A more general relationship between relevance and rigor

Recently, SMBC (one of the few webcomics still worth reading, as he somehow manages to be uncorrupted by his own success) posted another inimitable offering.

Except that in this case, it is actually perfectly imitable. This kind of thing can be done for any number of fields, including psychology and neuroscience. The advantage of doing something like this in a systematic fashion consists in the fact that one will be able to gauge – by the very reaction to it – how defensive or self-confident a given field is. For didactic purposes, I’ll start with low hanging fruit.

An obvious retort to this post is that it is extremely derivative. This is true. That doesn’t change the fact that Economics is in good company. Put differently, almost every field faces a tradeoff between the sexiness of the question under study and the availability of rigorous methods to study it, as the two seem to be inversely correlated. Like so:

Come to think of it, this relationship might be generally true across fields and empirically testable. Perhaps the only question that is – at this point -is both sexy and tractable.

But I might be biased.

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