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Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and re

• Nasrudith 2y ago
  They always keep on asserting that 'multi-disciplinarianism' (always in the form of the less practical being pushed on the more practical, never the other way around despite the obvious role in understanding reality in well, understanding reality). They never worry about being detached from reality from their distance to the objective. It reeks of the bad old days of classical philosophy where they considered estrangement from reality an intrinsic virtue as "purity of thought" and looked down upon those who dealt with banal reality. I have yet to see any actual backing for such claims. Only standard academia's toxic social knife-fighting and Kafka-traps. The specific form of bullshit being mounting social pressure as a weapon. Where where not agreeing with them and their theories means clearly you are more wrong and a worse person for not agreeing with them and thus you must agree with them! It always rung of a scam to justify mandatory electives to justify the existence of their professorships. There is no intellectual honesty to be found here, only snobbery and blind adherence to cliches.
• asacrowflies 2y ago
  It would help if those "soft sciences" had any sort of reproducible outcomes. As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
  • kiba 2y ago
    Ignorance is really not a virtue. If you suspect that you're being lied to by the consensus, feel free to read alternatives by heterodox scholars. I suspected that they're crank. It's not like I particularly agree with the way things work now, only that we shouldn't make things worse by making obviously stupid moves in the wrong direction.
  • AlotOfReading 2y ago
    How aware of them do you consider yourself to be? There's an entire field of literature called critical theory that's explicitly dedicated to challenging the status quo. My own field (anthropology/archeology) does it so commonly that there are multiple terms for slightly different shades of it (public, applied, postcolonial, etc).
  • chasing 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 2y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. (I don't think the GP comment was very good either, but taking the thread flameward is definitely not what we want.)
      • chasing 2y ago
        Easy to be snarky online. I'll pull it back.
        • dang 2y ago
          Appreciated!
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Can you give an example? It seems like you have a lot to share but stopped short at a vague implication of a shadowy elite controlling entire academic subjects.
    • Palomides 2y ago
      [dead]
    • asdasdsddd 2y ago
      Priming for starters https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
      • kiba 2y ago
        The best source of information about the reliability of scientific information...are within the scientific community. If you engage outside the scientific community, you're most likely going to encounter cranks.
    • cfraenkel 2y ago
      Economics, and the Powell Memo, followed by Milton Friedman and the Phillips curve and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.
      • throw0101d 2y ago
        > […] and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with. Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward: > Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27] > Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_... See also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox Also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theo... Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.
  • lajy 2y ago
    Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
    • kelseyfrog 2y ago
      To reinforce your point with another example: If psychology wasn't reproducible then ads wouldn't work. Of course they are reproducible. It's trivial.
      • lazide 2y ago
        some is reproducible. And very little of psychology covers what is used in ads.
  • kiba 2y ago
    There's more to knowledge than just reproducible outcomes. For example, history is frustrating because you are going to end up in unique circumstances and you're not going to be able to see into the future, only the present. Yet, we must at least have an understanding of the world around us and critical thinking skills that can only come from with doing history.
  • kiitos 2y ago
    Thanks for providing a case in point.
  • kelseyfrog 2y ago
    > As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is. This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory. Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
• soulofmischief 2y ago
  It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration. But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility. So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history. We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society. We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective. This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.
  • kiba 2y ago
    Go take improv classes. It's a lot of fun and now you have a skill that let you perform in any major metropolitan area without needing a script or much preparation, other than warmups if that's what they do. But yeah, people should be curious and willing to try things, even things that doesn't seem to be the thing for them.
    • TheGRS 2y ago
      I'll pile onto that. I love improv. It gave me a new set of mental skills that are difficult to train for elsewhere. It teaches you how to walk in a room and make the best of any situation and overcome that feeling of meeting strangers. I find any difficult work situation I can now approach from a "what can we do with this?" mentality, where I used to always dread rolling up my sleeves to do more work. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially anyone in a leadership role.
• seventhtiger 2y ago
  It seems to me that these soft sciences are parasitic and only try to follow successful things created by engineers and impose their vision upon them. There are plenty of engineers for hire, and sociologists can build their own vision.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Culture and society are downstream of economics, which is downstream (though in feedback with) of technology.
• xg15 2y ago
  I was thinking that "disdain" might be overdramatic and too broad of a generalization - until I read the replies to this comment.
