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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Well there's also the other kind of economist that helps corporations figure out how to save on fuel and make more money.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

We distrust trial by combat not because its outcome is random -- it isn't -- but because the qualities it's correlated to have nothing to do with truth: someone who's wrong, or guilty, or whatever, is just as likely to be a better fighter than someone who's right/innocent/whatever as to be a worse one.

It's not clear that the same applies to trial by academc inquiry. That would mean that making the more persuasive-to-academics arguments about something is uncorrelated with being right (or, since the point of research isn't only direct truthseeking on questions known in advance) with doing work that will lead to new discoveries.

That seems, to say the least, unobvious. Being persuasive to academics on a given topic and being right / usefully creative about it are surely both correlated, for instance, with any measure of general intelligence you please; with deep and wide expertise on the topic; maybe with having ideas on the subject that other people haven't thought of but that aren't obviously crazy.

And, as it happens, academic inquiry does produce plenty of what seem with hindsight to be good results. Quantum mechanics, for instance.

Doubtless it will do less well in disciplines where there's more scope for bullshitting and therefore less correlation between being persuasive to academics and being right -- theology, philosophy, economics -- but the analogy with trial by combat seems rather weak in any case where you can't plausibly argue that that correlation basically isn't there at all.

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