Any field that attempts to analyse real-world phenomena as if they were a piece of literature. That’s a bloody good start.
I’ve wanted to make some sort of post to this effect myself, but (ironically) couldn’t come up with a coherent theme to draw all the ideas together.
I’m currently working my way through undergrad economics, and regularly notice people expounding upon their home-brew economic theories that wouldn’t fly, make no sense, or have well-established theory or evidence opposing them. When I respond “this probably wouldn’t work because of x”, the most frustrating response is a wholesale rejection of economics as a legitimate field with useful findings. They don’t engage with the economic arguments because they don’t see the point in establishing the basic framework. This happens with alarming frequency.
The trouble is that I have a blacklist of fields that I basically don’t think are worth my time to study because they look like spurious nonsense. On what basis is it reasonable for me to dismiss, say, a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis of the recent banking crisis without bothering to engage with its arguments, and simultaneously criticise someone else for being wilfully ignorant of my own favoured disciplines?
My current rule of thumb, which largely seems to work, is to ask “what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong?” It obviously doesn’t distinguish all spurious nonsense from all useful disciplines, (the real-world consequences of homeopathy being right are enormous; it just happens to be conclusively wrong), but it does highlight which fields of study are getting work done, information-theoretically speaking, and which are sinkholes for effort without producing any practicable information.
One of the reasons I’m picking on urban planning here is that it seems like the consequences of it are enormous, given the importance of cities as generators of growth and innovation. (Though it’s possible there’s not in fact much difference between “successful” cities and “unsuccessful” ones.)
Urban planning seems similar to economics in some important respects. One of these, is that in practice the field is used as a garden of many different theories and tools which are selected from as needed to ex post facto justify political positions that are genuinely supported by unstated biases. Whatever crazy idea you have, you can be sure somewhere someone is receiving public or private funding to try and make it look legitimate.
My current rule of thumb, which largely seems to work, is to ask “what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong?”
Interesting heuristic. I’d be intrigued to hear what it says about pure mathematics?
One of my strongest mathematical interests is graph theory, in part because networks are incredibly pure abstract mathematical objects which you can draw lots of conclusions about on a purely logical basis, and in part because they can be used to model so many real-world phenomena. As a result, even modest propositions in that particular area have lots of real-world consequences.
History also strongly suggests that even the most historically useless pure maths can have tremendously important applications and consequences further down the line, some choice examples being radon transformations, modular arithmetic and eigenspace. It would be an incredibly bold statement to say a particular area of pure maths is completely without real-world consequence. There’s an awful lot of remaining time for even the most esoteric theorem to be put to use.
Apologies in advance for nitpicking, but the heuristic is to ask what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong, not whether the discipline has real-world consequences. So what are the propositions of mathematics that can be right or wrong? Clearly a published theorem can be right or wrong, but most are correct. What can be right or wrong is what areas of pure mathematics people consider to be interesting. I would say that these propositions can be right or wrong, and do have “real world” consequences. People used to think graph theory was not interesting—they were wrong.
I’m not sure interestingness is really the focus of the issue. I’m sure feminist post-structuralist discourse analyses of the recent banking crisis are very interesting to people interested in the subject, but I still don’t think it has any power to deduce true facts about the universe.
I do have another heuristic which is a little less straightforward to apply, but a little more selective: would a society of humans kept isolated from our own for thousands of years develop a similar discipline with the same essential elements as our version? Pure maths definitely passes that one, while something like Jungian analysis probably wouldn’t.
There’s a lot of places where we’d have catastrophic consequences if we had wrong beliefs about pure mathematics. For example, public-key crypto would fall apart if mathematicians were severely mistaken about finite groups and their relationship to prime numbers. And we couldn’t be very wrong about real analysis before we’d notice something the matter with calculus.
I would have said that math is a degenerate case for such a heuristic because we so seldom are wrong about it.
I wouldn’t say that economics is an illegitimate field without useful findings, but it may well be underserved. It contains a lot of elegant mathematical superstructure build on shaky foundations. Treating normative theories like Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility as if they were descriptive is of very limited … utility. As Daniel Hausman, cited by Leiter, wrote,
[T]he justification for a particular paradigm or research program, like the justification for the commitment to economics as a separate science, is success and progress, including especially empirical success and progress. Since economics has not been very successful and has not made much empirical progress, economists should be exploring alternatives. . ..[U]nless equilibrium theory [the core of what makes economics a distinct science according to Hausman] has captured the major causes of economic phenomena, the separate science of economics can never be successful. If, as seems likely to me, there are systematic failings of human rationality, and economic behavior is significantly influenced by many motive forces, apart from consumerism and diminishing marginal rates of substitution, then equilibrium theory is not a very good theory, whether or not there is anything better. …
Many (behavioral, especially) economists have proposed partial models accounting for a given irrationality or deviance from standard choice theory. What I haven’t heard of—and admittedly I don’t follow the subject closely—is any synthesis that covers a wide range of real human choice patterns.
