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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 reflexivi
by 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 agoBy this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.
- stanfordkid 6y agoNot really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.
- jaundermann 6y agoMaybe, but the laws as we know them do. People create and change them.
- stanfordkid 6y agoSure. 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 agoWhen 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 agoI agree that absent Locke, there would be no US as we know it.
- inerte 6y agoWe also got eugenics based on “science”
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoEugenics 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 agoNot sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage
- lopmotr 6y agoWhat 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 agoNo - 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 agoThe 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 agoYes 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 agoThe 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 agoIf 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 agoI 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.