It's probably fine for there to be a study of history that is not a science, but there should also be a study of history that does apply scientific methods.
Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
91–100 of 237 posts
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").
Biology had always been red herring. Lot of biologists actually are careful about making big claims until they understand the mechanisms. There is an evidence based clinical science but that's been made very watertight through structured trials that must comply to well defined standards unlike studies like "Coffee was found to reduce cancer" which is often half-assed surveys with too many statistical biases.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#93One 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?
You've seen how military contractors act on HN. I'm sure Oppenheimer was spouting all the same old excuses. "Orders are orders. It's just my job. If I don't someone else will." Oppenheimer's mistake was being born as a human being, instead of an angel.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").
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Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science. > It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia. Are you? This issue with "social science" has been going on for…
As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities. There might be some valid criticism of the term "social science" and the field but lumping it in with humanities isn't accurate. While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how the…
I'd say social sciences are closer to humanities than they are to hard sciences.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").
i think the monimum bar for something to be science is that it has to have a rigor to it which can be used for removing doubt:
- hypothesis
- control group
- well chosen or random samples from representative population
- statistical significance
- a way to separate correlation from causation
- enumeration of conflating factors and potential for flaws in the chosen methodology
- list of prior studies or research
- peer review
- reproducibility, possibly using alternative methods
until all of this is done, a survey (or any study) is not science. convincing the layman is insufficient; you have to convince other experts in the field.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#97I 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.…
Yeah, it still baffles me that people think economics is a proven science and not built on a shaky foundation that falls apart soon as you prod it.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#98"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…
Has it become more reproducible? From what I've read we've only now come to terms with the fact that so much of the research is not reproducible and largely debunked (even land-mark studies like the Milgram experiments have started to be put into question)
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#99This 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…
I’m not even sure the paper he starts off criticizing is that problematic - it sounds like it’s basically a quantitative study of various tropes in fiction and comparing it to real data.
>comparing it to real data
given that the study goes back as far as the creation of the Illiad I have serious trouble believing that we have high fidelity data about the social graph of individuals at that point in history.
Pretty much all we have is second-hand accounts to begin with which may themselves be as unreliable as fiction. So on that particular case, I fully agree with the author. That's not actually scientific.
Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is g…
I guess it really depends on what you think the purpose of college is. To me, that's exactly what college and high school should be for -- learning things that don't have a direct economic impact but that make you a more educated/well-rounded person. They shouldn't just be about job training, which should be focused in technical schools, and it actually saddens me that so many think the purpose of university/high sch…
We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them.
I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).