28 ms·

Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

320 points by danielalmeida 6y ago

everyone 6y ago
Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.) A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.
  - non-entity 6y ago
    Apparently the natural sciences were once grouped into liberal arts as well
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      Indeed, my alma mater has the natural sciences in the same college as the arts. Engineering is separate.
  - minkzilla 6y ago
    Plenty of non stem majors are very rigorous. Philosophy is particularly so. My undergraduate roommate wrote a 50 page paper that had to have original ideas that was critiqued by professors who are quite adept at spotting fallacies and picking apart arguments.
  - Chathamization 6y ago
    > Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is good for you and not everything is about buying food."
    - dorchadas 6y ago
      I guess it really depends on what you think the purpose of college is. To me, that's exactly what college and high school should be for -- learning things that don't have a direct economic impact but that make you a more educated/well-rounded person. They shouldn't just be about job training, which should be focused in technical schools, and it actually saddens me that so many think the purpose of university/high school should be job training (really, that should be the companies themselves, but of course they don't want to pay the money to invest in their hires).
      - Chathamization 6y ago
        We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them. I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  Because music, history, and literature are just as important to human society as math, computer science, and physics. This unthinking disrespect for the humanities is embarrassing.
  - burfog 6y ago
    Unthinking respect for the humanities is embarrassing. Exactly why do they deserve respect? (hint: they don't)
    - FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
      So, the only thing in life you enjoy is math? Because if you enjoy music or tv or novels or dance or sport or anything else, you enjoy something that doesn't deserve your respect. And why would you enjoy something like that?
    - Argasm 6y ago
      Maybe because the actual meaning of science was forged by philosophers ans "sociologists" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte#Comte's_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte#Comte's_positivi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
  - dekervin 6y ago
    Embarassing is an understatement. It is one of those cases where people don't know what they don't know ( unknown unknowns ).
- Jaygles 6y ago
  That's what colleges are for. Even for the hard sciences you don't really get much "real" world profit-seeking experience.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo) Because that's why colleges exist...? Historically universities were not the workforce mills they are today. You did not go to a university to help you find work. Stuff like business/management, engineering, medicine, etc really shouldn't be part of universities.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    It's interesting how you go in two sentences from returning to goals of historical universities to suggesting that medicine shouldn't be part of it. A classic full university was supposed to cover the four historically major fields of study - theology, medicine, law and philosophy (which includes all the modern subtypes of PhD's e.g. physics, math, biology, etc). Three of these fields were pretty much designed to prepare students for the specific needs of knowledge intensive work (clerics, doctors and lawyers) and only the philosophy studies were less practical.
- hliyan 6y ago
  Because the operation (not just the physical structure) of the human brain (a complex neural network) and networks of brains (society) are just as important, if not more important subjects of study than physical systems and computers. Or are you suggesting that we completely abandon the understanding of human behavior at scale?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Humanities are the most effective method of teaching empathy that I am aware of.
  - username90 6y ago
    Is there any evidence of this? To me it seems like humanities makes people have less empathy, since instead of feeling other people they analyze them. For example, to me it seems like American politicians have way less empathy than European politicians even though European politicians have studied way less humanities than American ones. So my belief that studying humanities helps you deconstruct the human experience and see us as robots, hurting your empathy. I do however believe that studying humanities makes it easier to answer what the tester wants you to answer on empathy tests, since you now understand those tests better.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      I don't have scientific evidence. But my wife is a historian and the process of doing history is fundamentally the process of erasing your own context and placing yourself fulling in somebody else's context. That's fundamentally the practice of empathy.
- FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
  Why is science even taught in college? All you need is a math book and YouTube to have people show you how to do the mechanical steps needed to solve problems. (I'm sarcastic of course. Sciences and humanities are both cool and good and contribute to a better understanding of the world around us, and one wouldn't be much without the other.)
SeeDave 6y ago
I would prefer a university structure where B.S. + M.S. is earned in four years by focusing on core major requirements to then have humanities courses offered at no cost via the alumni association as part of continuing education throughout one's twenties.
- qntty 6y ago
  That's funny because I actually think that the opposite would be nice. You never know what technical knowledge you'll end up needing, so it would be nice to have technical education integrated with work throughout the first several years of working. But everyone can benefit from having a broad education in liberal arts and sciences.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Youre forgetting that study is optional and most of us have little to no interest in liberal arts and sciences.
    - enterabdazer 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436085 Do we need fancier widgets or people with the capacity for and appreciation of human development? Is the world suffering from a lack of scientific progress or a lack of sophistication in human problems? Do more people suffer from depression or insufficient software quality? Do you think that the people who develop software could benefit from exposure to wider philosophical thought or from a better IDE? Outside of technology, are we better, more capable human beings than we were 100 years ago? It's alarming that many STEM-natives think the wider human experience isn't worthwhile. It's a prerequisite for progress. Technology is just tools, and tools are means to an end. What's the end we're shooting for? That's the humanities.
      - 6y ago
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
The article is talking, essentially, to the humanities. But the point applies to those of us on the outside as well. We as well need to stop expecting the humanities to be science.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
This reminds me a little bit of the push to add “art” to STEM schools.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  I've noticed this too! I've seen schools describing their curriculum as STEAM, and all I could think was "Isn't that just normal school, but without history?"
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    If you're drunk, you can get history, too. Because then you slur your words, and it comes out SHTEAM.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Or Sean Connery
- waheoo 6y ago
  Are the arts so insecure that they need to be apart of stem to have any self worth? You can perform perfectly good science outside of the stem factory. They dont have a monopoly. But given the scientific rigor ive seen in the arts I would appreciate if they maintain a clear and separate distinction from stem.
maweki 6y ago
Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences. As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it's the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they could very well have a mathematician on hand. What do we do in math if not model real problems of real people? It might be nice for some people to not know an application of their research but for humanities to find novel ways in which to use mathematical tools is great and should be encouraged. Of course they will miss but they will also hit. We need a peer review where those methods are understood within the humanities and social sciences, in order to not draw false conclusions. Of course, qualitative analysis isn't going the way of the dodo and the author agrees on that. I just think the occasional misuse of mathematical models for humanities research is well worth the possible gain. Those problems should follow some rules with a mathematical models, right??? Let's help those researchers instead of banishing them to qualitative methods.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If you reduce the humanities to what is quantifiable, you kill them. (You also kill humanity.) [Edit: After re-reading, I'm not sure the parent thinks that numbers should take over the humanities, so my comment may be misdirected. I'm leaving it anyway, because I think the point is valid, even if it doesn't address the parent's point.]
  - wussboy 6y ago
    Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
- tropdrop 6y ago
