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I don’t get the downvotes, there is some truth here. I even skimmed a doctoral thesis supposed to be in the field of linguistics where the author declared her w
by titanix2 8y ago
I don’t get the downvotes, there is some truth here. I even skimmed a doctoral thesis supposed to be in the field of linguistics where the author declared her work was also made as an activist. Too many papers made by too many "academics" are straight made up ideological essays with no grounding in reality nor in science.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoThose ideological "academics" are the ones downvoting.
- mattkrause 8y agoNope—-one came from me, and I’m a systems neuro/CS staff scientist. Social science is incredibly important. Psychology departments have contributed so much to our understanding of perception and attention, which in turn has paved the way for safe and effective user interfaces, better compression algorithms, and prosthetics. Sociology can tell you how to optimize anything involving groups of people, whether it’s effectively provisioning government services or running an aircraft crew. Linguistics has obvious applications to speech and text processing, education, and even medicine. All this and more, plus you get to learn about what it means to be human! And it’s cheap to boot! Saving one airplane funds a hell of a lot of cockpit management studies. Sure, there is some crappy social science, but there are also crappy programmmers. The blatant dismissal of whole fields is the worst kind of pseudointellectual snobbery. By all means, call out work that’s subpar, but if you can’t see how social science is both interesting and useful, it’s only because you’re not trying.