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Originally Posted by CrazyLond
In the physical sciences, you can observe phenomena to develop a hypothesis which you then try to disprove by experimentation. And when you can't, and no one else can, it become a theory or ultimately, a law.
I'm a big fan of behavioral economics. You can use modern math/statistics to learn things about "the universe". It probably won't boil down to a law. Honestly, physical sciences are basically done with laws -- think Newton's Law of Gravity, which was wrong.
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Imagine if you treated poker with the back-to-front scientific method approach. "He bet. My hypothesis is that he bet because he has a strong hand. I shall now call him the next 100 times to see if I can disprove my hypothesis."
Your example is proof that a poorly constructed experiment will yield silly results.
Let's say you were buddies with Josem and could get your mitts on all of the billions of pokerstars hands ever played. You might be able to do some deep research into poker ideas. Or not, because maybe online poker is different.
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To me, this makes as much sense as trying to explain economics by looking at historical trends.
The state of the art in econ is a randomized trial with a big sample.
The real answer is that the soft sciences are more difficult than the hard ones when it comes to getting to "concrete" results. Or not, I mean state of the art physics is grappling with a math construct that nobody can prove/disprove applies to the real world (string theory). You should check out the freakenomics podcast. They're entertaining. There is a lot about behavioral economics. Way more fun than studying homoeconomicus.(strange that the correct spelling hit the nsfw filter)