Inductive Reasoning and the Mess of Social Policy
Inductive reasoning sits at the center of social policy. We cannot avoid it, and it is unreliable by design, so the real job is to manage its failure modes, not pretend we can live without it. We live in a world of partial data and time pressure. Laws still need to be written, budgets allocated, programs designed. That means someone will always be generalizing from limited examples, trends, and noisy measurements....