As a result, said an editorial in the Lancet , “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” If this is true of the physical sciences, it can only be worse in the fields that aim to be like the physical sciences but always fall short.
fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.” Yet we persist in doing social science, in blithely reporting and accepting its findings, adjusting government policy and our own behavior according to it, against all evidence, even as its conceits unravel in plain sight. It’s not hard to see why some of us persist. The great economist Kenneth Arrow worked as a statistician in World War II. One of his jobs was to analyze weather forecasts and send them on to his commanding general. It wasn’t long before Arrow and his colleagues discovered that the forecasts were essentially worthless; no forecast had more than a 50% chance of being correct. Shocked, he sent this alarming information to his superiors. After several days, he got a response. “The commanding general knows the forecasts are no good,” Arrow was told. “But he needs them for planning purposes.”
“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
HAYEK AND HUMILITY Friedrich Hayek pointed to the fundamental problem in his Nobel prize speech in 1974. Social sciences are of strictly limited use by their very nature. Human actions are infinitely complicated in motive, execution, and circumstance. In their fullness, they cannot be reduced to data. “A theory of essentially complex phenomena” – the aim of all social science – “must refer to a large number of particular facts,” Hayek wrote. “To derive a prediction from it, or to test it, we have to ascertain all these particular facts.” Which, Hayek said, is impossible. It’s touching to think of the childlike faith of researchers who think they can reproduce and quantify real-world human behavior in their campus psych labs, and thereby discern enduring truths about our nature. Childlike – or slightly sinister? Hayek went on: “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in
Andrew Ferguson is the author of several books, including Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid Into College. He is a former speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush and a current senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
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