What I think Nathan Beard is trying to say is EAs/LWers give way too much credence to models that are intuitively plausible and not systematically tested, and generally assume way too much usefulness of an average social science concept or paper, let alone intuition.
And given just how hard it is to make a useful social science model in economics, arguably one of the most well evidenced sciences, I think this is the case.
And I think this critique is basically right, but I think it’s still worth funding, as long as we drastically lower our expectations of the average usefulness of social sciences .
What I think Nathan Beard is trying to say is EAs/LWers give way too much credence to models that are intuitively plausible and not systematically tested, and generally assume way too much usefulness of an average social science concept or paper, let alone intuition.
And given just how hard it is to make a useful social science model in economics, arguably one of the most well evidenced sciences, I think this is the case.
And I think this critique is basically right, but I think it’s still worth funding, as long as we drastically lower our expectations of the average usefulness of social sciences .