Any field that attempts to analyse real-world phenomena as if they were a piece of literature. That’s a bloody good start.
I’ve wanted to make some sort of post to this effect myself, but (ironically) couldn’t come up with a coherent theme to draw all the ideas together.
I’m currently working my way through undergrad economics, and regularly notice people expounding upon their home-brew economic theories that wouldn’t fly, make no sense, or have well-established theory or evidence opposing them. When I respond “this probably wouldn’t work because of x”, the most frustrating response is a wholesale rejection of economics as a legitimate field with useful findings. They don’t engage with the economic arguments because they don’t see the point in establishing the basic framework. This happens with alarming frequency.
The trouble is that I have a blacklist of fields that I basically don’t think are worth my time to study because they look like spurious nonsense. On what basis is it reasonable for me to dismiss, say, a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis of the recent banking crisis without bothering to engage with its arguments, and simultaneously criticise someone else for being wilfully ignorant of my own favoured disciplines?
My current rule of thumb, which largely seems to work, is to ask “what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong?” It obviously doesn’t distinguish all spurious nonsense from all useful disciplines, (the real-world consequences of homeopathy being right are enormous; it just happens to be conclusively wrong), but it does highlight which fields of study are getting work done, information-theoretically speaking, and which are sinkholes for effort without producing any practicable information.
One of the reasons I’m picking on urban planning here is that it seems like the consequences of it are enormous, given the importance of cities as generators of growth and innovation. (Though it’s possible there’s not in fact much difference between “successful” cities and “unsuccessful” ones.)
Urban planning seems similar to economics in some important respects. One of these, is that in practice the field is used as a garden of many different theories and tools which are selected from as needed to ex post facto justify political positions that are genuinely supported by unstated biases. Whatever crazy idea you have, you can be sure somewhere someone is receiving public or private funding to try and make it look legitimate.
Interesting heuristic. I’d be intrigued to hear what it says about pure mathematics?
Depends on which area of pure mathematics.
One of my strongest mathematical interests is graph theory, in part because networks are incredibly pure abstract mathematical objects which you can draw lots of conclusions about on a purely logical basis, and in part because they can be used to model so many real-world phenomena. As a result, even modest propositions in that particular area have lots of real-world consequences.
History also strongly suggests that even the most historically useless pure maths can have tremendously important applications and consequences further down the line, some choice examples being radon transformations, modular arithmetic and eigenspace. It would be an incredibly bold statement to say a particular area of pure maths is completely without real-world consequence. There’s an awful lot of remaining time for even the most esoteric theorem to be put to use.
Apologies in advance for nitpicking, but the heuristic is to ask what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong, not whether the discipline has real-world consequences. So what are the propositions of mathematics that can be right or wrong? Clearly a published theorem can be right or wrong, but most are correct. What can be right or wrong is what areas of pure mathematics people consider to be interesting. I would say that these propositions can be right or wrong, and do have “real world” consequences. People used to think graph theory was not interesting—they were wrong.
I’m not sure interestingness is really the focus of the issue. I’m sure feminist post-structuralist discourse analyses of the recent banking crisis are very interesting to people interested in the subject, but I still don’t think it has any power to deduce true facts about the universe.
I do have another heuristic which is a little less straightforward to apply, but a little more selective: would a society of humans kept isolated from our own for thousands of years develop a similar discipline with the same essential elements as our version? Pure maths definitely passes that one, while something like Jungian analysis probably wouldn’t.
There’s a lot of places where we’d have catastrophic consequences if we had wrong beliefs about pure mathematics. For example, public-key crypto would fall apart if mathematicians were severely mistaken about finite groups and their relationship to prime numbers. And we couldn’t be very wrong about real analysis before we’d notice something the matter with calculus.
I would have said that math is a degenerate case for such a heuristic because we so seldom are wrong about it.
I wouldn’t say that economics is an illegitimate field without useful findings, but it may well be underserved. It contains a lot of elegant mathematical superstructure build on shaky foundations. Treating normative theories like Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility as if they were descriptive is of very limited … utility. As Daniel Hausman, cited by Leiter, wrote,
Many (behavioral, especially) economists have proposed partial models accounting for a given irrationality or deviance from standard choice theory. What I haven’t heard of—and admittedly I don’t follow the subject closely—is any synthesis that covers a wide range of real human choice patterns.