Hardly simple. You are talking about running huge social experiments based on guesses about what might work better. It would be interesting to see the results of such experiments, but extremely difficult to convince people to participate.
They're not actually simple and we don't actually get to play god with populations of actual people interacting in the real world under different conditions. We can devise experiments that (imperfectly) try to compare the results of different legal and other environments on outcomes. And some compelling results in economics come about from creating especially interesting "experiments" in this manner.
I think the point is to at least try to have a control for the experiment. Social experiments like these are going to be difficult to eliminate all other variables, but this is probably as close as we are likely to achieve.
I doubt you need an experiment to do that. With enough people around you saying "yes sir", and some success in what you are trying to do, the mind can easily rationalise these things.
It's easy to do this with anything in computer science as others can implement or recreate whatever is being discussed easily. Not so with a 6 month experiment with several groups of humans, or even a 2 week one with rats.
I'm an empiricist at heart, too (at least for some things; everyone is an idealist one way or another). But come on, it has its limits! I think we both already know that a social experiments colony would be chaos.
What I was suggesting would have an outside chance of providing useful information. Given enough time, it would probably provide enough information to prevent the next phase from being a complete disaster.
You could say that every nation created (or major political upheaval) is an experiment. The U.S. certainly was. Unfortunately, it takes hundreds of years to start producing useful results, and even then, the results are very muddled.
Gather all the best ideas, and run lots of small decentralized experiments. Evaluate and iterate. I don't trust anyone who claims to see the solution as clearly as day.
If someone seriously wanted to run an experiment/trial it would need to be on the scale of a medium sized city and a decade before I’d be willing to draw any conclusions at all.
Precisely. If it is a workable system, the experiment will be a success, a community will have benefited, and you will have your political ammunition to have it scaled up.
If it is a failure, well, it would be much preferable to know this before implementing it on a large scale, for obvious reasons.
Let's not politicize something which can be easily and cheaply tested with scientific rigor. If it works, it works. If not, then okay.
Imagine you honestly believe in intelligent design. You probably know most people believe the opposite, so when you encounter poll designed by people you don't know you assume they believe evolution theory is true, so if you want to win money you say whatever it takes, no matter what you believe.
So IMHO this experiment measured how well people predict what experimenter thinks is correct, and not how people beliefs change when incentivized.
To control for this divide the group that gets money into 2, and say to one subgroup you're republican think-tank, and to the other you're democrat think-tank, and compare the results :)
I do not see why experimentation is impossible if we are in a position where there literally is no alternative other than doing 'experiments' except refusing to address the results and change tactics except under extreme political pressure. Things like 'we believe if taxes are lowered on businesses, it will result in them hiring more workers', after it has been tried for 30 years and has resoundingly shown to be a collassal untruth, actively destroying the middle class and leading to tremendous instability even among those who do remain employed, at least if we could say it was an experiment and we were uncertain of the outcome, we could say 'well that didn't work let's try something different' instead of it being a political battle fueled by people just trying to trick others into thinking that reality is different from what it is.
In a situation that affects so many people, it may seem unwise to do experiments and try things where we can not say with certainty what effects they might have, though we admit they may be substantial. The ethics are very dim on that front. But the alternative has to be considered. We do not have 'generally accepted treatment' to turn to and rely on. We only have other experiments, albeit while not calling them experiments and not treating them as if their outcomes are in doubt, simply forging ahead with blinders on. I can't imagine an argument that would justify that as more ethical than earnestly doing experiments.
How can you possibly create a controlled enough experiment to give quantitive results? You’d need two different leaders leading the same people and companies to be able to compare.
Sure, but if the gains in an experiment come from cannibalizing other districts, then it's not a good guide to what will happen when everyone's in the experiment. Do you attract more people to the profession? Or do people get discouraged by seeing variable outcomes they can't predict ahead of time?
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