4 ms·

So, tell me... what's the minimal necessary agricultural footprint for a city of one million human beings. This is the social sciences are viewed with contempt

So, tell me... what's the minimal necessary agricultural footprint for a city of one million human beings. This is the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers, by the way.

onethought 3y ago
I don't understand your point. What's the minimum materials needed to build a bridge? (Depends on technology: Design, Materials, etc). Agricultural footprint is exactly the same – I mean we could build an underground farm from hydroponics if we wanted. But what does that have to do with Social Sciences? And why contempt? are you saying there is no phenomena in social interaction/groups? Where do you draw that line? Is understanding Ants and Bees contemptible? Just humans? Why?
bell-cot 3y ago
> ...minimum agricultural footprint for a city... Nicely put. But bear in mind that agricultural output of a given piece of land varies every year, sometimes greatly. Weather is the farmer's eternal frenemy, but there's also flood, disease, pestilence, vulcanism, ... > ...are viewed with contempt... Hard scientists and engineers have good reasons to sneer at much of the social "sciences". But the human and social realities which those folks claim to study are dangerously real.
hnbad 3y ago
> the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers They're not. They're viewed by contempt by techies with overinflated egos who don't realize that when looking at complex systems outside their area of expertise they're like junior developers coming into a legacy project guffawing at the needless complexity because they don't yet grasp the unwritten requirements that created the scar tissue they see as bad craftmanship. Actual "real scientists" and "real engineers" understand that the social sciences are amongst the most complex of sciences because they don't have the liberty to run isolated experiments in a vacuum, run simulations and test assumptions with a pen and paper because their field of study encompasses the complexity of the entire human brain and its interaction with everything around us. Sure, there are thousands and possibly millions of hacks in those fields but there are also thousands and millions of hacks in STEM. Imagine having your entire field judged on the musings and performance of the worst techie you know.
- boondoggle16 3y ago
  >hnbad
dang 3y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Both of photochemsyn's criticisms are largely accurate. Looking at resource requirements as mapped to land area is highly instructive, and one of the more illuminating exercises I've done is to plot population growth as the falling available land area (for all resource and ecosystem service value afforded) over time. We're well below "40 acres and a mule" --- with 8 billions of souls on Earth, there are about 4.6 acres/person, or 1.86 hectare. Many of the most interesting and useful analyses of Earth's resource situation provide a similar mapping. I'm aware of David MacKay's Without the Hot Air which maps just energy use by land area (with a focus on the UK). What becomes painfully evident is that it would be immensely challenging to supply energy equivalent to present utilisation from wind and solar potential of the British Isles alone, meaning something would have to give. (Less energy utilisation, imports from elsewhere, and/or both.) Many industrialised nations face similar challenges. Vaclav Smil is another, with Energy and History and Energy and Civilization both looking at energy-as-land-use based on 1 kW/m^2 influx (and lesser densities of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.). Smil is the source of one of the more picturesque descriptions of oil wells: punctiform sources of energy, a hole in the ground a few inches wide through which millions of years of accumulated ancient sunshine spew forth. Combine that with Jeffrey S. Dukes "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686>, which I've posted to HN a few times (limited discussion), to realise that we're consuming fossil fuels at millions of times their rate of formation, a cost utterly unaccounted for in market prices. (Imagine a YC-funded startup had a similar burn-rate....) And yes, social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, and political economy very often utterly ignore these facts, on both the left and right, simply because they're ideologically inconvenient. As I've already commented, my first impression on seeing this item in the HN queue was that it was some far-left woo along the lines of the Jacque Fresco's Venus Project (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project>). Such schemes are often surprisingly similar to right-libertarian theology, as this turned out to be. The physical and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, ecology, environmental studies) are often deeply and legitimately critical of such views. Mauricio Schoijet's "Limits to Grwoth and the Rise of Catastrophism" (1999) is a good treatment of how both the ideological right and left frequently reject Limits to Growth arguments: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399> <https://doi.org/10.2307/3985399 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985399> Given that the criticism is also being voiced to power, and to interests which are deeply vested in oil and gas, HN is once again disadvantaging the disadvantaged who speak to truth power, and tone-policing them to boot. I know what your justifications for this are, but it remains a very bad look.

