I think it’s a bit of a shame that society seems to funnel our most intelligent, logical people away from social science. I think social science is frequently much more helpful for society than, say, string theory research.
Note: I do find it plausible that doing STEM in undergrad is a good way to train oneself to think, and the best combo might be a STEM undergrad and a social science grad degree. You could do your undergrad in statistics, since statistics is key to social science, and try to become the next Andrew Gelman.
As advice for others like me, this is good. For me personally it doesn’t work too well; my A level subjects mean that I won’t be able to take a STEM subject at a good university. I can’t do statistics, because I dropped maths last year. The only STEM A level I’m taking is CompSci, and good universities require maths for CompSci degrees. I could probably get into a good degree course for Linguistics, but it isn’t a passionate adoration for linguistics that gets me up in the mornings. I adore human and social sciences.
I don’t plan to be completely devoid of STEM education; the subject I actually want to take is quite hard-science-ish for a social science. If I get in, I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools. It would be pretty cool to do some kind of PhD involving human evolution. From what I’ve seen, if I get onto the course I want to get onto, it’ll teach me a lot of biology and evolutionary psychology and maybe some biochemistry and linguistics.
I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools.
While archaeology certainly seems fun, do you think it will help you understand how to build a better world?
But to an extent, the biggest problems—coordination problems, how-do-we-build-a-half-decent-state problems—have been around since the very beginning.
No. The problem of building a state out of 10,000 people who’s fasted way of transport is the horse and who have no math is remarkably different from the problem of building a state of tens of millions of people in the age of the internet, cellphones fast airplanes and cars that allow people to travel fast.
The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have the math to even think about running a randomized trial to find out whether a certain policy will work.
Studying them doesn’t tell you anything about how to get our current political system to be more open to make policy based on scientific research.
Evolutionary psychology is incredibly useful for understanding our own biases and fallacies.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
rather than just carrying my magnifying glass straight over to political science and becoming the three gazillionth and fourth person to ever look for a better more ideal way to do politics.
Most people in political science don’t do it well. I don’t know of a single student body that changed to a new political system in the last decade.
I did study at the Free University of Berlin which has a very interesting political structure that came out of 68′s. At the time there was a rejection of representative democracy and thus even through the government of Berlin wants the student bodies of universities in Berlin to be organised according to representative democracy, out university effectively isn’t.
Politics students thought really hard around 68 about how to create a more soviet style democracy and the system is still in operation today.
Compared to designing a system like that today’s politics students are slacking. The aren’t practically oriented.
I’m interested in doing work on rationality problems and cooperation problems, and looking at the origins of the problems and how our current solutions came into being over the course of human history seems worthwhile as part of understanding the problems and figuring out more/better solutions.
If you are interested in rationality problems, there the field of decision science. It’s likely more yielding then anthropology.
Having a good grasp of academic decision science would be helpful when it comes to designing political systems and likely not enough people in political science deal with that subject.
Are you aware that the American Anthropological Association dropped science from their long-range plan 5 years ago?
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
Reducing elections to a single candidate also wouldn’t fly legally. You can’t just forbid people from being a candidate without producing a legal attack surface.
As I said, it’s actually a complex political system that need smart people to set up.
It’s like British Democracy also happens to “democracy” where there a queen and the prime minister went to Eton and Oxford and wants to introduce barrier on free communication that are is some way more totalitarian than what the Chinese government dares to do.
Democracy always get’s complicated if it comes to the details ;).
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Never mind the word. What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin that you’re referring to? And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Because Soviets are a central part of how the USSR was organised.
And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
Copying on things were in the USSR wasn’t the point. The point are certain Marxist ideas about the value of Soviets for political organisation.
What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin (FU) that you’re referring to?
A system of of soviets, as I said above.
There a lot of ideas involved. On the left you had a split between people who believe in social democracy and people who are Marxists. The FU Asta is Marxist.
The people sitting in it are still Marxist even through the majority of the student population of the FU isn’t and they don’t have a problem with that as they don’t believe in representative democracy. They also defend their right to use their printing press to print whatever they want by not disclosing what they are printing. By law they are only allowed to print for university purposes and not for general political activism.
The problem of studying people in the first villages is not only that their problems don’t map directly to today. It’s also that it’s get’s really hard to get concrete data. It’s much easier to do good science when you have good reliable data.
With 10,000 people you can solve a lot via tribal bonds and clans. Families stick together. You can also do a bit of religion and everyone follows the wise local priest. Those solutions don’t scale well.
