Tetlock’s political judgment study was a test for macroeconomics, political science and history. Yet people with PhDs in these areas did no better on predicting macro political and economic events than those without any PhD. Maybe macro helps in producing good econometric models, but it doesn’t help in making informal predictions. (Whereas one suspects that physics and chemistry would help in a test of quick predictions about a novel physical or chemical system, vs. people without a PhD in these fields).
In some sports, applied science seems important to improving expert performance. The PhD knowledge is used to guide the sportsperson (who has exceptional physical abilities). Likewise, our skill at making reliably sturdy buildings has dramatically improved due to knowledge of physics and materials science. But the PhDs don’t actually put the buildings up, they just tell the builders what to do.
In some sports, applied science seems important to improving expert performance. The PhD knowledge is used to guide the sportsperson (who has exceptional physical abilities).
I can’t find the references now, but I have seen several stories about sports (specifically, some football teams in Australia) using psychology and other scientific knowledge (and improving because of it).
Well, some disciplines are a bit too hard for humans to actually reason about (such as predicting complex interactions of many people), the demand for something that looks like science results in a supply of pseudoscience. That was the case for medicine through history until relatively recently—very strong demand for some solutions, lack of any genuine solutions, resulting in a situation where frauds and self deception are the best effort.
With the economics, perhaps an extremely intelligent individual may be able to make interesting predictions, but the individual as intelligent as most of the traders can’t predict anything interesting. The ‘political science’ is altogether non-scientific discipline that calls itself science and thus is even worse than garden variety pre-science which is at least scientific enough to see how unscientific it is.
The history would only help predictively if the agents (politicians, etc) were really unaware of history and if little changed since closest precedent, which isn’t at all the case.
Tetlock’s political judgment study was a test for macroeconomics, political science and history. Yet people with PhDs in these areas did no better on predicting macro political and economic events than those without any PhD. Maybe macro helps in producing good econometric models, but it doesn’t help in making informal predictions. (Whereas one suspects that physics and chemistry would help in a test of quick predictions about a novel physical or chemical system, vs. people without a PhD in these fields).
Another analogy is that having a PhD in the relevant sciences doesn’t help you play sports.
In some sports, applied science seems important to improving expert performance. The PhD knowledge is used to guide the sportsperson (who has exceptional physical abilities). Likewise, our skill at making reliably sturdy buildings has dramatically improved due to knowledge of physics and materials science. But the PhDs don’t actually put the buildings up, they just tell the builders what to do.
I can’t find the references now, but I have seen several stories about sports (specifically, some football teams in Australia) using psychology and other scientific knowledge (and improving because of it).
Well, some disciplines are a bit too hard for humans to actually reason about (such as predicting complex interactions of many people), the demand for something that looks like science results in a supply of pseudoscience. That was the case for medicine through history until relatively recently—very strong demand for some solutions, lack of any genuine solutions, resulting in a situation where frauds and self deception are the best effort.
With the economics, perhaps an extremely intelligent individual may be able to make interesting predictions, but the individual as intelligent as most of the traders can’t predict anything interesting. The ‘political science’ is altogether non-scientific discipline that calls itself science and thus is even worse than garden variety pre-science which is at least scientific enough to see how unscientific it is.
The history would only help predictively if the agents (politicians, etc) were really unaware of history and if little changed since closest precedent, which isn’t at all the case.