onethought 3y ago

I don't understand your point. What's the minimum materials needed to build a bridge? (Depends on technology: Design, Materials, etc). Agricultural footprint is exactly the same – I mean we could build an underground farm from hydroponics if we wanted. But what does that have to do with Social Sciences? And why contempt? are you saying there is no phenomena in social interaction/groups? Where do you draw that line? Is understanding Ants and Bees contemptible? Just humans? Why?

bell-cot 3y ago

> ...minimum agricultural footprint for a city... Nicely put. But bear in mind that agricultural output of a given piece of land varies every year, sometimes greatly. Weather is the farmer's eternal frenemy, but there's also flood, disease, pestilence, vulcanism, ... > ...are viewed with contempt... Hard scientists and engineers have good reasons to sneer at much of the social "sciences". But the human and social realities which those folks claim to study are dangerously real.

hnbad 3y ago

> the social sciences are viewed with contempt by the real scientists and engineers They're not. They're viewed by contempt by techies with overinflated egos who don't realize that when looking at complex systems outside their area of expertise they're like junior developers coming into a legacy project guffawing at the needless complexity because they don't yet grasp the unwritten requirements that created the scar tissue they see as bad craftmanship. Actual "real scientists" and "real engineers" understand that the social sciences are amongst the most complex of sciences because they don't have the liberty to run isolated experiments in a vacuum, run simulations and test assumptions with a pen and paper because their field of study encompasses the complexity of the entire human brain and its interaction with everything around us. Sure, there are thousands and possibly millions of hacks in those fields but there are also thousands and millions of hacks in STEM. Imagine having your entire field judged on the musings and performance of the worst techie you know.

boondoggle16 3y ago
>hnbad

dang 3y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dredmorbius 3y ago
Both of photochemsyn's criticisms are largely accurate. Looking at resource requirements as mapped to land area is highly instructive, and one of the more illuminating exercises I've done is to plot population growth as the falling available land area (for all resource and ecosystem service value afforded) over time. We're well below "40 acres and a mule" --- with 8 billions of souls on Earth, there are about 4.6 acres/person, or 1.86 hectare. Many of the most interesting and useful analyses of Earth's resource situation provide a similar mapping. I'm aware of David MacKay's Without the Hot Air which maps just energy use by land area (with a focus on the UK). What becomes painfully evident is that it would be immensely challenging to supply energy equivalent to present utilisation from wind and solar potential of the British Isles alone, meaning something would have to give. (Less energy utilisation, imports from elsewhere, and/or both.) Many industrialised nations face similar challenges. Vaclav Smil is another, with Energy and History and Energy and Civilization both looking at energy-as-land-use based on 1 kW/m^2 influx (and lesser densities of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.). Smil is the source of one of the more picturesque descriptions of oil wells: punctiform sources of energy, a hole in the ground a few inches wide through which millions of years of accumulated ancient sunshine spew forth. Combine that with Jeffrey S. Dukes "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686>, which I've posted to HN a few times (limited discussion), to realise that we're consuming fossil fuels at millions of times their rate of formation, a cost utterly unaccounted for in market prices. (Imagine a YC-funded startup had a similar burn-rate....) And yes, social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, and political economy very often utterly ignore these facts, on both the left and right, simply because they're ideologically inconvenient. As I've already commented, my first impression on seeing this item in the HN queue was that it was some far-left woo along the lines of the Jacque Fresco's Venus Project (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project>). Such schemes are often surprisingly similar to right-libertarian theology, as this turned out to be. The physical and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, ecology, environmental studies) are often deeply and legitimately critical of such views. Mauricio Schoijet's "Limits to Grwoth and the Rise of Catastrophism" (1999) is a good treatment of how both the ideological right and left frequently reject Limits to Growth arguments: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399> <https://doi.org/10.2307/3985399 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985399> Given that the criticism is also being voiced to power, and to interests which are deeply vested in oil and gas, HN is once again disadvantaging the disadvantaged who speak to truth power, and tone-policing them to boot. I know what your justifications for this are, but it remains a very bad look.