The science of business in business schools?

I really enjoyed science courses during my undergrad years (I'm still an undergrad, used to be pre-med though so I took a bunch of science courses), and one thing I am afraid of in business school is that a lot of the questions and answers will be somewhat open ended. I like having precise answers like in economics (my major) - do a lot of business school courses give problems with precise, smart, logical answers or are there many open ended, ambiguous problems?

 
Best Response

Just speculating here, but what I expect is you'll be given precise, smart, logical, "scientific" answers, even though none exist. In other words, business professors will make the unscientific appear scientific, just like economists do. To quote F.A. Hayek:

F.A. Hayek:
It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."
F.A. Hayek:
Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems.
 
derivstrading:
precise answers in imprecise fields are generally not worth a dime.

Well, said. Let me offer a few more Hayek quotes (again, from the same Nobel speech) which make a similar point.

Hayek:
And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.
Hayek:
On this standard there may thus well exist better "scientific" evidence for a false theory, which will be accepted because it is more "scientific", than for a valid explanation, which is rejected because there is no sufficient quantitative evidence for it.
 
numm:
randombetch:
I like having precise answers like in economics

You lost me here.

Haha, I think what he means is he prefers answers that "appear" precise, even when no precise answer exits - like in econ. :)

For more on this topic.

 
numm:
randombetch:
I like having precise answers like in economics

You lost me here.

Have you ever taken a microeconomics course? The answers to the problems are always precise, ie: something like... p = a^2-c/(4ab)

My major is economics, all my classes have had precise answers to problems.

 

take an epistemology course and realize no precise answers exist for anything

looking for that pick-me-up to power through an all-nighter?
 
<span class=keyword_link><a href=//www.wallstreetoasis.com/finance-dictionary/what-is-london-interbank-offer-rate-libor>LIBOR</a></span>:
take an epistemology course and realize no precise answers exist for anything

1+1 = ...?

 
randombetch:
<span class=keyword_link><a href=//www.wallstreetoasis.com/finance-dictionary/what-is-london-interbank-offer-rate-libor>LIBOR</a></span>:
take an epistemology course and realize no precise answers exist for anything

1+1 = ...?

Math is different though; it's more about a philosophy. It turns out that it's an incredibly useful philosophy for understanding the real world, but it's a philosophy none the less. You could have completely different axioms that give you a completely different branch of mathematics, where different things would be "true." I hope I'm not talking out of my ass here, because I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

ANT:
Go read the black swan.

Or that article I've already linked to in this thread. ;)

 

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