7 ms·

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

by 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.
- beambot 6y ago
  When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron. Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    I agree that absent Locke, there would be no US as we know it.
- inerte 6y ago
  We also got eugenics based on “science”
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage
      - lopmotr 6y ago
        What do you mean? It's selective breeding for humans the same as we do for farm animals and cats and dogs. It's not pseudoscientific.
        TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        No - it's pseudo moral. It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots who don't even understand the limits of the science - or why breeding humans like farm animals really isn't such a great idea.
        catalogia 6y ago
        The GP didn't seem to claim it was moral. Making nerve gas isn't moral either, but that has nothing to do with whether making nerve gas is pseudochemistry.
        pluto9 6y ago
        > It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots It's reviled because it's inherently immoral. Its proponents are indeed usually racist idiots, but even if they had the best of intentions, it would still be immoral.
- roenxi 6y ago
  Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome. Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new business.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect! A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framework. It’s like assuming that the dollar bill you see on the sidewalk must be fake because it’s there.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      If you want a citation; that little theory is vaguely from Karl Marx. Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III according to Wikipedia [0]. Pretty good theory, and somewhat older than 40 years. Notwithstanding that, what you say may be true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. This is not only wrong, it's laughable. Governmental interference in the economy has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk. And not with good outcomes, either: the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling over a period of decades finally catching up with everyone.
      - progre 6y ago
- abathur 6y ago
  I agree with the core premise (scholarships of society are more reflexive), but this nonetheless made me wonder about the relative rates of incarceration and suspicious death among practitioners of the various arts and social sciences.
swimfar 6y ago
We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react. Even a lot of engineering deals with similar types of uncertainty. We build huge structures out of metal, concrete, and wood on top of soils and other geological materials, often with the assumption they they are all homogeneous with constant material properties through the structure (they aren't). However, we can do this because the variations in properties tend to average out as the material sample gets larger. If we try to make the same assumption on very small scales, we find that there is a lot more uncertainty and our predictions aren't going to be as accurate. We see this in physics and many other scientific fields as well.
- stanfordkid 6y ago
  I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works). Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from a very "respectable" set of academics at Yale -- that is based on a flat out fabricated economic model: We focus primarily on the moderate scenario. That is, our baseline assumption is that diminishing returns play a larger role than accelerating returns (so that α ≤ 1) but not so large that they lead to α < 0. We stress that U depends both on the variation in economic value attached to different activities and on the model governing the disease transmission Translation: we made some equations that makes the BAD thing BAD and the GOOD thing GOOD. [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v...
  - wilbo 6y ago
    This is a problem I find tiring about most studies, even in the sciences (excluding most physics and all mathematics). It seems as if most researchers are looking for a novel or interesting correlation or apply an interesting model to a new domain. Generally, I've found this puts insufficient effort into any kind of disconfirmation. It makes sense, though, with the incentives most academic journals put into study authors. Nothing's sexy about disproving some random model fits.
ThomPete 6y ago
social science is interpretation of data and much closer to history than science. The data will often change over time and thus the interpretation. Its very problematic that we treat it as science because it can be politized. To the extent its science its very very imprecise and is on the other end of the spectrum than something like physics which makes very very careful conclusions about very specific things and even they are to a certain extent also just interpretations. It should be called interpretational disciplines not science.
hari_seldon_ 6y ago
I agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  Username checks out
catgary 6y ago
I’m not even sure the paper he starts off criticizing is that problematic - it sounds like it’s basically a quantitative study of various tropes in fiction and comparing it to real data.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >comparing it to real data given that the study goes back as far as the creation of the Illiad I have serious trouble believing that we have high fidelity data about the social graph of individuals at that point in history. Pretty much all we have is second-hand accounts to begin with which may themselves be as unreliable as fiction. So on that particular case, I fully agree with the author. That's not actually scientific.

by Gimpei 6y ago

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.
beambot 6y ago
When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron. Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  I agree that absent Locke, there would be no US as we know it.
inerte 6y ago
We also got eugenics based on “science”
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      What do you mean? It's selective breeding for humans the same as we do for farm animals and cats and dogs. It's not pseudoscientific.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        No - it's pseudo moral. It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots who don't even understand the limits of the science - or why breeding humans like farm animals really isn't such a great idea.
        catalogia 6y ago
        The GP didn't seem to claim it was moral. Making nerve gas isn't moral either, but that has nothing to do with whether making nerve gas is pseudochemistry.
        pluto9 6y ago
        > It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots It's reviled because it's inherently immoral. Its proponents are indeed usually racist idiots, but even if they had the best of intentions, it would still be immoral.
roenxi 6y ago
Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome. Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new business.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect! A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framework. It’s like assuming that the dollar bill you see on the sidewalk must be fake because it’s there.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    If you want a citation; that little theory is vaguely from Karl Marx. Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III according to Wikipedia [0]. Pretty good theory, and somewhat older than 40 years. Notwithstanding that, what you say may be true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. This is not only wrong, it's laughable. Governmental interference in the economy has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk. And not with good outcomes, either: the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling over a period of decades finally catching up with everyone.
    - progre 6y ago
abathur 6y ago
I agree with the core premise (scholarships of society are more reflexive), but this nonetheless made me wonder about the relative rates of incarceration and suspicious death among practitioners of the various arts and social sciences.

swimfar 6y ago

We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react. Even a lot of engineering deals with similar types of uncertainty. We build huge structures out of metal, concrete, and wood on top of soils and other geological materials, often with the assumption they they are all homogeneous with constant material properties through the structure (they aren't). However, we can do this because the variations in properties tend to average out as the material sample gets larger. If we try to make the same assumption on very small scales, we find that there is a lot more uncertainty and our predictions aren't going to be as accurate. We see this in physics and many other scientific fields as well.

stanfordkid 6y ago
I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works). Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from a very "respectable" set of academics at Yale -- that is based on a flat out fabricated economic model: We focus primarily on the moderate scenario. That is, our baseline assumption is that diminishing returns play a larger role than accelerating returns (so that α ≤ 1) but not so large that they lead to α < 0. We stress that U depends both on the variation in economic value attached to different activities and on the model governing the disease transmission Translation: we made some equations that makes the BAD thing BAD and the GOOD thing GOOD. [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v...
- wilbo 6y ago
  This is a problem I find tiring about most studies, even in the sciences (excluding most physics and all mathematics). It seems as if most researchers are looking for a novel or interesting correlation or apply an interesting model to a new domain. Generally, I've found this puts insufficient effort into any kind of disconfirmation. It makes sense, though, with the incentives most academic journals put into study authors. Nothing's sexy about disproving some random model fits.

ThomPete 6y ago

social science is interpretation of data and much closer to history than science. The data will often change over time and thus the interpretation. Its very problematic that we treat it as science because it can be politized. To the extent its science its very very imprecise and is on the other end of the spectrum than something like physics which makes very very careful conclusions about very specific things and even they are to a certain extent also just interpretations. It should be called interpretational disciplines not science.

hari_seldon_ 6y ago

I agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

notduncansmith 6y ago
Username checks out

catgary 6y ago

I’m not even sure the paper he starts off criticizing is that problematic - it sounds like it’s basically a quantitative study of various tropes in fiction and comparing it to real data.

Barrin92 6y ago
>comparing it to real data given that the study goes back as far as the creation of the Illiad I have serious trouble believing that we have high fidelity data about the social graph of individuals at that point in history. Pretty much all we have is second-hand accounts to begin with which may themselves be as unreliable as fiction. So on that particular case, I fully agree with the author. That's not actually scientific.