Mathiness, scientism and give me the money.

by reestheskin on 06/07/2020

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Two nice quotes from Paul Romer about his paper Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth

The alternative to science is academic politics, where persistent disagreement is encouraged as a way to create distinctive sub-group identities.

The usual way to protect a scientific discussion from the factionalism of academic politics is to exclude people who opt out of the norms of science. The challenge lies in knowing how to identify them.

I can agree go along with both, but it is in the details that the daemons feast. It appears to me that the ‘norms of science’ argument is itself problematic, reminding me of those silly things you learn at school about the scientific method 1. The historical origin of the concept of the scientific method owed more to attempts to brand certain activities in the eyes of those who were not practicing scientists 2. As a rough approximation, the people who talk about the scientific method tend not to do science. Of course, in more recent times, the use of the term ‘science’ itself has been a flag for obtaining funding, status or approval. Dermatology is now dermatological sciences ; pharmacology is now pharmacological sciences. Even more absurd, in the medical literature I see the term delivery science (and I don’t mean Amazon), or reproducibility science. The demarcation of science from non-science is a hard philosophical problem going back way before Popper; I will not solve it. The danger is that we might end up exiling all those meaningful areas of human rationality that we once — rightly — considered outwith science, but still valued. There is indeed a subject that we might reasonably call medical science(s). It is just not synonymous with the principles and practice of medicine. It is also why political economy is a more useful subject than economics (or worse still, economic sciences).

  1. I guess this depends on how you interpret the ‘they’ in Romer’s second quote. It is the people or the norms that are the problem? I tend to think of both.
  2. There is an excellent recent article in the New York Review of Books that touches upon this issue Just Use Your Thinking Pump! by Jessica Riskin.