiment. And he was doing so retroactively. That makes it not science, but what is often called a "just so story" and is technically called the ad hoc fallacy. Speculation about how to do a better experiment is a great discussion to have, but both yourself and grellas are moving towards a perfect solution fallacy, where you are ignoring the data you have now, that tells you something interesting in favour of waiting for some ideal study in the future (that can somehow test underlying causes in a sociological problem, which is, as you say, extraordinarily difficult). This is a normal reaction to cognitive dissonance, find a flaw in the source that contradicts what you believe (it's correlational) and then you don't have to change your mind while you wait for a perfect solution. Seems to make sense but what you are actually doing is believing the narrative that has less evidence and then rationalizing that belief. The idea of an accelerator actually running a controlled study is an interesting one, but the structure of such a study would mean that you would be very confident in getting lower returns than normal for that cohort. Maybe you would discover something that made it worthwhile from the data, but likely you would not. It would be great for everyone if someone did it, but no one wants to literally sabotage young entrepreneurs in order to maintain valid controls. Maybe you could use the same ethical arguments that medicine uses ... but it would be a hard sell. |