  I don't think the author is arguing for a banishment of certain authors "to qualitative methods." The problem described in the article is one I frequently see in Silicon Valley - ok, a couple of engineers build a thing. Note how they didn't start from asking "what is a real problem?" No, they built some tool/app. Now they spend several investment cycles trying to find "product market fit" by attempting to find some place in the market where that thing solves a real problem. This very rarely works as a business strategy - you first need to find a real problem and then build a tool that solves that problem. Problem -> so what? (we build a solution) -> real business. Now, replace "app" with "mathematical modeling," and you'll start to feel the author's gripe. I do think the author is right to ask - what is the point? So what? What are you trying to do with those mathematical models? What problem are you solving? For instance, we have the hypothesis that the researchers of the British paper posited: > the relative likelihood that certain stories are originally based in real-world events Based on: >looking at the (very complicated) mathematics of social networks So, we have a tool - that tool is looking at the mathematics of social networks. Does high fidelity between models of social networks predict "realness?" Does a certain model of a social network described in the relationships of protagonists in a book suggest that book's events are accurate historical ones? No, right? Then why is that step glossed over when the researchers go ahead and start modeling anyway?
Gimpei 6y ago
This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but then we should accept that the conclusions from qualitative analysis are less firm and judge them accordingly.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.
  - naushniki 6y ago
    By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.
    - stanfordkid 6y ago
      Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.
      - jaundermann 6y ago
        Maybe, but the laws as we know them do. People create and change them.
        stanfordkid 6y ago
        Sure. But updating the equations doesn't change the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment or make a ball fall up instead of down -- it simply converges on a more precise outcome.
wrnr 6y ago
Say i agree with the sentiment expressed here, what does the curriculum of a neo-classical humanities look like. Let's presume you'd want to keep the good stuff, things like Arrow's impossibilities theorem, Bayesian statistics, Network theory, Language pragmatics, ect. You know the sort of stuff that might aid the organisation of complex systems without repeating the mistakes of the past. Maybe it is unfair to judge the hole field on a silly paper, in all fairness they write about non existing geometries in physics
naushniki 6y ago
I think anything can be a subject to scientific study. Methods are what is essential for a study being scientific, not the subject.
- doukdouk 6y ago
  Can mathematics be a subject of scientific study? Should axioms and proofs be replaced by empirical evidence?
mmhsieh 6y ago
One of the most valuable courses I took as an undergrad was an anthropology course. In it, we studied the life of JR Oppenheimer and his relationship with the government patrons of his science. The sort of scoundrels naturally attracted to power will always find cynical use for talent of the kind possessed by Oppenheimer. However, every aspect of such a relationship will be thoroughly cynical. If you are a future STEM person, understanding this fact will save you a lot of grief. Learn it early.
- wrnr 6y ago
  Was it beyond Oppenheimer's intellect and imagination to comprehend what he was doing? Sort of like nazi Germany having no idea what was happening to the jews?
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    You've seen how military contractors act on HN. I'm sure Oppenheimer was spouting all the same old excuses. "Orders are orders. It's just my job. If I don't someone else will." Oppenheimer's mistake was being born as a human being, instead of an angel.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mhh__ 6y ago
  You aren't wrong but in the case of Oppenheimer - If we don't build this bomb what happens if the German's build one and when the soviets definitely get their hands on one?
abathur 6y ago
Kinda funny, I guess. This is one of those instances where I might care about the case Konnikova was making if she bothered using any quantitative methods to convince me the humanities were awash in quantitative study while qualitative analysis clearly went the way of the dodo. Or that literature programs were churning out students who think network analysis is the best way to understand a text. In the purely-qualitative realm, it just comes off as pearl-clutching over something I don't think anyone actually believes?
fasteddie31003 6y ago
If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it's a science.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it's a science. You've just disqualified much of physics research today :-)
  - paulcole 6y ago
    They didn’t say that if you can’t do a double-blind controlled study, it’s not a science.
modzu 6y ago
science = hypothesis; prediction; test prediction; observe. thats it. so a lot of "science" actually isnt science either...
guerrilla 6y ago
"Psychology is not a natural science." I used to think this and to a certain extent I still do but the fact is that the feild has changed and become much more reproducible as time passes and it matures. More importantly though this article conflates humanities with social sciences pretty badly. This is quite insulting to sociology and even more so to economics and anthropology. Physical antrho is pretty serious science. There are limitations to social sciences but those are not the same limitations of literary criticism.
- neonate 6y ago
  Psychology hasn't simply become more reproducible. It has been gutted by a reproducibility crisis and it remains to be seen what the outcome will be.
  - 0d9eooo 6y ago
    The reproducibility crisis extends far beyond psychology. Psychologists are the messengers, just like they were with meta-analysis in the 60s and 70s. Similar problems have been demonstrated in a host of fields, mostly the biomedical sciences. To take one prominent example, HN has been plastered with articles about COVID studies of dubious quality.
    - neonate 6y ago
      I agree.
- andreilys 6y ago
  Has it become more reproducible? From what I've read we've only now come to terms with the fact that so much of the research is not reproducible and largely debunked (even land-mark studies like the Milgram experiments have started to be put into question)
torrance 6y ago
I would add to this list economics. Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations. I do recommend reading the first half of her Doughnut Economics where she makes this case at length, from someone inside the discipline.
- 2019-nCoV 6y ago
  The more macro the more inaccurate.
- scollet 6y ago
  Do you think there is a factor of unknowns in both economics and humanities (disparate) that challenge scientific study? I.e. humanities and a further extension of art is currently immeasurable. If this sounds like a loaded question, I don't know how to phrase it correctly.
- andreilys 6y ago
  Yeah, it still baffles me that people think economics is a proven science and not built on a shaky foundation that falls apart soon as you prod it.
  - selectionbias 6y ago
    Look at the latest edition of QJE. You will see mostly studies addressing a particular policy question, e.g., 'what was the effect of this policy change on unemployment' which they answer using randomly controlled trials or quasi-experimental methods. Which aspect of this falls apart when you prod it?
    - andreilys 6y ago
      I was more thinking of top economists like Alan Greenspan and his comments about having banished volatility, followed shortly after by the '08 crash. Much of economics is politics disguised as technocracy.
yk 6y ago
I fully agree with the premise that humanities aren't a science. In fact I am fairly certain that the current paradigm of science can not work for at least history, though I strongly suspect most of the humanities. One of the problems is computability, when I try to build statistics on a space of human intentions, then I strongly suspect that this is at least as complicated as trying to build a measurable space atop the set of all Turing machines, and there I get immediately the issue of computability. (For example, calculating the average run time of halting Turing machines.) So, then assuming that one can meaningful build a statistic (just the claim that this is possible) will doom any too formal reasoning, by principle of explosion.
- shash 6y ago
  I disagree entirely, especially about history. You form hypotheses on the basis of evidence (literary, archaeological, documentary, etc), make predictions about the kinds of effects you’d expect to find in the historical record, and then modify those hypotheses based on what you find later. How is that not a science?
  - yk 6y ago
    > make predictions about the kinds of effects you’d expect to find in the historical record, You want to make predictions about the past?
    - shash 6y ago
      No, predictions about what other undiscovered evidence you’d expect to find about the past. In a way this is like astrophysics in that you can’t conduct experiments, but you can predict that X is correlated with Y. Come to think of it, paleontology... For example, take the Shakespeare authorship controversy; you could create a hypothesis that say “Shakespeare was indeed the author of Hamlet”. A prediction from this might be, “if a manuscript of Hamlet were ever found it would be in Shakespeare’s handwriting”. Not a really good example to be sure, but just off the top of my head...
supernova87a 6y ago
Makes me think of the joke on "Big Bang Theory" (which am almost ashamed to admit enjoying): Caricatured dumb humanities major: "That's what I love about math, there's no one right answer!"
- naushniki 6y ago
  The most funny part is that this is effectively true.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    Well math is not a science either. I acknowledge that there is debate about if formal sciences (logic, math, theoretical CS) are a science, but I'm with Popper in saying that the core of a science is falsifiability which does not apply to math.
gumby 6y ago
The first paper she studies sounds interesting. Regression analysis on vocabulary has been used to identify authors of work whose authorship had been lost or to find context of where and in what circumstances certain authors grew up. Mathematical analysis of linguistics has pointed to. Irrational patterns later confirmed by genetic analysis. I don’t mind pointing out the vacuity of what often passes for scholarship. But she didn’t start with a good example.
29athrowaway 6y ago
You can analyze a book by saying it has certain number of pages, each one with certain amount of paper and ink, and you can use that to determine the chemical composition of the paper and the ink. That will not tell you what the book is about, though.