It seems mostly irrelevant to me though, since I am aware that rubbish social scientists exist and I just want to try and improve and be a good social scientist.
You are likely becoming like the people that surround you when you go into university. You also build relationships with them.
Going to Cambridge is good. Cambridge draws a lot of intelligent people together and also provides you with very useful contacts for a political career.
On the other hand that means that you have to go to those place in Cambridge where the relevant people are.
Find out which professors at Cambridge actually do good social science. Then go to their classes.
Just make sure that you don’t get lost and go on a career of digging up old stuff and not affecting the real world. A lot of smart people get lost in programs like that. It’s like smart people who get lost in theoretical physics.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
I agree wholeheartedly. A field like theoretical physics is much more glamorous to large number of intelligent people. I think it’s partly signaling, but I’m not sure that explains everything.
What makes the least sense to me are people who seem to believe (or even explicitly confirm!) that they are only interested in things which have no applications. Especially when these people seem to disparage others who work in applied fields. I imagine this teasing might explain a bit of why so many smart people work in less helpful fields.
I think to an extent, physics is more intellectually satisfying to a lot of smart people. It’s much easier to prove things for definite in maths and physics. You can take a test and get right answers, and be sure of your right answers, so when you’re sufficiently smart it feels like a lot of fun to go around proving things and being sure of yourself. It feels much less satisfying to debate about which economics theories might be better.
Knowing proven facts about high level physics makes you feel like an initiate into the inner circles of secret powerful knowledge, knowing a bunch about different theories of politics (especially at first) just makes you feel confused. So if you’re really smart, ‘hard’ sciences can feel more fun. I know I certainly enjoy learning computer science and feeling the rush of vague superiority when I fix someone’s computer for them (and the rush of triumph when my code finally compiles). When I attempt to fix people’s sociological opinions for them, there’s no rush of vague superiority, just a feeling of intense frustration and a deeply felt desire to bang my head against the wall.
Then there’s the Ancient Greek cultural thing where sitting around thinking very hard is obviously superior to going out and doing things—cool people sit inside their mansions and think, leaving your house and mucking around in the real world actually doing things is for peasants—which has somehow survived to this day. The real world is dirty and messy and contains annoying things that mess up your beautiful neat theories. Making a beautiful theory of how mechanics works is very satisfying. Trying to actually use the theory to build a bridge when you have budget constraints and a really big river is frustrating. Trying to apply our built up knowledge about small things (molecules) to bigger things (cells) to even bigger things (brains) to REALLY BIG AND COMPLICATED things (lots and lots of brains together, eg a society) is really intensely frustrating. And the intense frustration and higher difficulty (more difficult to do it right, anyway) means there’s more failure and less conclusive results / slower progress, which leads some people to write off social science as a whole. The rewarding rush of success when your beautifully engineered bridge looks shiny and finished is not something you really get in the social sciences, because it will be a very long time before someone feels the rewarding rush of success that their beautiful preference-satisfying society is shiny and perfect.
I do think that the natural sciences are hopelessly lost without the social sciences, but for most super-clever people, is studying natural science more fun than doing social science? Definitely—I mean, while the politics students are busy reading books and banging their heads against walls and yelling at each other, physics students are putting liquid nitrogen in barrels of ping pong balls so that the whole thing explodes! (I loved chemistry in secondary school for years, right up until I finally caught on that coloured flames were the closest we were going to get to scorching our eyebrows off. Something about health and safety, thirteen year olds, and fire. I wish I hadn’t stopped loving chemistry, because I hear once you’re at university they do actually let you set things on fire sometimes.)
I don’t think that something being (more) mathematically rigorous explains all of what we see. Physicists at one time used to study fluid dynamics. Rayleigh, Kelvin, Stokes, Heisenberg, etc., all have published in the field. You can do quite a lot mathematically in fluids, and I have felt like part of some inner circle because of what I know about fluid dynamics.
Now the field has been basically displaced by quantum mechanics, and it’s usually not considered part of “physics” in some sense, and is less popular than I think you might expect if a subject being amenable to mathematical treatment is attractive to some folks. Physicists are generally taught only the most basic concepts in the field. My impression is that the majority of physics undergrads couldn’t identify the Navier-Stokes equations, which are the most basic equations for the movement of a fluid.
It could also be that fluids have obvious practical applications (aerodynamics, energy, etc.) and this makes the subject distasteful to pedants. That’s just speculation, however. I’m really not sure why fields like physics, etc., are so attractive to some people, though I think you’ve identified parts of it.
