Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, borders on click bait.
It's a title.
It's a clickbaity title for the paper.
Fuck Nuance [pdf]
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#22This article is a truly fantastic critique of how modern social sciences (besides economics) are carried out and publicized in modern society. Any critique one dislikes - typically "your theory predicts X which is false" - can be dismissed by "nuance", "things are more complicated", "that's different in unspecified way", etc. In statistical terms, these dismissals are little more than a call for overfitting - if I ca…
> In statistical terms, these dismissals are little more than a call for overfitting - if I can arbitrarily add more dimensions to a theory, I can make it fit any data set. Sure. However, this leads me to believe it is statistics that are the problem, and not nuance. You are in my opinion admitting that nuance invalidates most statistics, or at least allows for heavy manipulation of the statistics to fit any narrativ…
No, on the contrary I'm saying that calls for nuance are often excuses to do bad statistics and bad science.
Rather than throwing away our theories because they predict X and the world does Y, they instead say "actually the theory only applies under vague unspecified circumstances which you'd understand if you were as nuanced as I". Whether or not the theory fits the data, they cry "intersectionality" or "humans are so complex".
In any case, your post begs the question. If we should ignore statistics, how should we make decisions? Emotionally pleasing verbal narratives?
See also the related essay, "Pragmatism is Poison". It argues that the word "pragmatism" is used in software a lot to shut down discussion of bad choices, much the same way "nuance" is used to shut down discussion of good theories. https://einarwh.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/pragmatism-is-poiso...
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you exclude economics? I see economics as practically leading the way with regard to dismissals like you suggest. One example I have first-hand experience with is the low-volatility anomaly. CAPM-like theories predict a roughly linear, positive-sloping relationship between risk and return. Yet decades worth of various empirical measurements of the riskiness of assets and portfolios unequivocally demonstrates t…
What you are describing in economics - while perhaps a failure mode - is the exact opposite of what this article discusses. The critique of this article is that valid abstractions and theories are rejected due to a lack of "nuance", rather than a failure to explain and predict reality: Second is the ever more extensive expansion of some theoretical system in a way that effectively closes it o from rebuttal or disco…
Yes, but as far as the economists are concerned, asking for someone to rectify CAPM with the low-volatility anomaly is just nuance.
The author of this piece is saying, Let's not just throw unconstrained nuance at a theory: let's look at a holistic and sort of complexity-adjusted assessment of how well it's doing before we start asking it to behave like a Swiss Army knife, with a special mode to satisfy every empirical whim.
I'm saying that this -- the argument against nuance of this type -- is used to defend otherwise flatly wrong theories. (And I misread your comment to be saying that about other fields of social science too.)
In other words, when someone says, "But wait a minute, can you augment CAPM to handle the particular messy real-world case that I care about?" the response is: sorry, but we have to Occam's Razor away your request, we can't tailor it to everything.
The problem is that that messy real-world case is not some bespoke, uncommon corner, but is the most up-front qualitative property of the whole theory.
I guess what I'm saying is that the author says we should Occam's Razor-ify requests for nuance, yet in economics people masquerade as if they are doing legit Occam's Razoring (we can't tailor our analysis to every whim) when really they are just protecting pet theories that simply are bad.
It's actually a caution against the way the OP's advice about constraining nuance can be misused and politically abused to defend models that are simply wrong.
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#24I assume simple theories are very good for advancing the science itself. But I don't think they are as actionable as complex ones, because reality is complex, and you need to account for that when creating policy.
Nuance is lethal for scientists, but lack of it is lethal to practitioners.
And practical experience consist mostly of knowing what kinds of nuance are important for what kinds of problems.
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#25I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline. In particular, I'm unaware of any of its "Great Theories", a la General Relativity for physics, or Darwinian Evolution for biology. Any candidates? I'm not trying to be snide, I really would like to learn more about this. The Wikipedia page for sociology describes "theories" that sound more like schools of thought.
> I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline.
...You wrote in a text field on a website with other readers who will be able to upvote or downvote your comment.
Sociology tends to have less of an emphasis on theory than some other fields, but that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of research that's useful and relevant.
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#26[deleted]
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#27By calling for a theory to be more comprehensive, or for an explanation to include additional dimensions, or a concept to become more flexible and multifaceted, we paradoxically end up with less clarity. A further odd consequence is that the apparent scope of theories increases even as the range of their explanatory application narrows. This seems analogous to poor imperative programming to me: as your code becomes m…
[deleted]
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In statistical terms, these dismissals are little more than a call for overfitting - if I can arbitrarily add more dimensions to a theory, I can make it fit any data set. Sure. However, this leads me to believe it is statistics that are the problem, and not nuance. You are in my opinion admitting that nuance invalidates most statistics, or at least allows for heavy manipulation of the statistics to fit any narrativ…
No, on the contrary I'm saying that calls for nuance are often excuses to do bad statistics and bad science. Rather than throwing away our theories because they predict X and the world does Y, they instead say "actually the theory only applies under vague unspecified circumstances which you'd understand if you were as nuanced as I". Whether or not the theory fits the data, they cry "intersectionality" or "humans are…
No true scottsman will allow their theory to be critiqued. A true scottsman is more nuanced.
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#29Can we un-capitalize "Nuance"? For a second I thought it refers to the speech technologies company.
Same. I actually clicked hoping to read a rant against my least favorite speech company and their bad habit of buying up competition for the patents and then sitting on the technology. They own the rights to the speech synthesizer I use every day, Eloquence, which is no longer developed and will probably never improve, but is easily the most intelligible synthesizer at high speed.
Yap same here ;-) They squeezed us with their pricing model for years. I was nodding as I was reading the title, then found something else. Oh well.
Re: Fuck Nuance [pdf]
#30I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline. In particular, I'm unaware of any of its "Great Theories", a la General Relativity for physics, or Darwinian Evolution for biology. Any candidates? I'm not trying to be snide, I really would like to learn more about this. The Wikipedia page for sociology describes "theories" that sound more like schools of thought.
Look up Max Weber, you could start with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...