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Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#101

Post by sytelus »

leeoniya wrote: post #96
kissickas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").

i think the monimum bar for something to be science is that it has to have a rigor to it which can be used for removing doubt: - hypothesis - control group - well chosen or random samples from representative population - statistical significance - a way to separate correlation from causation - enumeration of conflating factors and potential for flaws in the chosen methodology - list of prior studies or research - pee…

In a way, science is a process of creating a model. To create a model, you first need evidence (i.e. data) and then you form hypothesis which your proposed model. Then you make prediction using your model that wasn't known before. If predictions continues to remain true over time then you have higher confidence in your model. However, a true scientist would never set his/her confidence to 1.0 in any model because all models are eventually wrong and needs to be improved further. So the science is the process of continuously gathering evidence, improving model and remain skeptical that you might be wrong. It is very much like training a machine learned model using training data. Most soft sciences do the first two steps and bypass everything else. It's like you created ML model, you had good result on training data but you never tested your model on hold out set, assumed your model was good enough and just moved on to make a press release.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#102

Post by Daub »

My father (a physicist) used to quote Rutherford to me: "all science Is either physics or stamp collecting". An extreme position perhaps. I now work in a college of humanities and have frequently collaborated with engineers. I have seen first hand how poorly applied scientific thinking has become within the humanities. But I cannot blame them. They are only giving to the uni what has been asked of them.

The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as 'social science' goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#103

Post by SI_Rob »

andreilys wrote: post #95
jccalhoun wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities. There might be some valid criticism of the term "social science" and the field but lumping it in with humanities isn't accurate. While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how the…

I'd say social sciences are closer to humanities than they are to hard sciences.

True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general direction of hard science ever since. Though necessarily relying much more on modeling and statistical approaches than on formal analysis.

Due to the inherent impossibility of repeating experimental conditions exactly (or in some fields, at all), the social sciences will never join the hard sciences, but instead occupy terrain adjacent to both humanities (where their data is sourced from), and hard sciences (where techniques are sourced from, increasingly for the "computational"- prefixed subfields).

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#104

Post by naasking »

wilbo wrote: post #60
stanfordkid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a problem I find tiring about most studies, even in the sciences (excluding most physics and all mathematics). It seems as if most researchers are looking for a novel or interesting correlation or apply an interesting model to a new domain. Generally, I've found this puts insufficient effort into any kind of disconfirmation. It makes sense, though, with the incentives most academic journals put into study aut…

Replication and publishing negative results do not get the respect they deserve. They should be given equal attention and funding as novel results. That would fix the replication crisis.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#105

Post by aww_dang »

torrance wrote: post #33

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.…

AKA, "The dismal science"

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#106

Post by kissickas »

sytelus wrote: post #92
kissickas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").

Biology had always been red herring. Lot of biologists actually are careful about making big claims until they understand the mechanisms. There is an evidence based clinical science but that's been made very watertight through structured trials that must comply to well defined standards unlike studies like "Coffee was found to reduce cancer" which is often half-assed surveys with too many statistical biases.

We don't know the mechanisms of plenty of things that we accept as proven with scientific principles, like most of pharmacy.

And what about physics before Newton? Or before Einstein? In fact, we still don't know exactly how gravity works. Or magnetism. At what point are you drawing the line of being able to "elaborate the exact mechanism"?

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#107

Post by naasking »

0d9eooo wrote: post #85
hliyan wrote: post #79

Perhaps the currency of social sciences should be anecdotes with full context (of which you can obviously get only a limited number unless you have unlimited budget) rather than collecting extensive data points on a limited number of variables. While physical systems can be approximated (or some independent variables dropped) without affecting the aspect being studied (think perfectly spherical objects), when it come…

As someone in the behavioral/population sciences, I think there's an underlying, interesting question of "when, if ever, should quantitative methods not be applied to an area of empirical inquiry?" The article doesn't seem to address this though. As for the social and behavioral sciences, another way of approaching it is: if you have a phenomenon, is it better to try to be scientific in explaining it or not? If not,…

Most science seeks broad principles, but I kind of like the OP's suggestion that a depth-focused approach of detailed anecdotes, possibly from multiple different points of view, could provide an interesting form of alternate data.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#108

Post by throwaway2048 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #43
inerte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also got eugenics based on “science”

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

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#109

Post by selectionbias »

andreilys wrote: post #97
torrance wrote: post #33

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.…

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?
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