Some individuals have an inherent distrust of quantitative analysis because they think that statistics can be manipulated to provide a desired interpretation. Regression analysis pretains to knowing about an error term in the regression equation. What would those individuals think if they knew that econometrics is based on an error term?
Do you have a distrust of quantitative analysis? For example, the economists in the Obama administration suggested that the stimulus package that they recommended in early 2008 would keep unemployment under 8%. Even though they did not show us their analysis, we all know that it was flawed because unemployment reached 10% in 2010. Were their econometric models improperly specified? Were their assumptions about the economy wrong? Is Keynesian macroeconomic theory wrong? Was there bias in their theory about how the stimulus would work?