111–120 of 237 posts
Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)
I would add to this list economics. Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations.…
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> Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science. > The name social science was invented by hacks just like creation science was invented by hacks because real science ( biology, physics, chemistry, etc ) has such a good reputation and they didn't so they decided to manufacture some credibility by attaching "sci…
> Do you have anything to back this up? Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_social_sciences "The term "social science" first appeared in the 1824 book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth by William Thompson (1775–1833). Auguste Comte (1797–1857) argued that ideas pass through…
Well, unless 1824 is "fairly recently" (to be generous, let's say a century ago, when things really got going), and Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and yes, even Marx are "hacks" (they may be other things, but hacks?).
This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…
I agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
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We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react. Even a lot of engineering deals with similar types of uncertainty. We build huge structures out of metal, concrete, and wood on top of soils and other geological materials, often with the assumption they they are all homogeneous with constant material properties through the str…
I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works). Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from…
This construction makes it seem like you view social sciences as a subset of humanities. I was taught that neither is a subset of the other.
Where did you get your impression from? I assume it’s not the university in your username, since I’m certain they don’t share this view. (Source: I’m married to a humanities professor at that university. Also: https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofhumanitiesandsci...)
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When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.
We also got eugenics based on “science”
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Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.
Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage
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Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.
Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage
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I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works). Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from…
I think most, if not all self-respecting social science scholars would resent being lumped in with economists
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Yeah, it still baffles me that people think economics is a proven science and not built on a shaky foundation that falls apart soon as you prod it.
Look at the latest edition of QJE. You will see mostly studies addressing a particular policy question, e.g., 'what was the effect of this policy change on unemployment' which they answer using randomly controlled trials or quasi-experimental methods. Which aspect of this falls apart when you prod it?
Much of economics is politics disguised as technocracy.