You do make a good point about the sense of completion being different in engineering vs. social science. I suppose the closest you could get in social science is developing some successful self-help book or changing public policy in a good way, but I think these are much harder than building things.
I think there’s also definitely a prestige/coolness factor which isn’t correlated with difficulty, applicability, or usefulness of the field.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL and saying you understand it whilst sliding your glasses down your nose makes you into Supergeek. Saying “I understand how wet stuff splashes” is not really so… high status. It’s the same thing that makes astrophysics higher status than microbiology even though the latter is probably more useful and saves more lives / helps more people—rockets spew fire and go to the moon, bacteria cells in a petri dish are just kind of icky and slimy. I am quite certain that, if you are smart enough to go for any field you want, there is a definite motivation / social pressure to select a “cool” subject involving rockets and quarks and lasers, rather than a less cool subject involving water and cells or… god forbid… political arguments.
And, hmm, actually, not quite true on the last point—a social scientist could develop an intervention program, like a youth education program, that decreases crime or increases youth achievement/engagement, and it would probably feel awesome and warm and fuzzy to talk to the youths whose lives were improved by it. So you could certainly get closer than “developing some successful self-help book”. It is certainly harder, though, I think, and there’s certainly a higher rate of failure for crime-preventing youth education programs than for modern bridge-building efforts.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL
To be honest, I found QM to be the least interesting subject of all physics which I’ve learned about.
Also, I don’t think the features you highlighted work either. Fluid dynamics has loads of counterintuitive findings, perhaps even more so than QM, e.g., streamlining can increase drag at low Reynolds numbers, increasing speed can decrease drag in certain situations (“drag crisis”). Fluids also has plenty of esoteric concepts; very few people reading the previous sentence likely know what the Reynolds number or drag crisis is.
Physicists, even astrophysicists, know little more about how rockets work than educated laymen. Rocketry is part of aerospace engineering, of which the foundation is fluid dynamics. Maybe rocketry is a counterexample, but I don’t really think so, as there are a lot more people who think rockets are interesting than who know what a de Laval nozzle is. Even that has some counterintuitive effects; the fluid accelerates in the expansion!
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
The best non-mathematical introduction I have seen is Shape and Flow: The Fluid Dynamics of Drag. This book is fairly short; it has 186 pages, but each page is small and there are many pictures. It explains some basic concepts of fluid dynamics like the Reynolds number, what controls drag at low and high Reynolds numbers, why golf balls (or roughened spheres in general) have less drag than smooth spheres at high Reynolds number (this does not imply that roughening always reduces drag; it does not on streamlined bodies as is explained in the book), how drag can decrease as you increase speed in certain cases, how wind tunnels and other similar scale modeling works, etc.
Beyond that, the most popular undergraduate textbook by Munson is quite good. I’d suggest buying an old edition if you want to learn more; the newer editions do not add anything of value to an autodidact. I linked to the fifth edition, which is what I own.
I’ll offer a few possibilities about why fluids is generally seen as less attractive than QM, but I want to be clear that I think these ideas are all very tentative.
This study suggests that in an artificial music market, the popularity charts are only weakly influenced by the quality of the music. (Note that I haven’t read this beyond the abstract.) Social influence had a much stronger effect. One possible application of this idea to different fields is that QM became more attractive for social reasons, e.g., the Matthew effect is likely one reason.
The vast majority of the field of fluid mechanics is based on classical mechanics, i.e., F = m a is one of the fundamental equations used to derive the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe because the field is largely based on classical effects, it’s seen as less interesting. This could be particularly compelling for physicists, as novelty is often valued over everything else.
I’ve also previously mentioned that fluid dynamics is more useful than quantum mechanics, so people who believe useless things are better might find QM more interesting.
There also is the related issue that a wide variety of physical science is lumped into the category “physics” at the high school level, so someone with a particular interest might get the mistaken impression that physics covers everything. I majored in mechanical engineering in college, and basically did it because my father did. My interest even when I was a teenager was fluids, but I hadn’t realized that physicists don’t study the subject in any depth. I was lucky to have picked the right major. I suppose this is a social effect of the type mentioned above.
(Also, to be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that more people do QM than fluids. I actually think the opposite is more likely to be true. I’m saying that QM is “cooler” than fluids.)
