Everyone knows that
correlation doesn't imply causation, but researchers invariably need to come up with plausible explanations (i.e., models) for the patterns found in their data. However, very different models can "explain" the same pattern. The books
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It and
Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Oxford economist
Paul Collier try to explain why some countries have remained poor using data from econometric studies. In his
very interesting review (PDF),
Mike McGovern, a political anthropologist at Yale, critiques the types of explanations found in popular economics books. Statistician Andrew Gelman has further thoughts on
descriptive statistics, causal inference, and story time.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jul 13, 2011 -
59 comments
"Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows."
How to Think About Science is a 24-part series from CBC Radio's
Ideas, featuring interviews with
Steven Shapin,
Ian Hacking,
Bruno Latour, and others. The streaming audio links on the show's website seem to be out of commission, but direct links to all of the episodes can be found
here.
posted by bewilderbeast
on Nov 27, 2009 -
77 comments
The
PhilSci Archive is an electronic
archive for preprints in the philosophy of science. The goal of the Archive is to promote communication in the field by the rapid dissemination of new work.
posted by aniola
on Apr 7, 2009 -
4 comments
Sushi Science and Hamburger Science: I had always regarded science as universal and believed there are no differences in science at all between countries. But I was wrong. People with different cultures think in different ways, and therefore their science also may well be different. In this essay, I will describe differences I have observed between Western science and Eastern science. Let me start with a parable......
posted by Rumple
on Feb 24, 2008 -
46 comments
