Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012) • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by cycomanic » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

tropdrop wrote: post #38

maweki wrote: post #6

Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences. As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it's the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they…

I don't think the author is arguing for a banishment of certain authors "to qualitative methods." The problem described in the article is one I frequently see in Silicon Valley - ok, a couple of engineers build a thing. Note how they didn't start from asking "what is a real problem?" No, they built some tool/app. Now they spend several investment cycles trying to find "product market fit" by attempting to find some p…

The laser was famously named "a solution looking for a problem", many times in science we build theories/experiments/devices without solving a problem, but instead found many problems in hindsight where the theory could be applied (and many others where it could)

So I see science at work, nothing to see here.

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

#132

Post by LoSboccacc » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

how not to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: conflate it with humanities and claim using data to prove things misses the points

how to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: throw out bogus research and get rid of quacks

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

#133

Post by ed25519FUUU » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #132

how not to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: conflate it with humanities and claim using data to prove things misses the points how to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: throw out bogus research and get rid of quacks

Good idea, but you can’t throw out the quacks because their chairing the departments. You won’t make much progress until you start throwing out the schools.

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

#134

Post by unishark » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #44

This is a terrible article. First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities . Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social…

She did not confuse humanities and social sciences. She started off focusing on humanities then segued into a bigger complaint about humanities and social sciences together sharing the same problem. The author has a doctorate from Columbia in psychology. So there's probably a lot more thought behind her frustrations.

As for the home departments of the authors, that doesn't change the fact that their work was humanities research. Unless you're saying humanities departments shouldn't be blamed for arguably bad humanities research produced by "outsiders" and published in physics journals. It doesn't appear to me that the publication contained any new applied math or physics.

Correlations are not science by the way, no matter how repeatable they are, they're just statistics. You need to prove causation to be scientific. Big analyses of countries generally can't do controlled experiments so their findings are always dependent on what they chose to include (and not include) in their models as the supposed causal mechanism.

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

#135

Post by cycomanic » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

naushniki wrote: post #47

supernova87a wrote: post #39

Makes me think of the joke on "Big Bang Theory" (which am almost ashamed to admit enjoying): Caricatured dumb humanities major: "That's what I love about math, there's no one right answer!"

The most funny part is that this is effectively true.

Well math is not a science either. I acknowledge that there is debate about if formal sciences (logic, math, theoretical CS) are a science, but I'm with Popper in saying that the core of a science is falsifiability which does not apply to math.

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

#136

Post by pdonis » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #52

roenxi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome. Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new busine…

The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect! A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framewor…

> The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting.

This is not only wrong, it's laughable. Governmental interference in the economy has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk. And not with good outcomes, either: the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling over a period of decades finally catching up with everyone.

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

#137

Post by unishark » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #84

crazygringo wrote: post #44

This is a terrible article. First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities . Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social…

I call these hard science vs soft science. Please do not get me wrong, I shuffle from math and art quite a bit these days and get to take a look at various approaches in both areas. There is a trend of applying hard science approach to soft science. This is good thing until it results in research that is quite wishy washy. When you see "study" where experiment is mainly surveying people, its soft science. Unfortunate…

The hard versus soft science distinction is an old one, cutting off around biology. Basically physics is the "true" science and as it gets harder to relate phenomenon back to the underlying physics involved, the study is seen as more soft.

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

#138

Post by watwut » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:17 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #119

rdcurd wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most, if not all self-respecting social science scholars would resent being lumped in with economists

Which fields are you referring to? I think of psychology as perhaps more rigorous, but none of the others (sociology, anthropology, political science).

Sociologists often complains that economists don't bother reading established peer reviewed sociology and opt for own guesswork based on own intuitive observations whenever they attempt to incorporate sociology-lite into their writings.

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

#139

Post by tw000001 » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #127

This is such a horrible article. Many have already mentioned the conflation of humanities and social sciences. Then by using the example of books (because most would agree books would loose their essence if we just describe them by numbers) it constructs a straw man that somehow we loose something (the beauty?) by using quantitative measures. Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is…

> conflation of humanities and social sciences.

You've missed the entire point. A sort of conflation is the problem - not by the author, but by people in and around soft sciences and humanities throwing a bit of statistical jazz into their papers and then drawing ostensibly rigorous conclusions which influence social policy.

The reality is that by their vary nature, both soft science and humanities (there is a lot of overlap) cannot be held to the same rigor as, say, mathematics, physics, chemistry. These sciences are pure theory (like gender studies), non experimental (like psychology), and fundamentally unfalsifiable in the majority of cases...but laymen, and apparently government officials, either don't understand or pretend they don't understand - either way shitty policy and legislation is passed and innocent people (society) are worse off frequently.

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

#140

Post by akiselev » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #124

Articles and generally ideas like this always seem too dismissive. CPUs are nothing like brains because: intricacies. Algorithms can't be applied to literature because: intricacies. It is almost an appeal to emotions to say that rather than saying "ok well we tried to apply these electric constructs and algorithms in order to understand ideas and literature better, we got nowhere and here's exactly why", they are lik…

I'd hesitate to even call them intricacies. Billions of years of evolution in biochemistry and multicellular organisms, half a billion years in nervous systems, and over 200 million years in mammalian brains have culminated with about 50 million years of evolution of the primate brain. For every human being that has ever lived, nature has run 10^X continuous brute force "simulations" to arrive at our present civilization, where X is a ridiculously high number that's impossible to even estimate.

Sure, our intelligence allows us to skip a lot of those processes just like it allowed us to escape our gravity well and explore our solar system, but the jump from CPU to brain is like the jump from moon landing to intergalactic travel. The discrete nature of digital electronics alone prevents them from matching neurons because of sampling, let alone their lack of architectural (i.e. neural) plasticity. It's like trying to weld with a q-tip.