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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.…
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…
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 framework. It’s like assuming that the dollar bill you see on the sidewalk must be fake because it’s there.
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…
A lot of people have been and continue to make this criticism that’s in the article, across a variety of the softer disciplines. (It’s like you’re not even familiar with this line of critique.) See, eg. a criticism of political science in the same vein from a political scientist https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Beca...
I personally, for example, find that political science went overboard in rational choice theory (borrowed from economics) over the past several decades, which hasn't turned out to be particularly fruitful. (And there are 20+ subfields of political science as well, rational choice being just one.)
But that's simply arguing over the relative usefulness of specific methods, like to what degree TDD should be used in software, or have we gone overboard with microservices.
The original article's absurdly broad critique of quantitative methods somehow taking over generally remains bizarre and completely uninformed.
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…
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.
When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron. Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.
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Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.) A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things tha…
Apparently the natural sciences were once grouped into liberal arts as well
Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)
Because that's why colleges exist...? Historically universities were not the workforce mills they are today. You did not go to a university to help you find work. Stuff like business/management, engineering, medicine, etc really shouldn't be part of universities.
If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it's a science.
You've just disqualified much of physics research today :-)
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…
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…
It makes sense, though, with the incentives most academic journals put into study authors. Nothing's sexy about disproving some random model fits.