Signal-to-noise ratio: Difference between revisions

[[Social science]]s don’t have that get-out-of-jail-free card: they address precisely that kind of supervening cause: behaviour that is, intrinsically, ''un''predictable. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics — these concern themselves with human agents, who ''are'' influenced by each other — which is why we don’t use physical science to predict their behaviour. Social sciences have to deal with the inherently complex, non-Gaussian interactions between human beings.<ref>physical sciences set up closed logical systems within which their rules will work, and often these systems are dramatically simplified as compared with anything you see in the real world: Newton, for example, assumes a frictionless, stationery, stable, neutral frame of reference: circumstances which, in any observed environment, do not and ''cannot'' not exist. {{author|Nancy Cartwright}} calls these structures “[[nomological machine]]s”. Because of this explicit caveat, we can put any variances between Newton’s prediction and the observed outcome down not to [[falsification]], but to the messy real world “contaminating” the idealised experimental conditions. Hence, the proverbial [[crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]].</ref>

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