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To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#11

Post by mensetmanusman »

This is the key flaw in this article:

“The truth is that such questions are open to empirical study and it is possible for social science to study them scientifically.”

Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable.

It’s possible human culture and society is too diverse to make claims of ‘absolute truth’ about. A statistical mechanics approach to why this might be true is telling. The more entropic states available, the more potential outcomes. That is why physics studying single atom or molecules is more ‘understandable’ than sociologists studying 10^35 if them (humans being a cloud of atoms).

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#12

Post by narrator »

The social scientists do everything for grant money. Foundations don't give grant money to figure out the truth. They get grant money to get someone to make some scientific sounding propaganda that supports whatever narrative they're pushing.

Who comes up with the narrative to push though, and why?

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#13

Post by kodz4 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #11

This is the key flaw in this article: “The truth is that such questions are open to empirical study and it is possible for social science to study them scientifically.” Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable. It’s possible human…

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

All men are not equal, never have been and probably never will be. So why is that line so famous? Why has it influenced the course of history? Not just in the US. What that sentence, and its effects on history show us, is when people are faced with the Unprovable, they have a choice to sit back, do nothing and accept it OR decide what they want the truth to be. Unsurprisingly its always the latter group that makes change happen. The rest just fall asleep reading Goedel.

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#14

Post by scythe »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #11

This is the key flaw in this article: “The truth is that such questions are open to empirical study and it is possible for social science to study them scientifically.” Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable. It’s possible human…

>Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable.

The trouble with this argument is that Goedel's proof relies on systems which can model Peano arithmetic; in particular, it assumes that the system deals with numbers that are arbitrarily large. For example, Goodstein's theorem, the commonly-stated simplest unprovable theorem, depends on a function like this:

f(2) = 19, f(3) = 7.6 × 10^12, f(4) = 1.3 × 10^154, ...

Most numbers in sociology are not so large. The number of possible subsets of the human population is between f(7) and f(8).

Additionally, theorems about discrete systems do not always apply to continuous systems. For example, the theory of real closed fields is decidable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_closed_field

Most undecidable statements depend on things that look vaguely Diophantine, but sociology is rarely Diophantine. Rather, it tends be that approximately a solution is still kind of a solution.

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#15

Post by ralusek »

For those interested in this, take a look at the work regarding "grievance studies" by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. They made intentionally unscientific studies with the intent of publication, and actually got themselves published on a few of their works. The objective was to demonstrate that not only does academia in the social sciences operate according to a completely different standard than the hard sciences, but is so ideologically driven that they behave in much the same way as a religion might.

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#16

Post by zajio1am »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #11

This is the key flaw in this article: “The truth is that such questions are open to empirical study and it is possible for social science to study them scientifically.” Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable. It’s possible human…

> Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable.

No, that is a misrepresentation of Goedel's results. A theorem that is undecidable (neither provable nor refutable) from a set of axioms cannot be 'truth' in the logical sense (because there are models of that set of axioms in which the theorem is true, and other models in which the theorem is false) - see Goedel's completeness theorem, which says that every truth is provable (and vice versa).

Goedel's incompleteness theorems can be understood on the semantic level as the mathematical structure of natural numbers cannot be characterized by a sane set of axioms, so any such attempt (e.g. peano axioms) that describes natural numbers also describes a different mathematical structure (a nonstandard model of arithmetic) and there exists a theorem that is true in one and false in the other model (so that theorem is undecidable).

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#17

Post by JulianMorrison »

hogFeast wrote: post #4

Sounds like, unsurprisingly, the author hasn't spent that much time considering any of these questions themselves...they just have all the answers for those that do (thanks buddy!). Some questions just deal with issues that are just not quantifiable (even the question he poses about immigration is just not completely quantifiable). And even questions that are quantifiable are often affected by beliefs (i.e. what happ…

> he believed he had found a way to spot the physical attributes of terrorists

Isn't this literally phrenology, risen from its grave?

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#18

Post by gridlockd »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #7

I'm always amazed that someone who by all rights should be intimately familiar with the history of social science research like McIntyre can seemingly be so unaware of it. There was an empirical, modernist period in social sciences in the 40-80s of exactly the kind suggested by Lee and it was an absolute disaster. The results couldn't be related to the real world, and no one was really able to get over the inherent […

> After a lot of arguing and furious paper writing in the late 80s-90s, everyone began working on how to deal with that bias, moving it front and center where it can be handled instead of subtly hiding it in a bunch of numbers and pretending it didn't exist.

And the result of that is... what exactly?

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#19

Post by thrwayxyz »

gridlockd wrote: post #18
AlotOfReading wrote: post #7

I'm always amazed that someone who by all rights should be intimately familiar with the history of social science research like McIntyre can seemingly be so unaware of it. There was an empirical, modernist period in social sciences in the 40-80s of exactly the kind suggested by Lee and it was an absolute disaster. The results couldn't be related to the real world, and no one was really able to get over the inherent […

> After a lot of arguing and furious paper writing in the late 80s-90s, everyone began working on how to deal with that bias, moving it front and center where it can be handled instead of subtly hiding it in a bunch of numbers and pretending it didn't exist. And the result of that is... what exactly?

The homeless epidemic mostly. Sometimes doing badly is better than doing terribly. In the name of the perfect and being 'non prejudiced' the current generation of psychologists have doomed the mentally ill to living standards lower than the 19th century and a life expectancy on par.

Re: To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

#20

Post by sideshowb »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #11

This is the key flaw in this article: “The truth is that such questions are open to empirical study and it is possible for social science to study them scientifically.” Here is someone proclaiming to be a scientist, and then throwing out proclamations of ‘truth’ not backed by evidence. Goedel proved logically that any axiomatic system of information exchange can have truths that are not provable. It’s possible human…

Goedel is not really relevant to this. In the same way that insolubility of the halting problem doesn't prevent this message getting from my phone to hn to your screen. Its s theoretical limit on what can be computed but we're nowhere near running up against it.

(Sure, someone's phone will crash now, but they can still get back here somehow if they're that bothered).

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