Fluid mechanics used to be “cooler” back in the late 1800s. Physicists like Rayleigh and Kelvin both made seminal contributions to the subject, but neither received their Nobel for fluids research. I recall reading that two very famous fluid dynamicists in the early 20th century, Prandtl and Taylor, were recommended for the prize in physics, but neither received it. These two made foundational contributions to physics in the broadest sense of the word. Taylor speculated the lack of Nobels for fluid mechanics was due to how the Nobel prize is rewarded. I also recall reading that there was indications that the committee found the mathematical approximations used to be distasteful even when they were very accurate. Unfortunately those approximations were necessary at the time, and even today we still use approximations, though they are different. Maybe the lack of Nobels contributes to fluids not being as “cool” today.
Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you’re awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical—it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you’ll just like what your friends like or is ‘cool’, but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers—but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who’ve not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It’d be like with Asch’s conformity experiments where participants aren’t even aware that they’re conforming because it’s subconscious, except even worse because it’s subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, “I didn’t learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren’t any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn’t very cool, therefore let’s not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum...”
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and “application is for peasants” type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
Also perhaps worth noting that the effect within the LW subculture in particular may have to do with lots of LW users knowing a lot about ideas or disciplines where there are a lot of popular but wrong positions so they know how not to go astray. Throughout the Sequences, before you figure out how to do it right, you hear about how a bunch of other people have done it wrong: MWI, p-zombies, value theory, evolutionary biology, intellectual subcultures, etc. I don’t know that there are any sexy controversies in fluid mechanics.
Interesting points. There are controversies in fluid mechanics, and they are discussed at great length in the field, but I don’t know of any popular treatments of them.
In particular, there a large number of debates centering around turbulence modeling which actually are extremely relevant to modeling in general. The LES vs. RANS debate is interesting, and while in some sense LES has “won”, this does not mean that LES is entirely satisfactory. A lot of turbulence theory is also quite controversial. I recall reading a fair bit about isotropic turbulence decay in 2012 and I was surprised by the wide variety of results different theoretical and experimental approaches give. Isotropic turbulence decay, by the way, is the among easiest turbulence problems you could devise.
The debate in turbulence about the log law vs. power law is a waste of time, and should be recognized as such. Both basically give you the same result, so which you use is inconsequential. There are some differences in interpretation that I don’t think are important or even remember to be honest.
Thinking about it, things like QM are a fair bit easier to explain than turbulence. To actually explain these things in detail beyond what I’ve mentioned would take a considerable amount of time.
“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.” (Horace Lamb)
Finance is not social science. I think it’s more similar to engineering: you need to have a grasp of the underlying concepts and be able to do the math, but the real world will screw you up on a very regular basis and so you need to be able to deal with that.
Look, it may very well be that social science is low-quality. But your comments in this thread are not at all up to LW standards. You need to cite evidence for your positions and stop calling people names.
I think there may be a self-reinforcing spiral where highly logical people aren’t impressed by social science, leading them to avoid it, leading to social science being unimpressive to highly logical because it’s done by people who aren’t highly logical. But I could be wrong—maybe highly logical people are misperceiving.
It’s not just a self-reinforcing spiral. There is also a driver, namely since social science has more political implications and there is a lot of political control over science funding, social science selects for people willing to reach the “correct” conclusions even if they have to torture logic and the evidence to do so.
Well that’s a self-reinforcing spiral of a different type. In general, I see a number of forces pushing newcomers to a group towards being similar to whoever the folks already in the group are:
Self-segregation. It’s less aversive to interact with people who agree with you and are similar to you, which nudges people towards forming social circles of similar others.
Reputation effects. If Google has a reputation for having great programmers, other great programmers will want to work there so they can have great coworkers.
This is why it took someone like Snowden to expose NSA spying. The NSA was the butt of jokes in the crypto community for probably doing illicit spying long before Snowden… which meant people who cared about civil liberties didn’t apply for jobs there (who wants to work for the evil empire?) (Note: just my guess as someone outside crypto; could be totally wrong on this one.)
Edit: evaporative cooling should probably be considered related to the bullet points above.
You’re assuming that “intelligent” == “logical”. That just ain’t so and especially ain’t so in social sciences.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there’s engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up ‘social science’ and ‘humanities’, then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I’m not very confident in any of my Google results, though—they all looked slightly dodgy—so I’m not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it—not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don’t require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor’s if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn’t conclude that social science is worthless—I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don’t need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one’s mind to do good social science, because you’re doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly “proving” whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you’d produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society’s ability to test for IQ is much better than our society’s ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer,
Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science
It’s not an argument for disregarding social science, but it is an argument to be more sceptical of its claims.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist.
