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This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science. For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific po

This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science. For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it. This isn't what an academic should be doing. And don't get me started on his debt book

dools 5y ago
Debt was his good one, bullshit jobs is bullshit.
jfengel 5y ago
You have to be careful about quantifying things, because you can't measure all the things you'd like to measure, but that doesn't mean they're not important. The pinnacle of science measures very simple things very rigorously, like in physics, and even there you get the occasional revolution where you realize that you've been measuring the wrong things all along. That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't. But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms. That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.
- unishark 5y ago
  It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments. Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.
pgwhalen 5y ago
> And don't get me started on his debt book I must admit I'm tempted to get you started :). Can you recommend a review of it that shares your criticism?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Brad DeLong (economics professor) famously went to town on the book. Others did, too. Search his blog with the keyword Graeber or Google "delong graeber" to review some of the debate.
- rStar 5y ago
  the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read. it also turns out to be a really great help reading people as well, by gauging their response.
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read. Same for me. I'm not well read in that topic so I can't compare Debt book with anything else as such. The sheer expanse of time period it covers and various topics it touches is very impressive indeed. FWIW I'm half way through reading "The Nature of Money"[1] which was published well before The Debt and I'm tempted to think that the Debt book is significantly influenced by the former. [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Nature+of+Money-p-9780745609973 https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Nature+of+Money-p-9780745609...
  - pgwhalen 5y ago
    I enjoyed the book very much, for how it shed light on the real meaning and use of money. In what sense has it helped you read people?
toofy 5y ago
I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider. Does this mean we should move into decision making based on a kooks worship of a sun god? Absolutely not. But it’s incredibly uncharitable to imply that one of the most influential anthropologists of recent history is somehow unreasonable. We should absolutely rely on quantification where we are able, but members of this community of all people should be able to recognize that we’re still early in the iterations and in our abilities to measure all of life’s chaos and complexities accurately. Again, i’m very much so not advocating that the itch you just had in your nose means someone is talking about you and i’m definitely not advocating that the tingle you felt run up your spine was a ghost. But we would be absolutely crazy to believe that we can accurately measure most of the complexities that are humanity’s issues. I’m not a luddite. I firmly believe that technology and science are the best way to make decisions and carry us forward. But let’s not delude ourselves to the current limits of our abilities. Some of our smartest people understand humans the least–and we’d be fools to forget this basic fact.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider. That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking. Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work: "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages" "When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror." c.f. https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists-on-debt-chapter-12/ https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists... You can find other examples here: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t... Now if Graeber had written a book on the joys of fishing, we wouldn't expect a large amount of numerical fact checks. But for a book on debt -- which is really a book on financial systems across history, we do expect that the conclusions be consistent with the data as we know it. Graeber never made those consistency checks, so much of his observations can be ruled out and they really reveal an incredible state of being out-of-touch. That said, he does provide rich examples and historical footnotes so I would recommend that people read his book. I just wouldn't recommend that people believe him when he draws certain conclusions and that people understand they are reading a polemical rather than an academic work.
djrobstep 5y ago
You think all qualitative research is pointless?

dools 5y ago

Debt was his good one, bullshit jobs is bullshit.

jfengel 5y ago

You have to be careful about quantifying things, because you can't measure all the things you'd like to measure, but that doesn't mean they're not important. The pinnacle of science measures very simple things very rigorously, like in physics, and even there you get the occasional revolution where you realize that you've been measuring the wrong things all along. That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't. But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms. That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.

unishark 5y ago
It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments. Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.

pgwhalen 5y ago

> And don't get me started on his debt book I must admit I'm tempted to get you started :). Can you recommend a review of it that shares your criticism?

rsj_hn 5y ago
Brad DeLong (economics professor) famously went to town on the book. Others did, too. Search his blog with the keyword Graeber or Google "delong graeber" to review some of the debate.
rStar 5y ago
the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read. it also turns out to be a really great help reading people as well, by gauging their response.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read. Same for me. I'm not well read in that topic so I can't compare Debt book with anything else as such. The sheer expanse of time period it covers and various topics it touches is very impressive indeed. FWIW I'm half way through reading "The Nature of Money"[1] which was published well before The Debt and I'm tempted to think that the Debt book is significantly influenced by the former. [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Nature+of+Money-p-9780745609973 https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Nature+of+Money-p-9780745609...
- pgwhalen 5y ago
  I enjoyed the book very much, for how it shed light on the real meaning and use of money. In what sense has it helped you read people?

toofy 5y ago

I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider. Does this mean we should move into decision making based on a kooks worship of a sun god? Absolutely not. But it’s incredibly uncharitable to imply that one of the most influential anthropologists of recent history is somehow unreasonable. We should absolutely rely on quantification where we are able, but members of this community of all people should be able to recognize that we’re still early in the iterations and in our abilities to measure all of life’s chaos and complexities accurately. Again, i’m very much so not advocating that the itch you just had in your nose means someone is talking about you and i’m definitely not advocating that the tingle you felt run up your spine was a ghost. But we would be absolutely crazy to believe that we can accurately measure most of the complexities that are humanity’s issues. I’m not a luddite. I firmly believe that technology and science are the best way to make decisions and carry us forward. But let’s not delude ourselves to the current limits of our abilities. Some of our smartest people understand humans the least–and we’d be fools to forget this basic fact.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider. That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking. Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work: "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages" "When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror." c.f. https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists-on-debt-chapter-12/ https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists... You can find other examples here: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t... Now if Graeber had written a book on the joys of fishing, we wouldn't expect a large amount of numerical fact checks. But for a book on debt -- which is really a book on financial systems across history, we do expect that the conclusions be consistent with the data as we know it. Graeber never made those consistency checks, so much of his observations can be ruled out and they really reveal an incredible state of being out-of-touch. That said, he does provide rich examples and historical footnotes so I would recommend that people read his book. I just wouldn't recommend that people believe him when he draws certain conclusions and that people understand they are reading a polemical rather than an academic work.

djrobstep 5y ago

You think all qualitative research is pointless?