[kurtosis]

I strongly disagree - I don't think any fields - even perpetual motion machine construction or astrology - are inherently bogus. We should demand that these fields make falsifiable predictions and then test them to find out which ones aren't false. Of course we can't conclude that they are inherently bogus when we haven't tested them. If we have tested them and found that they are false then that's all we need to know. (I'm all for testing a genuinely new perpetual motion machine, almost all "new perpetual motion machines" have already been tried or depend on principles that have already been tested and proven false.

Let me reiterate since it seems that my message was a little unclear - the purpose of the medicine and finance analogy was say that even though there were many bogus financiers making false promises about their products by using simple models where they don't apply - this doesn't mean that there could never be non-bogus financiers that take a more rigorous and transparent approach to their use of models. We should demand the construction of financial instruments which cannot be "booby trapped". This is a case for more and better financial innovation, not less of it.

Of course this takes a broad view of financial innovation to include such things as auction design, election methods, etc.

I will also retract my statement that the valuation models were pseudo-science - to the extent that they made real predictions they were scientific. But they were undoubtedly cynically exploited.