I disagree but let me qualify that. If we define “successful” as “socially successful”, that is, e.g., you have your tenure and your papers are accepted in reasonable peer-reviewed journals, then yes, you do not need high IQ to be be successful social scientist.
However if we define “successful” as “actually advancing the state of human knowledge” then I feel fairly confident in thinking that a high IQ is even more of a necessity for a social scientists than it is for someone who does hard sciences.
Ah, I’m sorry—I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn’t great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it’s just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you’ve gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It’s part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn’t that you don’t need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you’d expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It’s really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you’ve come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It’s really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say “people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)” or “people from lower classes are in the lower class because they’re not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they’re not smart (so we should do nothing)” or “people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn’t teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)”. I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you’ve come up with them… how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There’s not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there’s a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They’re subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education.
Given that teachers who have a masters in education don’t do better than teachers who haven’t, I think there a good case of scrapping the current professors in that fields from their titles.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like “we should scrap Masters programs in education”. But it could also give very good support to “we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education.”
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Very true. We should task them with creating a better program, and if they don’t produce results, we should fire them and find new professors. Just the same as firing any employee who is incapable of doing their job, really.
The thing I disagree with would be if we scrapped the positions and programs entirely; I am entirely on board with the idea of firing the people currently holding the positions and running the programs, and finding new people to hold the positions and run the programs differently. I think that I now understand your position better and you’re advocating the latter, not the former, in which case I entirely agree with you.
There are many different ways to teach knowledge. Academia isn’t the only way.
You could have a education system where teachers don’t go to university to learn how to teach but where they do apprenticeships programs. They sit in the classrooms of experienced teachers and help.
Decrease the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom to allow for time where teachers discuss with their colleagues what works best.
Different people learn in different ways. I’m really good at textbook learning and hate hands on learning (and suspect that is common among introverted intellectual people). Ideally, why not offer both a university course that qualifies you as a teacher and an apprenticeship system that qualifies you as a teacher, and allow prospective teachers to decide which best suits their learning style? We could even do cognitive assessments on the prospective teachers to recommend to them which program would be best for what their strengths seem to be.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
The job of being a teacher is not ideal for introverts. At the core teaching is about social interaction.
You can’t learn charisma through reading textbooks. Textbooks don’t teach you to be a authority in the classroom and get the children to pay attention to what you are saying.
They don’t teach empathy either. Empathy is a strong predictor for success of psychologists in therapy session and likely also useful for teachers.
“Learning styles” are a popular concept but there no good research that suggests that giving different students different training based on learning style is helpful.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
I agree. Get rid of the whole business of giving students grades outside of automatically graded tests to allow a teacher to focus on teaching.
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do.
Unfortunately, what is actually happening is that the politicians and beaurocrats decide which policy they prefer for ideological reasons and then fund social scientists willing to produce “science” to justify the desision.
I’m not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting “evidence-led policy” policies, and I’d hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I’m going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it’s doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn’t by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems.
I’m sure there could be. It’s not an easy problem to solve—after all, right now, there are professors in social sciences, economics, and other subjects who can tell pretty quickly whether or not a given policy is at least vaguely sensible or not. But how often are they listened to?
Also, it’s not always easy to see which option is the best. If Policy A might or might not reduce crime but makes it look like everyone’s trying; Policy B will reduce crime but also reduce civil liberties; Policy C will reduce the amount of crime but increase its potential lethality… then how can one tell which policy is the best?
Having said that… there should be solutions. Your proposed institute is an improvement on the status quo, and would be a good thing to set up in many countries (assuming that they can be funded).
We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up “technocracy” if you want to learn more). That’s how we got into the mess we are in now.
My understanding is that the technocracy movement were more engineers than social scientists, and were not an influential movement anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that scientists are inherently biased, its that if they mention certain hypotheses publicly they will be fired because of journalists.
Incidentally, I know neuro/cognitive scientists at a very left-wing university, and they believed in certain gender/racial cognitive differences, despite ideology.
I think it’s a bit of a shame that society seems to funnel our most intelligent, logical people away from social science. I think social science is frequently much more helpful for society than, say, string theory research.
Note: I do find it plausible that doing STEM in undergrad is a good way to train oneself to think, and the best combo might be a STEM undergrad and a social science grad degree. You could do your undergrad in statistics, since statistics is key to social science, and try to become the next Andrew Gelman.