  • kelseyfrog 2y ago
    Lol, I would have guessed you've been here long enough to experience it. :) It's probably not most folks, but when the topics of sociology and psychology come up there's definitely a contingent who reply with contempt. This isn't a new concept, but the compartmentalization of subjects in school is one of the factors at play along with a hierarchy of subjects and students. You can observe how a lot of computer science folks hold mathematics and physics in high regard, and biologists, and sociologists in low regard. It's no coincidence that this maps to relative possession of the habitus valued by the ideological hegemony. Again, it works to reinforce social statuses rather than dismantle them, often in ways that are detrimental to those actively, albeit unknowingly, contributing to the same systems.
    • Xymist 2y ago
      The degree to which a science is valuable is proportional to the degree to which it would keep working if we finally wiped out humans and the goddamned whining stopped. Physics wouldn't notice, sociology would become irrelevant.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • etrautmann 2y ago
        So all of medicine isn’t science? What a weird take
      • dragonwriter 2y ago
        “Valuable” only makes any sense when qualified with to whom, and your claim is clearly not true with any human or set of humans in that role.
      • 2y ago
• dartos 2y ago
  How do you think one leads to the other? Engineers due tend to be pretty critical of things that can’t be accurately and consistently measured (not meant as a slight. It’s true, but it doesn’t make those soft sciences worthless), but they aren’t the only ones making these systems. Most of the time, engineers are given requirements and build systems to satisfy them. You wouldn’t blame a construction worker for gentrification, right?
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I thought it was for the money
• pdonis 2y ago
  > The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] While I agree that disdain is not the right reaction, neither is misdescribing what these disciplines are. And the most important fact about them is: they are not sciences. We do not have a science of how people work, how groups of people work, how collective action works. Dealing with people is an art. It requires applying non-repeatable human judgments to non-repeatable human situations, and doing so constantly, day after day, year after year, realizing that there is never going to be a stable state of things, there is never going to be a time when you have dealt with all the conflicts and solved all the problems and can sit back and relax. Engineers are understandably uncomfortable with such a situation because it goes against everything we (I say "we" because I'm an engineer myself) are taught. We are taught to engineer solutions to problems, solutions that keep working, if not forever, at least for a long enough time that we aren't constantly having to manage them. A well built bridge does not require constant engineer attention once it is finished. But there is no such thing when it comes to humans and human relationships. They do require constant attention in order to survive and flourish. But we have no science of how to do that, the way we have a science of how to build bridges. All we have is our fallible human judgment, and if we're lucky, some rules of thumb that, while they aren't science, are hopefully better than nothing. Unfortunately, I think what rules of thumb we have have been mostly ignored in the process of building systems like social media.
  • Smithalicious 2y ago
    You don't seem to understand the difference between sociology and socialising, nor the difference between science and engineering.
  • NewJazz 2y ago
    We absolutely have statistical and theoretical frameworks for evaluating collective behavior. Cite something or don't @ me.
    • pdonis 2y ago
      > We absolutely have statistical and theoretical frameworks for evaluating collective behavior. Yes, we do, but their predictive power, if it exists at all, is very poor. Science is about building models with good predictive power. If you don't have that, you don't have a science, at least not in any way that matters.
• wyager 2y ago
  Soft "sciences" don't have enough predictive power to, on expectation, improve this situation to any meaningful degree
• generic92034 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
• api 2y ago
  Another way of saying this is: everything non-trivial you build embeds at least a little bit of cultural baggage. If you’re not thinking about that it just means you have no idea what stuff you are loading into your designs. It’s still there you’re just not aware of it. It’s like being the unwitting carrier of a disease or a parasite. Makes me think of brain slugs in Futurama for some reason.
• etrautmann 2y ago
  This is an interesting point, but how do you this psychology as a field has or usefully could push against such forces? Is that its role even accidentally?
• Brian_K_White 2y ago
  When I was an infant taking my first couple years of EE I joined right in with everyone else ridiculing the "basket weavers". Now I say that stem is just a tool that does no good by itself. It's just as harmful as beneficial. An engineer doesn't like to think of themself as a tool, but tough shit. Without the humanities an engineer is exactly that, merely a tool that others wield, and others decide how to wield and to what ends. Stem tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb. The humanities tells you whether/when/why to build a bridge or a bomb.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
  These “soft sciences” have actually been responsible for 100s of millions of deaths in the 20th century. Many times these practitioners of these ”soft sciences” are cloistered away in the ivory towers of academia and away from regular people whom they actually look down on because they don’t match their theories.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  It also made us worser engineers unable to contemplate the computer in front of the computer . We cyclical reinvent the wheels and our brightest regularly bump into the limitations of self projecting themselves upon everyone they meet. We need a field that is able to systematically cartograph the limitations our brains impose on us, society and technology. We need a world map of blindspots, of disabilities l. Not 15 years ago we congratulated ourselves on plans to degrowth , and look at what happened during the pandemic.