Uma das minhas narrativas preferidas

"A strong version of the canonical big data thesis is that when you have enough information, you can make unbiased predictions that don’t require an underlying understanding of the process or context – the data are sufficient to speak for themselves.  This is the so-called “end of theory.”
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Not so fast, Harford responds.  The failure of Google Flu Trends, in his view, emphasizes the perils of unmoored empiricism.
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“A theory-free analysis of mere correlations is inevitably fragile,” Harford writes.  “If you have no idea what is behind a correlation, you have no idea what might cause that correlation to break down.”
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He’s right, of course – but I suspect that outside of a few areas such as physics, our understanding of causation is far more fragile than we appreciate.  We overestimate our understanding of causation, and our ability to generalize..
I’d argue this is especially true in medicine, where despite our aspirations to approach health and disease from first principles, our actual understanding is far more limited, and based far more on rationalized empiricism than is often appreciated – there’s much more scientism than science.
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Fundamentally, my concern is that more often than we appreciate, and especially in healthcare, our faith on theory is misplaced – we turn to various theories as crutches, explanatory models, memory devices, in the case of med students and harried residents.
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The difference is that we recognize (or should recognize) empirical predictions for what they are, limitations and all.  Yet, I suspect we are more likely to let our guard down in instances where predictions are theory-driven, where we instinctively believe we really understand what is going on.  In doing so, we are likely to discount data that don’t fit, and unconsciously constrain our thinking according to theory’s dictates."

Sobretudo porque no mundo das chamadas ciências sociais, o que é verdade hoje pode passar a ser mentira amanhã e vice-versa, só pela actuação do observado e do observador.
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Algo que devia incutir muito mais humildade em quem pretende construir sociedades de homens novos e substituir-se a centenas de gerações de tentativa-e-erro.
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Feyrabend rules!!!
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Trechos retirados de "Why Causation Is (Often) Not Causation - The Retro Humility Of Empiricism"