As advice for others like me, this is good. For me personally it doesn’t work too well; my A level subjects mean that I won’t be able to take a STEM subject at a good university. I can’t do statistics, because I dropped maths last year. The only STEM A level I’m taking is CompSci, and good universities require maths for CompSci degrees. I could probably get into a good degree course for Linguistics, but it isn’t a passionate adoration for linguistics that gets me up in the mornings. I adore human and social sciences.
I don’t plan to be completely devoid of STEM education; the subject I actually want to take is quite hard-science-ish for a social science. If I get in, I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools. It would be pretty cool to do some kind of PhD involving human evolution. From what I’ve seen, if I get onto the course I want to get onto, it’ll teach me a lot of biology and evolutionary psychology and maybe some biochemistry and linguistics.
While archaeology certainly seems fun, do you think it will help you understand how to build a better world?
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No. The problem of building a state out of 10,000 people who’s fasted way of transport is the horse and who have no math is remarkably different from the problem of building a state of tens of millions of people in the age of the internet, cellphones fast airplanes and cars that allow people to travel fast.
The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have the math to even think about running a randomized trial to find out whether a certain policy will work. Studying them doesn’t tell you anything about how to get our current political system to be more open to make policy based on scientific research.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
Most people in political science don’t do it well. I don’t know of a single student body that changed to a new political system in the last decade.
I did study at the Free University of Berlin which has a very interesting political structure that came out of 68′s. At the time there was a rejection of representative democracy and thus even through the government of Berlin wants the student bodies of universities in Berlin to be organised according to representative democracy, out university effectively isn’t. Politics students thought really hard around 68 about how to create a more soviet style democracy and the system is still in operation today.
Compared to designing a system like that today’s politics students are slacking. The aren’t practically oriented.
If you are interested in rationality problems, there the field of decision science. It’s likely more yielding then anthropology. Having a good grasp of academic decision science would be helpful when it comes to designing political systems and likely not enough people in political science deal with that subject.
Are you aware that the American Anthropological Association dropped science from their long-range plan 5 years ago?
Is that the system where everyone can vote, but there’s only one candidate?
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
Reducing elections to a single candidate also wouldn’t fly legally. You can’t just forbid people from being a candidate without producing a legal attack surface.
As I said, it’s actually a complex political system that need smart people to set up.
It’s like British Democracy also happens to “democracy” where there a queen and the prime minister went to Eton and Oxford and wants to introduce barrier on free communication that are is some way more totalitarian than what the Chinese government dares to do.
Democracy always get’s complicated if it comes to the details ;).
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Never mind the word. What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin that you’re referring to? And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
Because Soviets are a central part of how the USSR was organised.
Copying on things were in the USSR wasn’t the point. The point are certain Marxist ideas about the value of Soviets for political organisation.
A system of of soviets, as I said above. There a lot of ideas involved. On the left you had a split between people who believe in social democracy and people who are Marxists. The FU Asta is Marxist.
The people sitting in it are still Marxist even through the majority of the student population of the FU isn’t and they don’t have a problem with that as they don’t believe in representative democracy. They also defend their right to use their printing press to print whatever they want by not disclosing what they are printing. By law they are only allowed to print for university purposes and not for general political activism.
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The problem of studying people in the first villages is not only that their problems don’t map directly to today. It’s also that it’s get’s really hard to get concrete data. It’s much easier to do good science when you have good reliable data.
With 10,000 people you can solve a lot via tribal bonds and clans. Families stick together. You can also do a bit of religion and everyone follows the wise local priest. Those solutions don’t scale well.
You are likely becoming like the people that surround you when you go into university. You also build relationships with them.
Going to Cambridge is good. Cambridge draws a lot of intelligent people together and also provides you with very useful contacts for a political career. On the other hand that means that you have to go to those place in Cambridge where the relevant people are. Find out which professors at Cambridge actually do good social science. Then go to their classes.
Just make sure that you don’t get lost and go on a career of digging up old stuff and not affecting the real world. A lot of smart people get lost in programs like that. It’s like smart people who get lost in theoretical physics.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
I agree wholeheartedly. A field like theoretical physics is much more glamorous to large number of intelligent people. I think it’s partly signaling, but I’m not sure that explains everything.
What makes the least sense to me are people who seem to believe (or even explicitly confirm!) that they are only interested in things which have no applications. Especially when these people seem to disparage others who work in applied fields. I imagine this teasing might explain a bit of why so many smart people work in less helpful fields.
