Too much data, not enough theory
2007-05-14 · Original WordPress address
A professor forwarded this New Yorker article about the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
One section of the article talks about tension between theorists and empiricists. The empiricists feel like they've been slaving away the last decade to build the collider and then the theorists are swooping in to claim credit for any of their discoveries. The theorist of course theorized the existence of any particles the empiricists might find.
Whatever the empirical physicists feel about the theorists, its clear that the LHC wouldn't have been built, nor conceived of, if it wasn't for theory. In physics, they have stories and then they run experiments to check those stories.
Economics has a different problem, I think. There's too much data, not enough experimental data, and not enough theory. Econometrics allows a hundred ways to parse signal from noise. Given even with random data 5 of those 'signals' will be statistically significant, we end up making up stories to explain the data even if the data is just noise.
In economics, we have it backwards. We find data sources, we dig around until we get statistical significance, and then we have a paragraph in the last section of the paper outlining the several stories that can be told to explain the data.