A Meander: Prediction vs Prescription, Science, Engineering and the Meaning of Life
21st October 2020
Purists love to talk about what is and is not a science. Clearly, for example, physics is a science, because it allows us to offer theories, and test them against data. And we learn from the results.
By way of contrast, economics or sociology or psychology are not sciences. Of course not! Those soft squishy subjects have no real predictive power after all, right?
Not so fast. Sure, physics will tell you, with impressive accuracy, what happens when a billiard ball hits another one. But if you replace the target billiard ball with a kitten, physics is not so helpful. And if we replace the kitten with a person, then physics has nothing at all useful to tell us.
On the other hand, some of those squishier subjects, albeit with large error bars, do have some predictive powers when it comes to people. When we scare people in a pandemic, we know some of the likely outcomes. We know how people tend to react to scarcity and plenty, how they change as a result of marriage or divorce. We don’t learn these things from physics, but we can learn them from the study of mankind through these softer “sciences.”