crazygringo 6y ago
This is a terrible article. First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities. Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences, and only "humanities" in a very broad umbrella term. "Humanities" is more often used to refer to disciplines such as history, art, literature. So a complete mix-up of fields. Third, the assumption that social sciences has a "reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any given point" is simply flat-out wrong. For example, of course political science relies on "big-N" studies which try to find or refute correlations between democracy and various other country indicators. But political science also relies heavily on "comparative politics" which is much closer to literature or history in a classic "compare and contrast" aspects of two countries. Similarly psychology has many different approaches taken in published papers and books, some quantitative and others more qualitative. I could go on and on. But this article is completely ridiculous, arguing against a straw man that simply doesn't exist. It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia. Bizarre.
- torrance 6y ago
  A lot of people have been and continue to make this criticism that’s in the article, across a variety of the softer disciplines. (It’s like you’re not even familiar with this line of critique.) See, eg. a criticism of political science in the same vein from a political scientist https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Became/245777 https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Beca...
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I've studied political science a great deal, and there are absolutely nuanced critiques you can have here. I personally, for example, find that political science went overboard in rational choice theory (borrowed from economics) over the past several decades, which hasn't turned out to be particularly fruitful. (And there are 20+ subfields of political science as well, rational choice being just one.) But that's simply arguing over the relative usefulness of specific methods, like to what degree TDD should be used in software, or have we gone overboard with microservices. The original article's absurdly broad critique of quantitative methods somehow taking over generally remains bizarre and completely uninformed.
ltbarcly3 6y ago
I'm going to sum up half the HN comments here without reading them: "This isn't good, humanities are important, not everything can be quantified."
brutualchaos 6y ago
(2012)
- igravious 6y ago
  +1 @dang
rnikander 6y ago
Some people submitted nonsense papers (for example: rape culture at dog parks, and an excerpt from Mein Kampf), and they were accepted for publication. https://www.timesofisrael.com/duped-academic-journal-publishes-rewrite-of-mein-kampf-as-feminist-manifesto/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/duped-academic-journal-publish...
- nemo44x 6y ago
  They have a book coming out soon titled “Cynical Race Theory” which is a critique of the 40 years of academic thought that has gone from fringe to mainstream (And applied like the Inquisition mashed up with Maoist techniques like Struggle Sessions) and we are seeing played out unwittingly by the media, tech companies, and the tokenizing social media chatter class.
  - noema 6y ago
    Looked this up and saw the promos. Anything endorsed by both Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal is bound to be bad faith, intellectually dishonest hackery.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      Perhaps. The authors, however, are respectable in the time I’ve read their blogs, tweets, etc. Guided by liberal principals and have expressed a generally good understanding of philosophy going back to the Greeks.
hliyan 6y ago
Perhaps the currency of social sciences should be anecdotes with full context (of which you can obviously get only a limited number unless you have unlimited budget) rather than collecting extensive data points on a limited number of variables. While physical systems can be approximated (or some independent variables dropped) without affecting the aspect being studied (think perfectly spherical objects), when it comes to humans, there are no independent variables. Approximation or simplified models are much harder. I think looking for statistical patterns (e.g. in literature) is perfectly good science as long as you are cognizant that patterns merely invite more study an should not be used to reach conclusions, also being aware that patterns might disappear when you expand your data set. Finally, as someone trained in the physical sciences, I used to look down on social scientists. I no longer do this. At least they're brave enough to tackle a complex monster with the limited tools at their disposal, stumbling and even enduring ridicule from the hard sciences. We ignore the human mind and collections thereof, because it's too complex and prefer the relative comfort of simple, predictable systems. I don't believe that's good.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  As someone in the behavioral/population sciences, I think there's an underlying, interesting question of "when, if ever, should quantitative methods not be applied to an area of empirical inquiry?" The article doesn't seem to address this though. As for the social and behavioral sciences, another way of approaching it is: if you have a phenomenon, is it better to try to be scientific in explaining it or not? If not, you cede that realm to the nonscientific, with all that implies. If you do approach it scientifically, how do you do that? If your explanation or theory involves some quantity of some sort, shouldn't you then attempt to specify a model of it, and test it against observations?
  - naasking 6y ago
    Most science seeks broad principles, but I kind of like the OP's suggestion that a depth-focused approach of detailed anecdotes, possibly from multiple different points of view, could provide an interesting form of alternate data.
m0zg 6y ago
Science implies the use of the scientific method. Scientific method implies falsifiable hypotheses. Anything that is not falsifiable isn't a science.
analboipucci 6y ago
Neither are social sciences. Economics, finance, sociology, political science, psychology.
jessriedel 6y ago
It's probably fine for there to be a study of history that is not a science, but there should also be a study of history that does apply scientific methods.
Daub 6y ago
My father (a physicist) used to quote Rutherford to me: "all science Is either physics or stamp collecting". An extreme position perhaps. I now work in a college of humanities and have frequently collaborated with engineers. I have seen first hand how poorly applied scientific thinking has become within the humanities. But I cannot blame them. They are only giving to the uni what has been asked of them. The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as 'social science' goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.
- konfekt 6y ago
  In the UK Thatcher might have been a driving force. In Western thinking (entering a rabbit hole) conceiving humanities as sciences is a recurrent theme (say, in the Scepticism of Hume) that Auguste Comte in the 19th century turned into the doctrine of positivism: - The scientific method (and precision of mathematics) applies to all sciences, social and natural. - Knowledge can be proved only by observation trough empiric means and deductive reasoning.
aww_dang 6y ago
Scientism is the main pillar supporting technocratic management and central planning of society. This is most apparent to me in economics.
cm2012 6y ago
Can you create a hypothesis and then falsify it? Then it's science. Polls are really useful + accurate and are one of my favorite examples of stuff that came from social science research.
nurettin 6y ago
Articles and generally ideas like this always seem too dismissive. CPUs are nothing like brains because: intricacies. Algorithms can't be applied to literature because: intricacies. It is almost an appeal to emotions to say that rather than saying "ok well we tried to apply these electric constructs and algorithms in order to understand ideas and literature better, we got nowhere and here's exactly why", they are like "it can't be applied oh no it can't our humanity is so distinct and precious there are some lines not to be crossed and here's a million contrived examples as to why". And to this approach I say, ignorant and cowardly.
- akiselev 6y ago
  I'd hesitate to even call them intricacies. Billions of years of evolution in biochemistry and multicellular organisms, half a billion years in nervous systems, and over 200 million years in mammalian brains have culminated with about 50 million years of evolution of the primate brain. For every human being that has ever lived, nature has run 10^X continuous brute force "simulations" to arrive at our present civilization, where X is a ridiculously high number that's impossible to even estimate. Sure, our intelligence allows us to skip a lot of those processes just like it allowed us to escape our gravity well and explore our solar system, but the jump from CPU to brain is like the jump from moon landing to intergalactic travel. The discrete nature of digital electronics alone prevents them from matching neurons because of sampling, let alone their lack of architectural (i.e. neural) plasticity. It's like trying to weld with a q-tip.
  - todorus 6y ago
    That makes it sound all very daunting, but we have a few advantages over nature when it comes to design. * A single life can produce multiple iterations of a technology. * Current technology speeds up the development of the next iteration.
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      Nature isn’t limited to intentional design tho, I’m not sure what advantage we have when you have a few 1000’s of people trying to progress technology over their life time vs about 7 billion iterations which are governed by natural selection and that is if you only account for a single species. Also don’t forget that a single life can also produce multiple iterations of itself over its life span. Designs are limited by what we understand and can imagine as well as other constraints, nature not so much.
cycomanic 6y ago