I think to an extent, physics is more intellectually satisfying to a lot of smart people. It’s much easier to prove things for definite in maths and physics. You can take a test and get right answers, and be sure of your right answers, so when you’re sufficiently smart it feels like a lot of fun to go around proving things and being sure of yourself. It feels much less satisfying to debate about which economics theories might be better.
Knowing proven facts about high level physics makes you feel like an initiate into the inner circles of secret powerful knowledge, knowing a bunch about different theories of politics (especially at first) just makes you feel confused. So if you’re really smart, ‘hard’ sciences can feel more fun. I know I certainly enjoy learning computer science and feeling the rush of vague superiority when I fix someone’s computer for them (and the rush of triumph when my code finally compiles). When I attempt to fix people’s sociological opinions for them, there’s no rush of vague superiority, just a feeling of intense frustration and a deeply felt desire to bang my head against the wall.
Then there’s the Ancient Greek cultural thing where sitting around thinking very hard is obviously superior to going out and doing things—cool people sit inside their mansions and think, leaving your house and mucking around in the real world actually doing things is for peasants—which has somehow survived to this day. The real world is dirty and messy and contains annoying things that mess up your beautiful neat theories. Making a beautiful theory of how mechanics works is very satisfying. Trying to actually use the theory to build a bridge when you have budget constraints and a really big river is frustrating. Trying to apply our built up knowledge about small things (molecules) to bigger things (cells) to even bigger things (brains) to REALLY BIG AND COMPLICATED things (lots and lots of brains together, eg a society) is really intensely frustrating. And the intense frustration and higher difficulty (more difficult to do it right, anyway) means there’s more failure and less conclusive results / slower progress, which leads some people to write off social science as a whole. The rewarding rush of success when your beautifully engineered bridge looks shiny and finished is not something you really get in the social sciences, because it will be a very long time before someone feels the rewarding rush of success that their beautiful preference-satisfying society is shiny and perfect.
I do think that the natural sciences are hopelessly lost without the social sciences, but for most super-clever people, is studying natural science more fun than doing social science? Definitely—I mean, while the politics students are busy reading books and banging their heads against walls and yelling at each other, physics students are putting liquid nitrogen in barrels of ping pong balls so that the whole thing explodes! (I loved chemistry in secondary school for years, right up until I finally caught on that coloured flames were the closest we were going to get to scorching our eyebrows off. Something about health and safety, thirteen year olds, and fire. I wish I hadn’t stopped loving chemistry, because I hear once you’re at university they do actually let you set things on fire sometimes.)
I don’t think that something being (more) mathematically rigorous explains all of what we see. Physicists at one time used to study fluid dynamics. Rayleigh, Kelvin, Stokes, Heisenberg, etc., all have published in the field. You can do quite a lot mathematically in fluids, and I have felt like part of some inner circle because of what I know about fluid dynamics.
Now the field has been basically displaced by quantum mechanics, and it’s usually not considered part of “physics” in some sense, and is less popular than I think you might expect if a subject being amenable to mathematical treatment is attractive to some folks. Physicists are generally taught only the most basic concepts in the field. My impression is that the majority of physics undergrads couldn’t identify the Navier-Stokes equations, which are the most basic equations for the movement of a fluid.
It could also be that fluids have obvious practical applications (aerodynamics, energy, etc.) and this makes the subject distasteful to pedants. That’s just speculation, however. I’m really not sure why fields like physics, etc., are so attractive to some people, though I think you’ve identified parts of it.
You do make a good point about the sense of completion being different in engineering vs. social science. I suppose the closest you could get in social science is developing some successful self-help book or changing public policy in a good way, but I think these are much harder than building things.
I think there’s also definitely a prestige/coolness factor which isn’t correlated with difficulty, applicability, or usefulness of the field.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL and saying you understand it whilst sliding your glasses down your nose makes you into Supergeek. Saying “I understand how wet stuff splashes” is not really so… high status. It’s the same thing that makes astrophysics higher status than microbiology even though the latter is probably more useful and saves more lives / helps more people—rockets spew fire and go to the moon, bacteria cells in a petri dish are just kind of icky and slimy. I am quite certain that, if you are smart enough to go for any field you want, there is a definite motivation / social pressure to select a “cool” subject involving rockets and quarks and lasers, rather than a less cool subject involving water and cells or… god forbid… political arguments.
