The article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us by Jonah Lehrer was brought to my attention by reader RichardH. The take away from the article is:

And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

I find the title of the article to be way overblown, but the story the article tells is worthwhile.  The article focuses on medical research.  However, as I read it, I  kept thinking of the investing world.  The Nightly Business Report on PBS is typical of all business reporting.  When the stock market has a big move (or no move at all), they come up with specific stories as to what made the market move the way it did (or didn’t).  These stories are mostly fantasies made to explain the cause and effect that is really almost totally unknown.  To quote the article again:

We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

In the previous post Mike Capuano: The Pragmatic Reformer, I mentioned the lessons learned from the books “How We Decide“, by Jonah Lehrer and  “Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable“, by Nicholas Taleb.  Jonah Lehrer is the author of the article that is the subject of this post.  In Nicholas Taleb’s book, he takes pains to warn us that when we are describing the facts of what happened we may be on safe ground, but when we descend into explanations of why it happened, we are more like being on thin ice.

In rereading my comments on How We Decide I notice the irony of Jonah Lehrer falling victim to just the problem he is highlighting in the article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us