This is such a horrible article. Many have already mentioned the conflation of humanities and social sciences. Then by using the example of books (because most would agree books would loose their essence if we just describe them by numbers) it constructs a straw man that somehow we loose something (the beauty?) by using quantitative measures. Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is the alternative that we simply use theories because of their "beauty" (whatever that means)? Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?
- tw000001 6y ago
  > conflation of humanities and social sciences. You've missed the entire point. A sort of conflation is the problem - not by the author, but by people in and around soft sciences and humanities throwing a bit of statistical jazz into their papers and then drawing ostensibly rigorous conclusions which influence social policy. The reality is that by their vary nature, both soft science and humanities (there is a lot of overlap) cannot be held to the same rigor as, say, mathematics, physics, chemistry. These sciences are pure theory (like gender studies), non experimental (like psychology), and fundamentally unfalsifiable in the majority of cases...but laymen, and apparently government officials, either don't understand or pretend they don't understand - either way shitty policy and legislation is passed and innocent people (society) are worse off frequently.
  - JordanFarmer 6y ago
    What you speak of has led to unrecoverable loss... The more mankind "knows", the more foolish we become.
  - barking 6y ago
    This is 2020 and while in the past attitudeX or behaviourY might have been acceptable we have now come to understand (through Social Science Studies or NY Times bestseller that a particular academic has written) that both are wrong, toxic, in fact.
vavooom 6y ago
I would encourage those interested in the intersection of STEM and the Humanities to check out the Digital Humanities Minor/ Major being offered at a growing number of universities. I earned the minor at UCLA, and found the application of digital tools to historical and modern "humanities" focused types questions to be incredibly relevant. Examples include: 3D modeling of the historic broadway district in Los Angeles, Natural Language Processing of ancient Roman texts, virtual reality's impact on human cognition, etc.
KhoomeiK 6y ago
Elegant conclusions can totally be arrived at in the humanities, it's just that statistical methods often aren't the best way to go about doing so. The traditional method of logical proof, which is valued just as much as data analysis in science, used to be the standard in the humanities. The human mind would compute the statistics more or less subconsciously, but would then use those empirical results to say something valuable through a process of logical induction. I think that's the key point that this article misses—it isn't that we don't want humanities to provide rational insight, it's that we want humanities to reduce its reliance on statistics and refocus on what it's historically been great at. There's something important to be said here about the duality between logic and math, algebra and statistics, classical AI and modern DL, philosophy and science, rationalism and empiricism.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
how not to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: conflate it with humanities and claim using data to prove things misses the points how to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: throw out bogus research and get rid of quacks
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Good idea, but you can’t throw out the quacks because their chairing the departments. You won’t make much progress until you start throwing out the schools.
devin 6y ago
One of the dumbest faux-scholarly articles I've read in awhile.
timkam 6y ago
I know it's just an example in the article, but the study about real-life likeness of social networks in fiction literature seems to miss a point. Wouldn't a good writer in many cases abstract away some of the complexity of real-life social networks?
Koffiepoeder 6y ago
I think one of the points that the article tries to make, is the point that proving something in a soft science using models is often based on many assumptions, be it implicit or explicit, and that this is problematic. To that I agree to some degree. In hard sciences all inputs to a proof are either verifiable theorems known to be absolutely true, conjectures/hypotheses (in which case the proof becones a conjecture) and seldomly axioms. In soft sciences on the other hand, it is common to construct models quite arbitrarily, in order to try and match empirical results. If however, we would like these models to have any indication of "absolute" truth, similar to the hard sciences, currently we can't or don't. To achieve this I believe we could do an input analysis of ALL assumptions and try and quantify the aggregated certainty of the model's correctness, even before matching it with empirical data. In this way we could say for example: we have used a model with a predicted input accuracy of 0.82, that matches our empirical results 0.97,p < 0.05. This would then further strengthen and quantify the "standing on the shoulders of a giant" principle. Of course this is easier said than done and I know this is a bit naïve. Currently no techniques exist to do this as far as I know. There is also discussion to be had about how to interpret model outputs (we now have three variables, how do we relate them? How to calculate this model's output accuracy?) and how to calculate subsequent model's accuracy based on different input accuracies and their inter-relations. This would also require re-building soft sciences all the way from the bottom up (from the most easily verifiable facts first) to be useful and a new science on hypthesized model accuracy calculation. Anyway, enough hypothesizing thought experiments for the day. Any thoughts?
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Some people do not consider mathematics to be a science. They veiw it as a tool used in science, e.g., statitics.
mihaaly 6y ago
The story reminds me of the HR practices of 'measuring' personality based on questionnaire to judge the competence of people for certain positions and determine their carrier path inside the organization (e.g. at Trimble). Imagine you are a software engineer applying for an engineering role and they ask you a hundred or more questions to compare the importance of aspects such as punctuality, trust, being patient, lawfulness, honesty and several more, 3 at a time, make a strict order of importance. Without specifics on the work context and situation. Then they build a multi dozen component report how good you are in this and that on a 1 to 5 scale. The way you work. Based on answers to strange questions, not actual work. When it is impossible to answer accurately (because it depends, or there is no order like between playing piano or being tall) then the results will be inaccurate, yet they use it to classify workforce like steel by its properties, determining their fate. Assessing work performance before doing any work. And they take it dead seriously like gauge on a pressure tank. It is just so ... well dumb, forcing any kind of oversimplified measurement on complex and fluid things, sounds like measuring friendliness by meter. People change, people adapt, people behave differently in different circumstances, very very differently, and definitely not how they admit it, no one can count how many influential factors there are, these robotic and unified approaches are just distorting for the purpose of appearing fair. It is far from fair, it is just robotic - which is ironic from a department called human resources, feels like robots work there not humans. Measuring fish by how high it can jump before allowing to swim. It is just pretentious not scientific.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  If you ever need to take such a test, get yourself in the mindset of "I am a loyal, hard working person", and good results will flow from that one. Just think what kind of employee a company wants to have. It's easier to fill it out on a test than actually be hard working for a couple of years, so the test is the easy part ;).
  - mihaaly 6y ago
    My point is more like that it is the best not to be involved with organizations employing such evaluation practices towards their people. Despite the technical interviews went very well I've quit the recruitment process when faced this mandatory step. I choose not to take those tests. Previous experiences show that where such mechanistic approach is in place those places are not worth working for. I tried to discuss around this kind of test, asking for reasons and proposing substitutes with more position relevant ones, but no, rigid refusal was the answer in polite wrapping. Actually they required two kinds of tests, one personality and one generic ability that included one third - ca. 6 questions - of calculating percentages and sum values quickly, in a financial context. Basically adding and multiplying numbers very quickly. Irrelevant but the results are taken into account seriously.
timwaagh 6y ago
On the one hand I completely agree that a lot of scientists across disciplines have too much confidence in the predictions of their models of complex systems. For example climate models predicting not only how much global temperature will rise but also on the local level, which seems far harder to predict. And the amount of studies that do not survive a replication attempt. But I don't believe that we can justify wasting tax money on people who don't try to back up their claims and instead just make up hypothesis after hypothesis, maybe based on a patient they knew, debating and sipping wine with their fellow intellectuals, prescribing morality under the guise of science and just laughing at us plebs. If you want to do that, become a writer or YouTuber, but not a scientist of any kind. If you're going to be a scientist at the very least try to back everything up with statistics. I know, It's work, it's not fun and it might not mean very much but you owe it to society to dig in and crunch those numbers.
ukj 6y ago
Humanities may not be a science, but being human sure is empirical. Experience is all we have. At the bottom of all of these bouts is then “demarcation problem”. What is a science, what isn’t a science? I prefer Paul Fayerabend’s view: if it is useful To somebody somewhere - it is a science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism
take_a_breath 6y ago
Economics-hating HN is the most fascinating HN.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

