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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)

#151

Post by dash2 »

stanfordkid wrote: post #35
swimfar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They make assumptions and then foreground them so the reader can understand them. What's wrong with that? Have you discovered a way of drawing conclusions without assumptions? Or do you think you can "just observe" without being guided by theory? What would a non-"fabricated" model look like?

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

#152

Post by Koffiepoeder »

I think one of the points that the article tries to make, is the point that proving something in a soft science using models is often based on many assumptions, be it implicit or explicit, and that this is problematic. To that I agree to some degree.

In hard sciences all inputs to a proof are either verifiable theorems known to be absolutely true, conjectures/hypotheses (in which case the proof becones a conjecture) and seldomly axioms. In soft sciences on the other hand, it is common to construct models quite arbitrarily, in order to try and match empirical results. If however, we would like these models to have any indication of "absolute" truth, similar to the hard sciences, currently we can't or don't.

To achieve this I believe we could do an input analysis of ALL assumptions and try and quantify the aggregated certainty of the model's correctness, even before matching it with empirical data. In this way we could say for example: we have used a model with a predicted input accuracy of 0.82, that matches our empirical results 0.97,p Of course this is easier said than done and I know this is a bit naïve. Currently no techniques exist to do this as far as I know. There is also discussion to be had about how to interpret model outputs (we now have three variables, how do we relate them? How to calculate this model's output accuracy?) and how to calculate subsequent model's accuracy based on different input accuracies and their inter-relations. This would also require re-building soft sciences all the way from the bottom up (from the most easily verifiable facts first) to be useful and a new science on hypthesized model accuracy calculation.

Anyway, enough hypothesizing thought experiments for the day. Any thoughts?

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

#153

Post by shash »

yk wrote: post #36

I fully agree with the premise that humanities aren't a science. In fact I am fairly certain that the current paradigm of science can not work for at least history, though I strongly suspect most of the humanities. One of the problems is computability, when I try to build statistics on a space of human intentions, then I strongly suspect that this is at least as complicated as trying to build a measurable space atop…

I disagree entirely, especially about history. You form hypotheses on the basis of evidence (literary, archaeological, documentary, etc), make predictions about the kinds of effects you’d expect to find in the historical record, and then modify those hypotheses based on what you find later.

How is that not a science?

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

#154

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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…

It surprised me as well, especially because the author studied psychology, so she must know the difference between humanities and social sciences.

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

#156

Post by kunfuu »

selectionbias wrote: post #112
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.…

I admit I haven't read or even heard of Kate Raeworth, but I am an academic economist. Most modern economic research is empirical, a paper poses a policy-relevant empirical question 'did policy X reduce unemployment' and then empirical evidence is presented (perhaps using data from a randomly controlled trial or using quasi-experimental variation). The statistics are calculated and the assumptions required for the va…

Hypothesis driven research disregarding rigoriousness of hypothesis formation is most often flawed, as the hypotheses will be filled with suspicious/flawed concepts that cannot serve as reliable and meaningful abstraction of reality.

Consider the measures prefixed with 'real', for example, 'real wage'. The concept of 'real wage' isn't meaningless, since it captures the relation between wage and purchasing power when inflation is involved. But what about cases where inflation is not involved, or cases where we need to consider interactions between some other factors and inflation? In those cases, the concept of 'real wage' is often impedimental and misleading, a ratio indicating purchasing power would surely be a better choice.

Consider the concept of 'equilibrium'. I can hardly see any empirical foundation of 'equilibrium' when it's invoked by empirical economics research. There are stationary periods of prices. But it's a different story to interpret such stationariness as a state of equilibrium with a mysterious process forcing prices to always gravitate to this state. This interpretation is without empirical foundation and yet its reliability is often assumed a priori in the research.

If you are not persuaded, it's okay. Regardless, I don't believe hypothesis formation is irrelevant.

EDIT: On second thought, my case against 'real wage' above was missing the key. The key is that purchasing power is what matters, and the purchasing power (most of the time local) of stock variables (e.g. savings) is what matters. To adjust flow variables by inflation is often misleading.

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

#157

Post by schwarze_pest »

gnicholas wrote: post #115
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…

> I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular 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 t…

At least my wikipedia tells me that.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studia_humanitatis#Humanities

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

#158

Post by heisenbit »

andi999 wrote: post #122
selectionbias wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I haven't read or even heard of Kate Raeworth, but I am an academic economist. Most modern economic research is empirical, a paper poses a policy-relevant empirical question 'did policy X reduce unemployment' and then empirical evidence is presented (perhaps using data from a randomly controlled trial or using quasi-experimental variation). The statistics are calculated and the assumptions required for the va…

Thats great. What about reproduction of results? Are ppl doing this (so is there funding for this)?

The work on reproduction of empirical economics so far has stalled due to lack of funding for a time machine.

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

#159

Post by mihaaly »

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…

When the measurement is flawed you will not know if the therapy works. Sorry. And the measurement is flawed! Actually, there is a crisis of reliability concerning modern research papers. (probably this is the source that many try to build castle out of dough?...)

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

#160

Post by todorus »

akiselev wrote: post #140
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 civiliza…

That makes it sound all very daunting, but we have a few advantages over nature when it comes to design.

* A single life can produce multiple iterations of a technology. * Current technology speeds up the development of the next iteration.

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