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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)

#31

Post by roenxi »

earthboundkid wrote: post #19
Gimpei wrote: post #8

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…

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 business.

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

#32

Post by abathur »

earthboundkid wrote: post #19
Gimpei wrote: post #8

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…

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.

I agree with the core premise (scholarships of society are more reflexive), but this nonetheless made me wonder about the relative rates of incarceration and suspicious death among practitioners of the various arts and social sciences.

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

#33

Post by torrance »

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 do recommend reading the first half of her Doughnut Economics where she makes this case at length, from someone inside the discipline.

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

#34

Post by neonate »

guerrilla wrote: post #30

"Psychology is not a natural science." I used to think this and to a certain extent I still do but the fact is that the feild has changed and become much more reproducible as time passes and it matures. More importantly though this article conflates humanities with social sciences pretty badly. This is quite insulting to sociology and even more so to economics and anthropology. Physical antrho is pretty serious scien…

Psychology hasn't simply become more reproducible. It has been gutted by a reproducibility crisis and it remains to be seen what the outcome will be.

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

#35

Post by stanfordkid »

swimfar wrote: post #27
Gimpei wrote: post #8

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…

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 a very "respectable" set of academics at Yale -- that is based on a flat out fabricated economic model:

We focus primarily on the moderate scenario. That is, our baseline assumption is that diminishing returns play a larger role than accelerating returns (so that α ≤ 1) but not so large that they lead to α

Translation: we made some equations that makes the BAD thing BAD and the GOOD thing GOOD.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v...

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

#36

Post by yk »

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 the set of all Turing machines, and there I get immediately the issue of computability. (For example, calculating the average run time of halting Turing machines.) So, then assuming that one can meaningful build a statistic (just the claim that this is possible) will doom any too formal reasoning, by principle of explosion.

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

#37

Post by wrnr »

mmhsieh wrote: post #14

One of the most valuable courses I took as an undergrad was an anthropology course. In it, we studied the life of JR Oppenheimer and his relationship with the government patrons of his science. The sort of scoundrels naturally attracted to power will always find cynical use for talent of the kind possessed by Oppenheimer. However, every aspect of such a relationship will be thoroughly cynical. If you are a future STE…

Was it beyond Oppenheimer's intellect and imagination to comprehend what he was doing? Sort of like nazi Germany having no idea what was happening to the jews?

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

#38

Post by tropdrop »

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 place in the market where that thing solves a real problem. This very rarely works as a business strategy - you first need to find a real problem and then build a tool that solves that problem.

Problem -> so what? (we build a solution) -> real business.

Now, replace "app" with "mathematical modeling," and you'll start to feel the author's gripe.

I do think the author is right to ask - what is the point? So what? What are you trying to do with those mathematical models? What problem are you solving? For instance, we have the hypothesis that the researchers of the British paper posited:

> the relative likelihood that certain stories are originally based in real-world events

Based on:

>looking at the (very complicated) mathematics of social networks

So, we have a tool - that tool is looking at the mathematics of social networks. Does high fidelity between models of social networks predict "realness?" Does a certain model of a social network described in the relationships of protagonists in a book suggest that book's events are accurate historical ones?

No, right? Then why is that step glossed over when the researchers go ahead and start modeling anyway?

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

#40

Post by gumby »

The first paper she studies sounds interesting. Regression analysis on vocabulary has been used to identify authors of work whose authorship had been lost or to find context of where and in what circumstances certain authors grew up.

Mathematical analysis of linguistics has pointed to. Irrational patterns later confirmed by genetic analysis.

I don’t mind pointing out the vacuity of what often passes for scholarship. But she didn’t start with a good example.

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