320 points by danielalmeida 6y ago

everyone 6y ago

Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.) A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Apparently the natural sciences were once grouped into liberal arts as well
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    Indeed, my alma mater has the natural sciences in the same college as the arts. Engineering is separate.
- minkzilla 6y ago
  Plenty of non stem majors are very rigorous. Philosophy is particularly so. My undergraduate roommate wrote a 50 page paper that had to have original ideas that was critiqued by professors who are quite adept at spotting fallacies and picking apart arguments.
- Chathamization 6y ago
  > Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is good for you and not everything is about buying food."
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    I guess it really depends on what you think the purpose of college is. To me, that's exactly what college and high school should be for -- learning things that don't have a direct economic impact but that make you a more educated/well-rounded person. They shouldn't just be about job training, which should be focused in technical schools, and it actually saddens me that so many think the purpose of university/high school should be job training (really, that should be the companies themselves, but of course they don't want to pay the money to invest in their hires).
    - Chathamization 6y ago
      We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them. I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).
ojnabieoot 6y ago
Because music, history, and literature are just as important to human society as math, computer science, and physics. This unthinking disrespect for the humanities is embarrassing.
- burfog 6y ago
  Unthinking respect for the humanities is embarrassing. Exactly why do they deserve respect? (hint: they don't)
  - FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
    So, the only thing in life you enjoy is math? Because if you enjoy music or tv or novels or dance or sport or anything else, you enjoy something that doesn't deserve your respect. And why would you enjoy something like that?
  - Argasm 6y ago
    Maybe because the actual meaning of science was forged by philosophers ans "sociologists" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte#Comte's_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte#Comte's_positivi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
- dekervin 6y ago
  Embarassing is an understatement. It is one of those cases where people don't know what they don't know ( unknown unknowns ).
Jaygles 6y ago
That's what colleges are for. Even for the hard sciences you don't really get much "real" world profit-seeking experience.
BeetleB 6y ago
> Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo) Because that's why colleges exist...? Historically universities were not the workforce mills they are today. You did not go to a university to help you find work. Stuff like business/management, engineering, medicine, etc really shouldn't be part of universities.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  It's interesting how you go in two sentences from returning to goals of historical universities to suggesting that medicine shouldn't be part of it. A classic full university was supposed to cover the four historically major fields of study - theology, medicine, law and philosophy (which includes all the modern subtypes of PhD's e.g. physics, math, biology, etc). Three of these fields were pretty much designed to prepare students for the specific needs of knowledge intensive work (clerics, doctors and lawyers) and only the philosophy studies were less practical.
hliyan 6y ago
Because the operation (not just the physical structure) of the human brain (a complex neural network) and networks of brains (society) are just as important, if not more important subjects of study than physical systems and computers. Or are you suggesting that we completely abandon the understanding of human behavior at scale?
UncleMeat 6y ago
Humanities are the most effective method of teaching empathy that I am aware of.
- username90 6y ago
  Is there any evidence of this? To me it seems like humanities makes people have less empathy, since instead of feeling other people they analyze them. For example, to me it seems like American politicians have way less empathy than European politicians even though European politicians have studied way less humanities than American ones. So my belief that studying humanities helps you deconstruct the human experience and see us as robots, hurting your empathy. I do however believe that studying humanities makes it easier to answer what the tester wants you to answer on empathy tests, since you now understand those tests better.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    I don't have scientific evidence. But my wife is a historian and the process of doing history is fundamentally the process of erasing your own context and placing yourself fulling in somebody else's context. That's fundamentally the practice of empathy.
FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
Why is science even taught in college? All you need is a math book and YouTube to have people show you how to do the mechanical steps needed to solve problems. (I'm sarcastic of course. Sciences and humanities are both cool and good and contribute to a better understanding of the world around us, and one wouldn't be much without the other.)

SeeDave 6y ago

I would prefer a university structure where B.S. + M.S. is earned in four years by focusing on core major requirements to then have humanities courses offered at no cost via the alumni association as part of continuing education throughout one's twenties.

qntty 6y ago
That's funny because I actually think that the opposite would be nice. You never know what technical knowledge you'll end up needing, so it would be nice to have technical education integrated with work throughout the first several years of working. But everyone can benefit from having a broad education in liberal arts and sciences.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Youre forgetting that study is optional and most of us have little to no interest in liberal arts and sciences.
  - enterabdazer 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436085 Do we need fancier widgets or people with the capacity for and appreciation of human development? Is the world suffering from a lack of scientific progress or a lack of sophistication in human problems? Do more people suffer from depression or insufficient software quality? Do you think that the people who develop software could benefit from exposure to wider philosophical thought or from a better IDE? Outside of technology, are we better, more capable human beings than we were 100 years ago? It's alarming that many STEM-natives think the wider human experience isn't worthwhile. It's a prerequisite for progress. Technology is just tools, and tools are means to an end. What's the end we're shooting for? That's the humanities.
    - 6y ago

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

The article is talking, essentially, to the humanities. But the point applies to those of us on the outside as well. We as well need to stop expecting the humanities to be science.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

This reminds me a little bit of the push to add “art” to STEM schools.

tengbretson 6y ago
I've noticed this too! I've seen schools describing their curriculum as STEAM, and all I could think was "Isn't that just normal school, but without history?"
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If you're drunk, you can get history, too. Because then you slur your words, and it comes out SHTEAM.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Or Sean Connery
waheoo 6y ago
Are the arts so insecure that they need to be apart of stem to have any self worth? You can perform perfectly good science outside of the stem factory. They dont have a monopoly. But given the scientific rigor ive seen in the arts I would appreciate if they maintain a clear and separate distinction from stem.

maweki 6y ago

Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences. As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it's the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they could very well have a mathematician on hand. What do we do in math if not model real problems of real people? It might be nice for some people to not know an application of their research but for humanities to find novel ways in which to use mathematical tools is great and should be encouraged. Of course they will miss but they will also hit. We need a peer review where those methods are understood within the humanities and social sciences, in order to not draw false conclusions. Of course, qualitative analysis isn't going the way of the dodo and the author agrees on that. I just think the occasional misuse of mathematical models for humanities research is well worth the possible gain. Those problems should follow some rules with a mathematical models, right??? Let's help those researchers instead of banishing them to qualitative methods.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
If you reduce the humanities to what is quantifiable, you kill them. (You also kill humanity.) [Edit: After re-reading, I'm not sure the parent thinks that numbers should take over the humanities, so my comment may be misdirected. I'm leaving it anyway, because I think the point is valid, even if it doesn't address the parent's point.]
- wussboy 6y ago
  Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
tropdrop 6y ago
I don't think the author is arguing for a banishment of certain authors "to qualitative methods." The problem described in the article is one I frequently see in Silicon Valley - ok, a couple of engineers build a thing. Note how they didn't start from asking "what is a real problem?" No, they built some tool/app. Now they spend several investment cycles trying to find "product market fit" by attempting to find some place in the market where that thing solves a real problem. This very rarely works as a business strategy - you first need to find a real problem and then build a tool that solves that problem. Problem -> so what? (we build a solution) -> real business. Now, replace "app" with "mathematical modeling," and you'll start to feel the author's gripe. I do think the author is right to ask - what is the point? So what? What are you trying to do with those mathematical models? What problem are you solving? For instance, we have the hypothesis that the researchers of the British paper posited: > the relative likelihood that certain stories are originally based in real-world events Based on: >looking at the (very complicated) mathematics of social networks So, we have a tool - that tool is looking at the mathematics of social networks. Does high fidelity between models of social networks predict "realness?" Does a certain model of a social network described in the relationships of protagonists in a book suggest that book's events are accurate historical ones? No, right? Then why is that step glossed over when the researchers go ahead and start modeling anyway?

