Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 71 posts

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

#61

Post by AlotOfReading »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #43
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, Can you cite at least one paper from this series?

My background is in archaeology, so that's what I'll discuss. The other social sciences had similar debates around the same time, plus or minus a few years.

If you're looking to understand one perspective from this period, I'd actually recommend Binford's Debating Archaeology [1]. This book summarizes a whole slew of arguments Binford had in the 80s with a number of other archaeologists, including his famous spate with Gould over the limits of empiricism. As it's a summary, it was obviously written after all of this was settled.

Selected works from the era might be Hodder's Symbolic and Structural Archaeology[2] or kohl's "Limits to Post-Processual Archaeology" [3]. The former was essentially an opening salvo for this debate and the latter is an example of a the reactions to it.

[1] Binford, L. R. (2016). Debating Archaeology: Updated Edition. Routledge.

[2] Hodder, I. (1982). Symbolic and Structural Archaeology.

[3] Kohl, P. L. (1993). Limits to a post-processual archaeology (or, The dangers of a new scholasticism). Archaeological Theory: who sets the agenda, 13-19.

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

#62

Post by weberc2 »

naasking wrote: post #34
ralusek wrote: post #15

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 th…

I think the main takeaway from the Sokal Squared hoax was that reviewers in this field are either a) extremely biased and approve any results that agree with their beliefs, or b) anti-science, or c) scientifically illiterate, because they couldn't even spot the painfully clear methodological problems in the hoax studies that were inserted on purpose to test exactly the quality of review.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive

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

#63

Post by akiselev »

lokisotube wrote: post #57
hliyan wrote: post #23

I've always found it uneasy that much of the data in social science studies comprise 5-point scale answers by volunteers to questionnaires, or observations of microcosmic situations that do not really represent reality (e.g. attempting to prove a hypothesis about generosity by giving participants $20 each and observing how they spend/gift it under a specially designed situation). I wonder whether questionnaires shoul…

Some questions to ponder: how is a record of behavior (the focus of behavioral science) any less objective than heart rate, pupil dilation, etc? Also, is heart rate a measure of psychological state really ? Hormone levels are a mess as a measure of psychobehavioral state. EEGs are useful but are opaque in terms of underlying mechanisms. People do use all the things you mention, and they're certainly useful, but also…

How does biomedicine bully the social sciences?

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

#64

Post by akiselev »

nradov wrote: post #40
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 […

This is an intellectually lazy comment. It is by no means obvious that the gender and ethnicity of of the researcher would impact that hypothetical experiment, or what the impact would be, or that it couldn't be avoided with careful experimental design. If the social sciences had a better general track record of producing reproducible results with practical value for society then I would be inclined to give them the…

> If the social sciences had a better general track record of producing reproducible results with practical value for society then I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the reality is that most researchers have squandered their credibility by chasing mirages. If it were up to me I would cut funding for the entire field.

Is that not the definition of intellectual laziness? You've just given up intellectually on an entire field.

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

#65

Post by seventhtiger »

lokisotube wrote: post #57
hliyan wrote: post #23

I've always found it uneasy that much of the data in social science studies comprise 5-point scale answers by volunteers to questionnaires, or observations of microcosmic situations that do not really represent reality (e.g. attempting to prove a hypothesis about generosity by giving participants $20 each and observing how they spend/gift it under a specially designed situation). I wonder whether questionnaires shoul…

Some questions to ponder: how is a record of behavior (the focus of behavioral science) any less objective than heart rate, pupil dilation, etc? Also, is heart rate a measure of psychological state really ? Hormone levels are a mess as a measure of psychobehavioral state. EEGs are useful but are opaque in terms of underlying mechanisms. People do use all the things you mention, and they're certainly useful, but also…

Questionnaires are not records of behavior. They are records of questionnaire answers. Aggregates of subjective responses don't become objective.

A record of behavior would be something like Internet activity. Tech companies may be the first to capture enough behavioral data to be able to actually study psychology.

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

#66

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

nradov wrote: post #40
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 […

This is an intellectually lazy comment. It is by no means obvious that the gender and ethnicity of of the researcher would impact that hypothetical experiment, or what the impact would be, or that it couldn't be avoided with careful experimental design. If the social sciences had a better general track record of producing reproducible results with practical value for society then I would be inclined to give them the…

Why not go one step further and only fund math, because in the end everything is math, right? No need to fund physics, which is just applied math. No need to fund medicine, which is just applied math. And medicine is a field filled with terrible studes that cant be replicated, so clearly it cant be good for anything.

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

#67

Post by logseman »

wmil wrote: post #58
adamsea wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm I do not know about that, the test real, meaningful control would be who gets the funding, no? Social sciences is nowhere near the top of this list. https://nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/aca... Overall my understanding is that it is harder to be an academic in almost any field these days, but especially the humanities - social sciences are an in-between zone, but I doubt the universities cutti…

> Hmmm I do not know about that, the test real, meaningful control would be who gets the funding, no? Well no. That's arguably showing what politicians perceive the value of each department to be. But it doesn't say anything about power on campus. The test of control should probably be what the undergrad degrees of the administrators and deans are.

I’m not sure how that’s a good control. Certain academic paths lead to much more lucrative private employment than others, so the degree holders have a huge incentive to go there instead of academic administration.

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

#68

Post by choeger »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #39
malvosenior wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your data is not good enough, get better data. Don't abandon objectivity. I think this is why a lot of people don't take the social sciences seriously, there's an extreme resistance to just doing objective, data driven research (and the lack of reproducibility that comes with that).

Again, the issue isn't one of methodology or technology. It's inherent to the research process. Let's do a thought experiment and imagine two identical research projects done in parallel universes. Everything is the same between these two universes except that the researchers are different people. In some fields, you'd probably expect the results to be the same. The researcher shouldn't affect objective results after…

> It should be very clear by this point in the thought experiment that "objectivity" is not really possible under those conditions. You need some theory to deal with this issue, but honestly it's manageable for the most part.

Tbh, That sounds like a lame excuse. The logical conclusion is that science done that way will never produce truth[1]. In consequence we should stop listening to such "scientists".

[1] As in "can be reproduced and likely gives the same result"

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

#69

Post by mancerayder »

thrwayxyz wrote: post #19
gridlockd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a bold claim, perhaps worthy of elaboration.

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

#70

Post by mancerayder »

kodz4 wrote: post #13
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 w…

No way - it's derived from a conception of rights derived from Reason, God, or both.

What you say sounds like a Postmodern interpretation, even revisionism, of the original intent. What else do you think self-evident meant?

But even worse, you left out the very next part: "endowed by their Creator with Certain unalienable Rights".

No, it is NOT about making change happen, or whatever hijacking of Truth is being attempted here, it's about solidifying a state (as in authority) different than other states created with other underlying principles.

Post reply on HN