Comment on Theories on Theories

• exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  In what way? And how does that differ from how medicine measures pain?

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  • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There are several physical autonomic responses that demonstrate feeling pain that can be measured

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  • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Namely, the scientific method relies on inductive reasoning and foundational economics relies heavily on deductive reasoning.

    The difference isn’t the data itself, it’s what they actually do with it. Medicine takes subjective, self-reported pain scales and plugs them directly into rigorous, double-blind, randomized controlled trials where they isolate variables to test a strictly falsifiable hypothesis.

    Foundational economics, on the other hand, takes subjective concepts like “utility” or “rational self-interest” and uses them as unfalsifiable, deductive assumptions to guess how massive, open systems work.

    Basically, you can put a new painkiller in a placebo-controlled trial to scientifically prove if it reduces that subjective pain, but you can’t put a macroeconomy in a petri dish to run a controlled, repeatable experiment on supply and demand.

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    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Plenty of medical science doesn’t lend itself well to double blind studies. In vivo infection models can’t ethically be tested with double blind studies, and can only be observed. Lots of medicine advances through observational studies, too, like almost anything relating to nutrition or lifestyle or trauma. There’s no double blind study on how survivable car accidents are.

      Plus double blind studies themselves don’t necessarily have any kind of explanatory power (see the entire field of anesthesia where we know how much of each anesthetic it generally takes to put people under, but we don’t know the underlying mechanism it uses to make people go under). Or, for that matter, Tylenol (whose mechanism of action remains a mystery).

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      • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That’s just it, though. Outliers are treated fundamentally differently between them, they are treated as bugs in economics, but as features in medicine.

        If a “universal” drug fails for a specific group, medicine views that outlier as a falsification that proves the rule is incomplete. They use the exception to fix the theory.

        Foundational economics does the opposite: it treats axioms like “rational actors” as holy scripture, so when people don’t behave like the math says they should, the economists just dismiss them as “irrational” and keep the model exactly the same.

        Even if we don’t know the mechanism behind Tylenol, we can still falsify whether or not it works. You can’t falsify a “rational actor” because the moment someone does something weird, you just move the goalposts. Medicine is trying to map the territory; foundational economics insists the map is right and the territory is just acting up.

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