Gimpei 6y ago

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but then we should accept that the conclusions from qualitative analysis are less firm and judge them accordingly.

earthboundkid 6y ago
When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.
- naushniki 6y ago
  By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.
  - stanfordkid 6y ago
    Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.
    - jaundermann 6y ago
      Maybe, but the laws as we know them do. People create and change them.
      - stanfordkid 6y ago
        Sure. But updating the equations doesn't change the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment or make a ball fall up instead of down -- it simply converges on a more precise outcome.

wrnr 6y ago

Say i agree with the sentiment expressed here, what does the curriculum of a neo-classical humanities look like. Let's presume you'd want to keep the good stuff, things like Arrow's impossibilities theorem, Bayesian statistics, Network theory, Language pragmatics, ect. You know the sort of stuff that might aid the organisation of complex systems without repeating the mistakes of the past. Maybe it is unfair to judge the hole field on a silly paper, in all fairness they write about non existing geometries in physics

naushniki 6y ago

I think anything can be a subject to scientific study. Methods are what is essential for a study being scientific, not the subject.

doukdouk 6y ago
Can mathematics be a subject of scientific study? Should axioms and proofs be replaced by empirical evidence?

mmhsieh 6y ago

One of the most valuable courses I took as an undergrad was an anthropology course. In it, we studied the life of JR Oppenheimer and his relationship with the government patrons of his science. The sort of scoundrels naturally attracted to power will always find cynical use for talent of the kind possessed by Oppenheimer. However, every aspect of such a relationship will be thoroughly cynical. If you are a future STEM person, understanding this fact will save you a lot of grief. Learn it early.

wrnr 6y ago
Was it beyond Oppenheimer's intellect and imagination to comprehend what he was doing? Sort of like nazi Germany having no idea what was happening to the jews?
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  You've seen how military contractors act on HN. I'm sure Oppenheimer was spouting all the same old excuses. "Orders are orders. It's just my job. If I don't someone else will." Oppenheimer's mistake was being born as a human being, instead of an angel.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mhh__ 6y ago
You aren't wrong but in the case of Oppenheimer - If we don't build this bomb what happens if the German's build one and when the soviets definitely get their hands on one?

abathur 6y ago

Kinda funny, I guess. This is one of those instances where I might care about the case Konnikova was making if she bothered using any quantitative methods to convince me the humanities were awash in quantitative study while qualitative analysis clearly went the way of the dodo. Or that literature programs were churning out students who think network analysis is the best way to understand a text. In the purely-qualitative realm, it just comes off as pearl-clutching over something I don't think anyone actually believes?

fasteddie31003 6y ago

If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it's a science.

BeetleB 6y ago
> If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it's a science. You've just disqualified much of physics research today :-)
- paulcole 6y ago
  They didn’t say that if you can’t do a double-blind controlled study, it’s not a science.

modzu 6y ago

science = hypothesis; prediction; test prediction; observe. thats it. so a lot of "science" actually isnt science either...

guerrilla 6y ago

"Psychology is not a natural science." I used to think this and to a certain extent I still do but the fact is that the feild has changed and become much more reproducible as time passes and it matures. More importantly though this article conflates humanities with social sciences pretty badly. This is quite insulting to sociology and even more so to economics and anthropology. Physical antrho is pretty serious science. There are limitations to social sciences but those are not the same limitations of literary criticism.

neonate 6y ago
Psychology hasn't simply become more reproducible. It has been gutted by a reproducibility crisis and it remains to be seen what the outcome will be.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  The reproducibility crisis extends far beyond psychology. Psychologists are the messengers, just like they were with meta-analysis in the 60s and 70s. Similar problems have been demonstrated in a host of fields, mostly the biomedical sciences. To take one prominent example, HN has been plastered with articles about COVID studies of dubious quality.
  - neonate 6y ago
    I agree.
andreilys 6y ago
Has it become more reproducible? From what I've read we've only now come to terms with the fact that so much of the research is not reproducible and largely debunked (even land-mark studies like the Milgram experiments have started to be put into question)

torrance 6y ago

I would add to this list economics. Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations. I do recommend reading the first half of her Doughnut Economics where she makes this case at length, from someone inside the discipline.

2019-nCoV 6y ago
The more macro the more inaccurate.
scollet 6y ago
Do you think there is a factor of unknowns in both economics and humanities (disparate) that challenge scientific study? I.e. humanities and a further extension of art is currently immeasurable. If this sounds like a loaded question, I don't know how to phrase it correctly.
andreilys 6y ago
Yeah, it still baffles me that people think economics is a proven science and not built on a shaky foundation that falls apart soon as you prod it.
- selectionbias 6y ago
  Look at the latest edition of QJE. You will see mostly studies addressing a particular policy question, e.g., 'what was the effect of this policy change on unemployment' which they answer using randomly controlled trials or quasi-experimental methods. Which aspect of this falls apart when you prod it?
  - andreilys 6y ago
    I was more thinking of top economists like Alan Greenspan and his comments about having banished volatility, followed shortly after by the '08 crash. Much of economics is politics disguised as technocracy.

yk 6y ago

I fully agree with the premise that humanities aren't a science. In fact I am fairly certain that the current paradigm of science can not work for at least history, though I strongly suspect most of the humanities. One of the problems is computability, when I try to build statistics on a space of human intentions, then I strongly suspect that this is at least as complicated as trying to build a measurable space atop the set of all Turing machines, and there I get immediately the issue of computability. (For example, calculating the average run time of halting Turing machines.) So, then assuming that one can meaningful build a statistic (just the claim that this is possible) will doom any too formal reasoning, by principle of explosion.

shash 6y ago
I disagree entirely, especially about history. You form hypotheses on the basis of evidence (literary, archaeological, documentary, etc), make predictions about the kinds of effects you’d expect to find in the historical record, and then modify those hypotheses based on what you find later. How is that not a science?
- yk 6y ago
  > make predictions about the kinds of effects you’d expect to find in the historical record, You want to make predictions about the past?
  - shash 6y ago
    No, predictions about what other undiscovered evidence you’d expect to find about the past. In a way this is like astrophysics in that you can’t conduct experiments, but you can predict that X is correlated with Y. Come to think of it, paleontology... For example, take the Shakespeare authorship controversy; you could create a hypothesis that say “Shakespeare was indeed the author of Hamlet”. A prediction from this might be, “if a manuscript of Hamlet were ever found it would be in Shakespeare’s handwriting”. Not a really good example to be sure, but just off the top of my head...

supernova87a 6y ago

Makes me think of the joke on "Big Bang Theory" (which am almost ashamed to admit enjoying): Caricatured dumb humanities major: "That's what I love about math, there's no one right answer!"

naushniki 6y ago
The most funny part is that this is effectively true.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Well math is not a science either. I acknowledge that there is debate about if formal sciences (logic, math, theoretical CS) are a science, but I'm with Popper in saying that the core of a science is falsifiability which does not apply to math.

gumby 6y ago

The first paper she studies sounds interesting. Regression analysis on vocabulary has been used to identify authors of work whose authorship had been lost or to find context of where and in what circumstances certain authors grew up. Mathematical analysis of linguistics has pointed to. Irrational patterns later confirmed by genetic analysis. I don’t mind pointing out the vacuity of what often passes for scholarship. But she didn’t start with a good example.

