Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[Breakable]

vansig wrote:

Interestingly not a single hard-science field, probably those principles are not so reliable eh?

Sorry, that statement is absurd if you can select “hard-science” to mean anything “easy to predict”. Do not dismiss whole fields and attempt to use that dismissal as ‘evidence’ that a methodology may be unreliable. Instead, test the power of the method against its competitors on those hard-to-predict problems.

It is possible that their methodology works on the “hard-to-predict – impossible to verify” problems, but not on the “easy to predict – easy to verify” problems?
If we don’t know it does, so why use it? How do do you verify a problem in a field such as “economics, sociology, and psychology”. Probably the best performance indicators come from economics, but they can be totally changed by by market which you have no control of. I am not aware of a single experiment that can measure prediction performance in a market in an unbiased, reliable, controllable and quantifiable fashion at least for the moment.
What about a well controlled verification – why cant I calculate planet earth motion guided by gravity using Newtonian theory (even without relativity) and see how much of the “Principles of forecasting” it violates? If they claim the principles are valid in predicting GW, that means they should be valid in any other physical calculation as GW models are physical in nature and do not try to predict human behavior for now.
But they are actually avoiding those claims – all the fields they are including are not “easy-to-verify” and I don’t see either “Climatology” nor “Physics” in their list of predictable fields. The only reason they even talk about GW, I would think is because they believe its not settled yet – so free publicity (specially for gullible people). My thinking is that they don’t actually want to mess with well-defined-hard-science, because they would quickly be disproved – same as any quack medicine that tries to claim real health benefits would be quickly axed by FDA. I really don’t have the time, but maybe anyone cares to run “CARL SAGAN’S BALONEY DETECTION KIT”
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html on them?