Not this. Unless we have explicitly and fairly advanced education, and are disciplined enough to apply it to all we do, we - the human species, every single one of us - suck at statistics, are terrible at understanding or predicting the behaviour of complex systems.
Read Kahneman's "Thinking,Fast and Slow" to get a better idea as to why.
Our biological heritage has left us - oh, OK, the vast majority of us - fundamentally incapable of understanding complex systems and making predictions that have any value beyond the immediate short term. Our intuition - our System 1 heuristics (read the book) - is completely ill-suited to this, and our reason - System 2 (ditto) - doesn't fare much better without advanced training.
Kahneman and others also cite many cases where trained experts make the same errors of judgement and analysis as the rest of us when they stray even fractionally from their areas of expertise.
The GP is right: We get a lot more of this "soft stuff" wrong than we get right because we generally don't bother to apply hard science methods to the problem.
Personal anecdote: I stopped listening to the news because I used to work in crypto. Well, that's the tl;dr reason.
I worked for a company that did PKI and noticed that tech journalists, who might be expected to at least have some greater technical background than just folk made egregious errors in their reporting, in reports that were researched and drafted and edited and considered and fact-checked prior to publication.
While PKI is complicated, it is not complex. Not like the economy. So if these "specialized" journalists with a technical leg up could get so much of something so simple so wrong, what were folks with degrees in English and/or journalism doing to something as advanced and out of our grasps as the economy?
Truth be told, I haven't stopped reading the news - I read it differently. Should an interesting headline catch my eye, I look for a few more. The more interesting the story, the more sources I check/read before accepting to learn anything from the reporting. This is a necessary side effect of how complex the world and its news are, and how simplistic reporting is.
Economists had no idea why their theories of rational actors were so flawed (but flawed they knew them to be) until Kahneman and Tversky came along. Hard science can only cast light on the dismal and dark, and the dismal and dark will remain so, will remain largely speculative, until they adopt our tools.
I do the same. I try to make sure new interesting models of the world are kept at arms length until I've at least tried to fully understand it myself. I'm still free to use them as black boxes but I always remind myself that they are subject to catastrophic failure at any point in time.
Read Kahneman's "Thinking,Fast and Slow" to get a better idea as to why.
Our biological heritage has left us - oh, OK, the vast majority of us - fundamentally incapable of understanding complex systems and making predictions that have any value beyond the immediate short term. Our intuition - our System 1 heuristics (read the book) - is completely ill-suited to this, and our reason - System 2 (ditto) - doesn't fare much better without advanced training.
Kahneman and others also cite many cases where trained experts make the same errors of judgement and analysis as the rest of us when they stray even fractionally from their areas of expertise.
The GP is right: We get a lot more of this "soft stuff" wrong than we get right because we generally don't bother to apply hard science methods to the problem.
Personal anecdote: I stopped listening to the news because I used to work in crypto. Well, that's the tl;dr reason.
I worked for a company that did PKI and noticed that tech journalists, who might be expected to at least have some greater technical background than just folk made egregious errors in their reporting, in reports that were researched and drafted and edited and considered and fact-checked prior to publication.
While PKI is complicated, it is not complex. Not like the economy. So if these "specialized" journalists with a technical leg up could get so much of something so simple so wrong, what were folks with degrees in English and/or journalism doing to something as advanced and out of our grasps as the economy?
Truth be told, I haven't stopped reading the news - I read it differently. Should an interesting headline catch my eye, I look for a few more. The more interesting the story, the more sources I check/read before accepting to learn anything from the reporting. This is a necessary side effect of how complex the world and its news are, and how simplistic reporting is.
Economists had no idea why their theories of rational actors were so flawed (but flawed they knew them to be) until Kahneman and Tversky came along. Hard science can only cast light on the dismal and dark, and the dismal and dark will remain so, will remain largely speculative, until they adopt our tools.