29athrowaway 6y ago

You can analyze a book by saying it has certain number of pages, each one with certain amount of paper and ink, and you can use that to determine the chemical composition of the paper and the ink. That will not tell you what the book is about, though.

crazygringo 6y ago

This is a terrible article. First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities. Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences, and only "humanities" in a very broad umbrella term. "Humanities" is more often used to refer to disciplines such as history, art, literature. So a complete mix-up of fields. Third, the assumption that social sciences has a "reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any given point" is simply flat-out wrong. For example, of course political science relies on "big-N" studies which try to find or refute correlations between democracy and various other country indicators. But political science also relies heavily on "comparative politics" which is much closer to literature or history in a classic "compare and contrast" aspects of two countries. Similarly psychology has many different approaches taken in published papers and books, some quantitative and others more qualitative. I could go on and on. But this article is completely ridiculous, arguing against a straw man that simply doesn't exist. It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia. Bizarre.

torrance 6y ago
A lot of people have been and continue to make this criticism that’s in the article, across a variety of the softer disciplines. (It’s like you’re not even familiar with this line of critique.) See, eg. a criticism of political science in the same vein from a political scientist https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Became/245777 https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Beca...
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I've studied political science a great deal, and there are absolutely nuanced critiques you can have here. I personally, for example, find that political science went overboard in rational choice theory (borrowed from economics) over the past several decades, which hasn't turned out to be particularly fruitful. (And there are 20+ subfields of political science as well, rational choice being just one.) But that's simply arguing over the relative usefulness of specific methods, like to what degree TDD should be used in software, or have we gone overboard with microservices. The original article's absurdly broad critique of quantitative methods somehow taking over generally remains bizarre and completely uninformed.

ltbarcly3 6y ago

I'm going to sum up half the HN comments here without reading them: "This isn't good, humanities are important, not everything can be quantified."

brutualchaos 6y ago

(2012)

igravious 6y ago
+1 @dang

rnikander 6y ago

Some people submitted nonsense papers (for example: rape culture at dog parks, and an excerpt from Mein Kampf), and they were accepted for publication. https://www.timesofisrael.com/duped-academic-journal-publishes-rewrite-of-mein-kampf-as-feminist-manifesto/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/duped-academic-journal-publish...

nemo44x 6y ago
They have a book coming out soon titled “Cynical Race Theory” which is a critique of the 40 years of academic thought that has gone from fringe to mainstream (And applied like the Inquisition mashed up with Maoist techniques like Struggle Sessions) and we are seeing played out unwittingly by the media, tech companies, and the tokenizing social media chatter class.
- noema 6y ago
  Looked this up and saw the promos. Anything endorsed by both Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal is bound to be bad faith, intellectually dishonest hackery.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    Perhaps. The authors, however, are respectable in the time I’ve read their blogs, tweets, etc. Guided by liberal principals and have expressed a generally good understanding of philosophy going back to the Greeks.

hliyan 6y ago

Perhaps the currency of social sciences should be anecdotes with full context (of which you can obviously get only a limited number unless you have unlimited budget) rather than collecting extensive data points on a limited number of variables. While physical systems can be approximated (or some independent variables dropped) without affecting the aspect being studied (think perfectly spherical objects), when it comes to humans, there are no independent variables. Approximation or simplified models are much harder. I think looking for statistical patterns (e.g. in literature) is perfectly good science as long as you are cognizant that patterns merely invite more study an should not be used to reach conclusions, also being aware that patterns might disappear when you expand your data set. Finally, as someone trained in the physical sciences, I used to look down on social scientists. I no longer do this. At least they're brave enough to tackle a complex monster with the limited tools at their disposal, stumbling and even enduring ridicule from the hard sciences. We ignore the human mind and collections thereof, because it's too complex and prefer the relative comfort of simple, predictable systems. I don't believe that's good.

0d9eooo 6y ago
As someone in the behavioral/population sciences, I think there's an underlying, interesting question of "when, if ever, should quantitative methods not be applied to an area of empirical inquiry?" The article doesn't seem to address this though. As for the social and behavioral sciences, another way of approaching it is: if you have a phenomenon, is it better to try to be scientific in explaining it or not? If not, you cede that realm to the nonscientific, with all that implies. If you do approach it scientifically, how do you do that? If your explanation or theory involves some quantity of some sort, shouldn't you then attempt to specify a model of it, and test it against observations?
- naasking 6y ago
  Most science seeks broad principles, but I kind of like the OP's suggestion that a depth-focused approach of detailed anecdotes, possibly from multiple different points of view, could provide an interesting form of alternate data.

m0zg 6y ago

Science implies the use of the scientific method. Scientific method implies falsifiable hypotheses. Anything that is not falsifiable isn't a science.

analboipucci 6y ago

Neither are social sciences. Economics, finance, sociology, political science, psychology.

jessriedel 6y ago

It's probably fine for there to be a study of history that is not a science, but there should also be a study of history that does apply scientific methods.

Daub 6y ago

My father (a physicist) used to quote Rutherford to me: "all science Is either physics or stamp collecting". An extreme position perhaps. I now work in a college of humanities and have frequently collaborated with engineers. I have seen first hand how poorly applied scientific thinking has become within the humanities. But I cannot blame them. They are only giving to the uni what has been asked of them. The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as 'social science' goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.

konfekt 6y ago
In the UK Thatcher might have been a driving force. In Western thinking (entering a rabbit hole) conceiving humanities as sciences is a recurrent theme (say, in the Scepticism of Hume) that Auguste Comte in the 19th century turned into the doctrine of positivism: - The scientific method (and precision of mathematics) applies to all sciences, social and natural. - Knowledge can be proved only by observation trough empiric means and deductive reasoning.

aww_dang 6y ago

Scientism is the main pillar supporting technocratic management and central planning of society. This is most apparent to me in economics.

cm2012 6y ago

Can you create a hypothesis and then falsify it? Then it's science. Polls are really useful + accurate and are one of my favorite examples of stuff that came from social science research.

nurettin 6y ago

Articles and generally ideas like this always seem too dismissive. CPUs are nothing like brains because: intricacies. Algorithms can't be applied to literature because: intricacies. It is almost an appeal to emotions to say that rather than saying "ok well we tried to apply these electric constructs and algorithms in order to understand ideas and literature better, we got nowhere and here's exactly why", they are like "it can't be applied oh no it can't our humanity is so distinct and precious there are some lines not to be crossed and here's a million contrived examples as to why". And to this approach I say, ignorant and cowardly.

akiselev 6y ago
I'd hesitate to even call them intricacies. Billions of years of evolution in biochemistry and multicellular organisms, half a billion years in nervous systems, and over 200 million years in mammalian brains have culminated with about 50 million years of evolution of the primate brain. For every human being that has ever lived, nature has run 10^X continuous brute force "simulations" to arrive at our present civilization, where X is a ridiculously high number that's impossible to even estimate. Sure, our intelligence allows us to skip a lot of those processes just like it allowed us to escape our gravity well and explore our solar system, but the jump from CPU to brain is like the jump from moon landing to intergalactic travel. The discrete nature of digital electronics alone prevents them from matching neurons because of sampling, let alone their lack of architectural (i.e. neural) plasticity. It's like trying to weld with a q-tip.
- todorus 6y ago
  That makes it sound all very daunting, but we have a few advantages over nature when it comes to design. * A single life can produce multiple iterations of a technology. * Current technology speeds up the development of the next iteration.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Nature isn’t limited to intentional design tho, I’m not sure what advantage we have when you have a few 1000’s of people trying to progress technology over their life time vs about 7 billion iterations which are governed by natural selection and that is if you only account for a single species. Also don’t forget that a single life can also produce multiple iterations of itself over its life span. Designs are limited by what we understand and can imagine as well as other constraints, nature not so much.

cycomanic 6y ago

This is such a horrible article. Many have already mentioned the conflation of humanities and social sciences. Then by using the example of books (because most would agree books would loose their essence if we just describe them by numbers) it constructs a straw man that somehow we loose something (the beauty?) by using quantitative measures. Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is the alternative that we simply use theories because of their "beauty" (whatever that means)? Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?

