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)

#231

Post by smegger001 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #31

earthboundkid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

SO what you are saying is we should distinguish between a descriptive, and predictive science.

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

#232

Post by stanfordkid » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #225

stanfordkid wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that the assumption is not rooted in any empirical phenomena. They have neither historical data to fit to (which itself would be tenuous) nor do they have any sort of first order justification for it. It's like doing a car crash safety simulation and stating that the airbag provides protective force "linearly proportional to the force of impact, with alpha > 1" ... without ever measuring it or doing a…

I'm too damn lazy to read the paper, so you may be right. But normally, we practice a division of labour. Theoreticians build models in the expectation that empiricists will (a) test them and (b) estimate key parameters. If these guys have said "we have the answer, this is what you should do" then maybe you are right. I'm not saying either that this phenomenon never happens. I just think it's rather rare, especially…

It's a paper on epidemiology, that utilizes econometric thinking. I understand the theoretician / empiricist divide very well. But I chose this paper to illustrate because it is very clearly aiming to impact immediate policy (it states this in the abstract). Furthermore it is not trying to create fundamental new theoretical models... but rather provide a justification for why lockdown is economically justified.

I hate to be the one to say this -- but most of modern economics is crap, given how reflexive it is. People know how the fed acts -- they know how policy makers act. The models don't take into account this reflexivity.

Someone like George Soros is a thousand times more savvy on how the economy works than post-docs publishing econometrics papers for $40k a year.

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

#233

Post by ace_of_spades » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

mihaaly wrote: post #159

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?...)

So are you arguing that useful measurements are impossible for specific topics or are you just stating that flawed research is less useful than it could be (which it obviously is)?

I can recommend having a look at the book „how to measure anything“ to get a sense of how to apply measurement techniques to „soft“ contexts.

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

#234

Post by nemo44x » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 12:42 PM UTC

noema wrote: post #230

nemo44x wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a book coming out soon titled “Cynical Race Theory” which is a critique of the 40 years of academic thought that has gone from fringe to mainstream (And applied like the Inquisition mashed up with Maoist techniques like Struggle Sessions) and we are seeing played out unwittingly by the media, tech companies, and the tokenizing social media chatter class.

Looked this up and saw the promos. Anything endorsed by both Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal is bound to be bad faith, intellectually dishonest hackery.

Perhaps. The authors, however, are respectable in the time I’ve read their blogs, tweets, etc. Guided by liberal principals and have expressed a generally good understanding of philosophy going back to the Greeks.

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

#235

Post by partyboat1586 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

barking wrote: post #142

tw000001 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is 2020 and while in the past attitudeX or behaviourY might have been acceptable we have now come to understand (through Social Science Studies or NY Times bestseller that a particular academic has written) that both are wrong, toxic, in fact.

>This is 2020

>attitudeX

>NY Times bestseller

>Toxic

Please address the issues directly and name your sources rather than just giving a general progressive word salad. I'm ready to support you but you don't convert people by brushing them off as out of date.

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

#236

Post by sobani » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 8:54 AM UTC

patcon wrote: post #210

mihaaly wrote: post #165

The story reminds me of the HR practices of 'measuring' personality based on questionnaire to judge the competence of people for certain positions and determine their carrier path inside the organization (e.g. at Trimble). Imagine you are a software engineer applying for an engineering role and they ask you a hundred or more questions to compare the importance of aspects such as punctuality, trust, being patient, law…

I don't know about this Trimble outfit, but many of my friends and relationship partners have found value in similar tests like enneagrams. In my experience, they do help distill relationship dynamics into a smaller set of more understandable patterns. No, it's not rigorous hard science, but neither is most of what we might speak about with a therapist. They can be great frameworks to build on, if you trust the peopl…

There is a big difference between using the Enneagram to get to understand yourself and others better and using it to judge people. No profile is 100% correct, but some companies act like they always are.

It's similar to unit test code coverage: a great tool to point to areas that might use some attention, but a bad tool to determine whether a commit should be rejected.

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

#237

Post by necovek » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:53 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #149

necovek wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions: what I have seen is those studies noticing a correlation and then mainstream media picking it up as de facto conclusions (to put out a simplest example we've all seen: "people who have more sex are happier", directly implying that having sex leads to happiness, whereas studies noticed a correlation between people who claim to be h…

> I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions. Perhaps you should look harder. The dominant approach in economics for 20 years has been to reject correlational studies and try very hard to get at casuality, by: * Running randomised controlled trials, often at scale (see eg Esther Duflo); * Laboratory experiments, which have provided a body of robust paradigms and results; *…

FWIW, I realise I didn't phrase it correctly. What I wanted to say was that any non-terrible ("half decent") study does not attempt to draw a final, black or white (I wrongly used "rigorous") conclusion, but that mainstream media will do that instead by choosing a particular interpretation of the study results.

I did not want to imply that social science studies are non-rigorous, I was actually trying to defend their scientific nature, but with an incorrect phrasing.