that relies upon statistical correlation is merely a side effect of advancements

http://bv.ms/1thsTYtScience that relies upon statistical correlation is merely a side effect of advancements in data collection, calculation, and computing by increasingly mechanical means of instrumentation. With these advanced, made possible by instrumentation, collection, analysis and explanation were specialised – but without operationalism as a moral and logical constraint upon scientific statements, pseudoscience has evolved as a specific disciple – and means of fund and attention getting – because it’s easier than practicing science.

This fallacy is so embedded in western thought at this point it will be as difficult to erase as was anthropomorphism or the act of divine hand.

It is the phlogiston theory of the 20th century brought about by advances in tools without corresponding advances in reason.

We can intuit a theory by any possible means. Statistical collection analysis extends our sense, perception, and therefore reduces the imperceptible to an analogy to experience that renders it perceptible.

And such correlations can help us develop hypotheses, and can invalidate older theories.

But without converting hypotheses intuited from statistical observations to a series of testable actions on the part of humans, no such pseudoscientific statement can be said to have been tested.

This is the reason for the fallacies of social science over the past centuries: wishful thinking about human nature in the left and pessimistic thinking about human nature as purely incentive driven if required to pay costs of decisions in the other.

Mor later. Thanks for the post. – curt.