tw000001 6y ago
> conflation of humanities and social sciences. You've missed the entire point. A sort of conflation is the problem - not by the author, but by people in and around soft sciences and humanities throwing a bit of statistical jazz into their papers and then drawing ostensibly rigorous conclusions which influence social policy. The reality is that by their vary nature, both soft science and humanities (there is a lot of overlap) cannot be held to the same rigor as, say, mathematics, physics, chemistry. These sciences are pure theory (like gender studies), non experimental (like psychology), and fundamentally unfalsifiable in the majority of cases...but laymen, and apparently government officials, either don't understand or pretend they don't understand - either way shitty policy and legislation is passed and innocent people (society) are worse off frequently.
- JordanFarmer 6y ago
  What you speak of has led to unrecoverable loss... The more mankind "knows", the more foolish we become.
- barking 6y ago
  This is 2020 and while in the past attitudeX or behaviourY might have been acceptable we have now come to understand (through Social Science Studies or NY Times bestseller that a particular academic has written) that both are wrong, toxic, in fact.

vavooom 6y ago

I would encourage those interested in the intersection of STEM and the Humanities to check out the Digital Humanities Minor/ Major being offered at a growing number of universities. I earned the minor at UCLA, and found the application of digital tools to historical and modern "humanities" focused types questions to be incredibly relevant. Examples include: 3D modeling of the historic broadway district in Los Angeles, Natural Language Processing of ancient Roman texts, virtual reality's impact on human cognition, etc.

KhoomeiK 6y ago

Elegant conclusions can totally be arrived at in the humanities, it's just that statistical methods often aren't the best way to go about doing so. The traditional method of logical proof, which is valued just as much as data analysis in science, used to be the standard in the humanities. The human mind would compute the statistics more or less subconsciously, but would then use those empirical results to say something valuable through a process of logical induction. I think that's the key point that this article misses—it isn't that we don't want humanities to provide rational insight, it's that we want humanities to reduce its reliance on statistics and refocus on what it's historically been great at. There's something important to be said here about the duality between logic and math, algebra and statistics, classical AI and modern DL, philosophy and science, rationalism and empiricism.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

how not to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: conflate it with humanities and claim using data to prove things misses the points how to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: throw out bogus research and get rid of quacks

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Good idea, but you can’t throw out the quacks because their chairing the departments. You won’t make much progress until you start throwing out the schools.

devin 6y ago

One of the dumbest faux-scholarly articles I've read in awhile.

timkam 6y ago

I know it's just an example in the article, but the study about real-life likeness of social networks in fiction literature seems to miss a point. Wouldn't a good writer in many cases abstract away some of the complexity of real-life social networks?

Koffiepoeder 6y ago

I think one of the points that the article tries to make, is the point that proving something in a soft science using models is often based on many assumptions, be it implicit or explicit, and that this is problematic. To that I agree to some degree. In hard sciences all inputs to a proof are either verifiable theorems known to be absolutely true, conjectures/hypotheses (in which case the proof becones a conjecture) and seldomly axioms. In soft sciences on the other hand, it is common to construct models quite arbitrarily, in order to try and match empirical results. If however, we would like these models to have any indication of "absolute" truth, similar to the hard sciences, currently we can't or don't. To achieve this I believe we could do an input analysis of ALL assumptions and try and quantify the aggregated certainty of the model's correctness, even before matching it with empirical data. In this way we could say for example: we have used a model with a predicted input accuracy of 0.82, that matches our empirical results 0.97,p < 0.05. This would then further strengthen and quantify the "standing on the shoulders of a giant" principle. Of course this is easier said than done and I know this is a bit naïve. Currently no techniques exist to do this as far as I know. There is also discussion to be had about how to interpret model outputs (we now have three variables, how do we relate them? How to calculate this model's output accuracy?) and how to calculate subsequent model's accuracy based on different input accuracies and their inter-relations. This would also require re-building soft sciences all the way from the bottom up (from the most easily verifiable facts first) to be useful and a new science on hypthesized model accuracy calculation. Anyway, enough hypothesizing thought experiments for the day. Any thoughts?

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Some people do not consider mathematics to be a science. They veiw it as a tool used in science, e.g., statitics.

mihaaly 6y ago

The story reminds me of the HR practices of 'measuring' personality based on questionnaire to judge the competence of people for certain positions and determine their carrier path inside the organization (e.g. at Trimble). Imagine you are a software engineer applying for an engineering role and they ask you a hundred or more questions to compare the importance of aspects such as punctuality, trust, being patient, lawfulness, honesty and several more, 3 at a time, make a strict order of importance. Without specifics on the work context and situation. Then they build a multi dozen component report how good you are in this and that on a 1 to 5 scale. The way you work. Based on answers to strange questions, not actual work. When it is impossible to answer accurately (because it depends, or there is no order like between playing piano or being tall) then the results will be inaccurate, yet they use it to classify workforce like steel by its properties, determining their fate. Assessing work performance before doing any work. And they take it dead seriously like gauge on a pressure tank. It is just so ... well dumb, forcing any kind of oversimplified measurement on complex and fluid things, sounds like measuring friendliness by meter. People change, people adapt, people behave differently in different circumstances, very very differently, and definitely not how they admit it, no one can count how many influential factors there are, these robotic and unified approaches are just distorting for the purpose of appearing fair. It is far from fair, it is just robotic - which is ironic from a department called human resources, feels like robots work there not humans. Measuring fish by how high it can jump before allowing to swim. It is just pretentious not scientific.

koonsolo 6y ago
If you ever need to take such a test, get yourself in the mindset of "I am a loyal, hard working person", and good results will flow from that one. Just think what kind of employee a company wants to have. It's easier to fill it out on a test than actually be hard working for a couple of years, so the test is the easy part ;).
- mihaaly 6y ago
  My point is more like that it is the best not to be involved with organizations employing such evaluation practices towards their people. Despite the technical interviews went very well I've quit the recruitment process when faced this mandatory step. I choose not to take those tests. Previous experiences show that where such mechanistic approach is in place those places are not worth working for. I tried to discuss around this kind of test, asking for reasons and proposing substitutes with more position relevant ones, but no, rigid refusal was the answer in polite wrapping. Actually they required two kinds of tests, one personality and one generic ability that included one third - ca. 6 questions - of calculating percentages and sum values quickly, in a financial context. Basically adding and multiplying numbers very quickly. Irrelevant but the results are taken into account seriously.

timwaagh 6y ago

On the one hand I completely agree that a lot of scientists across disciplines have too much confidence in the predictions of their models of complex systems. For example climate models predicting not only how much global temperature will rise but also on the local level, which seems far harder to predict. And the amount of studies that do not survive a replication attempt. But I don't believe that we can justify wasting tax money on people who don't try to back up their claims and instead just make up hypothesis after hypothesis, maybe based on a patient they knew, debating and sipping wine with their fellow intellectuals, prescribing morality under the guise of science and just laughing at us plebs. If you want to do that, become a writer or YouTuber, but not a scientist of any kind. If you're going to be a scientist at the very least try to back everything up with statistics. I know, It's work, it's not fun and it might not mean very much but you owe it to society to dig in and crunch those numbers.

ukj 6y ago

Humanities may not be a science, but being human sure is empirical. Experience is all we have. At the bottom of all of these bouts is then “demarcation problem”. What is a science, what isn’t a science? I prefer Paul Fayerabend’s view: if it is useful To somebody somewhere - it is a science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism

take_a_breath 6y ago

Economics-hating HN is the most fascinating HN.

deleted 6y ago

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