In light of new data showing China's population shrinking for the second year running, a Shanghai-based think tank has drastically changed its 2100 forecast.
“Hey, here’s a possible future. Not the most likely or even the most accurate to some imagined neutral policy position, just one potential future. Or maybe even not a potential future if we’re missing a key impact.” It’s all bullshit man, with practically zero prescriptive value. One of the broadly assumed core components of birthing decisions, economics, is almost unpredictable even 20 years out, let alone 75. The simulation-based social “sciences” are just prettied-up hunches and guesswork in anything but the shortest of terms.
But I agree that they aren’t meant to be proven, because that’s a very convenient space to work in when your methodology is “I made a guess about the coefficient” combined with “what if complicated things were actually simple”. Garbage in, garbage out.
You sound really sure about your understanding of statistics and probability, and I don’t think anything I can say can impact that. I’m going to defer to the experts, but you do you I guess.
“Hey, here’s a possible future. Not the most likely or even the most accurate to some imagined neutral policy position, just one potential future. Or maybe even not a potential future if we’re missing a key impact.” It’s all bullshit man, with practically zero prescriptive value. One of the broadly assumed core components of birthing decisions, economics, is almost unpredictable even 20 years out, let alone 75. The simulation-based social “sciences” are just prettied-up hunches and guesswork in anything but the shortest of terms.
But I agree that they aren’t meant to be proven, because that’s a very convenient space to work in when your methodology is “I made a guess about the coefficient” combined with “what if complicated things were actually simple”. Garbage in, garbage out.
You sound really sure about your understanding of statistics and probability, and I don’t think anything I can say can impact that. I’m going to defer to the experts, but you do you I guess.