I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
I think the article does a pretty good job of dismissing itself.
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.
You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed.
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
petsfed|1 year ago
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.
pessimizer|1 year ago
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"