Galbraith, economics, math, psi, consciousness, silly monkeys

I've been reading off-and-on the autobiography of the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and one thing struck me: he was treated dismissively by much of the academic economics establishment for using commonsense logical reasoning instead of formal mathematical reasoning ... and at the time the formal math reasoning of economists was largely based on linear systems theory ... but in recent decades a lot of his ideas from the early and mid 20th century have been significantly validated by the introduction of more advanced math such as nonlinear dynamics and the game theory of not-fully-rational actors.

Just like the parable of the guy who searches for his lost item under the lamp because it's easy to see it there ... even though he dropped it somewhere else ... scientists have a strong tendency to assume that aspects of the world that are not rigorously study-able using the tools they have at their disposal, are somehow unimportant or even nonexistent.

Question: in what ways are we currently being similarly shortsighted? In what ways does our current mathematical and scientific toolset excessively bias our view of reality?

Psi is the most obvious example: in spite of compelling data, most people reject the phenomenon because our current scientific theoretical framework rejects it.

Consciousness is another: people declare it does not exist, or isn't amenable to science ... or is identical to neuroscience ... even though commonsense clearly says differently. We often find it hard to believe that reality isn't captured by our current theoretical frameworks ... even though history shows that, over and over, theoretical frameworks have expanded dramatically to encompass new aspects of reality.

Even in economics, people still dramatically underestimate the importance of mass psychology and culture in markets and governments. Numerical indicators like "consumer confidence" barely scratch the surface. We lack models to study these effects analytically in detail ... so we unconsciously minimize their reality....

Silly monkeys...