And, hmm, actually, not quite true on the last point—a social scientist could develop an intervention program, like a youth education program, that decreases crime or increases youth achievement/engagement, and it would probably feel awesome and warm and fuzzy to talk to the youths whose lives were improved by it. So you could certainly get closer than “developing some successful self-help book”. It is certainly harder, though, I think, and there’s certainly a higher rate of failure for crime-preventing youth education programs than for modern bridge-building efforts.
To be honest, I found QM to be the least interesting subject of all physics which I’ve learned about.
Also, I don’t think the features you highlighted work either. Fluid dynamics has loads of counterintuitive findings, perhaps even more so than QM, e.g., streamlining can increase drag at low Reynolds numbers, increasing speed can decrease drag in certain situations (“drag crisis”). Fluids also has plenty of esoteric concepts; very few people reading the previous sentence likely know what the Reynolds number or drag crisis is.
Physicists, even astrophysicists, know little more about how rockets work than educated laymen. Rocketry is part of aerospace engineering, of which the foundation is fluid dynamics. Maybe rocketry is a counterexample, but I don’t really think so, as there are a lot more people who think rockets are interesting than who know what a de Laval nozzle is. Even that has some counterintuitive effects; the fluid accelerates in the expansion!
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
The best non-mathematical introduction I have seen is Shape and Flow: The Fluid Dynamics of Drag. This book is fairly short; it has 186 pages, but each page is small and there are many pictures. It explains some basic concepts of fluid dynamics like the Reynolds number, what controls drag at low and high Reynolds numbers, why golf balls (or roughened spheres in general) have less drag than smooth spheres at high Reynolds number (this does not imply that roughening always reduces drag; it does not on streamlined bodies as is explained in the book), how drag can decrease as you increase speed in certain cases, how wind tunnels and other similar scale modeling works, etc.
You could also watch this series of videos on drag. They were made by the same person who wrote Shape and Drag. There is also a related collection of videos on other topics in fluid dynamics.
Beyond that, the most popular undergraduate textbook by Munson is quite good. I’d suggest buying an old edition if you want to learn more; the newer editions do not add anything of value to an autodidact. I linked to the fifth edition, which is what I own.
I’ll offer a few possibilities about why fluids is generally seen as less attractive than QM, but I want to be clear that I think these ideas are all very tentative.
This study suggests that in an artificial music market, the popularity charts are only weakly influenced by the quality of the music. (Note that I haven’t read this beyond the abstract.) Social influence had a much stronger effect. One possible application of this idea to different fields is that QM became more attractive for social reasons, e.g., the Matthew effect is likely one reason.
The vast majority of the field of fluid mechanics is based on classical mechanics, i.e., F = m a is one of the fundamental equations used to derive the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe because the field is largely based on classical effects, it’s seen as less interesting. This could be particularly compelling for physicists, as novelty is often valued over everything else.
I’ve also previously mentioned that fluid dynamics is more useful than quantum mechanics, so people who believe useless things are better might find QM more interesting.
There also is the related issue that a wide variety of physical science is lumped into the category “physics” at the high school level, so someone with a particular interest might get the mistaken impression that physics covers everything. I majored in mechanical engineering in college, and basically did it because my father did. My interest even when I was a teenager was fluids, but I hadn’t realized that physicists don’t study the subject in any depth. I was lucky to have picked the right major. I suppose this is a social effect of the type mentioned above.
(Also, to be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that more people do QM than fluids. I actually think the opposite is more likely to be true. I’m saying that QM is “cooler” than fluids.)
Fluid mechanics used to be “cooler” back in the late 1800s. Physicists like Rayleigh and Kelvin both made seminal contributions to the subject, but neither received their Nobel for fluids research. I recall reading that two very famous fluid dynamicists in the early 20th century, Prandtl and Taylor, were recommended for the prize in physics, but neither received it. These two made foundational contributions to physics in the broadest sense of the word. Taylor speculated the lack of Nobels for fluid mechanics was due to how the Nobel prize is rewarded. I also recall reading that there was indications that the committee found the mathematical approximations used to be distasteful even when they were very accurate. Unfortunately those approximations were necessary at the time, and even today we still use approximations, though they are different. Maybe the lack of Nobels contributes to fluids not being as “cool” today.
Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you’re awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical—it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you’ll just like what your friends like or is ‘cool’, but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers—but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who’ve not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It’d be like with Asch’s conformity experiments where participants aren’t even aware that they’re conforming because it’s subconscious, except even worse because it’s subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, “I didn’t learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren’t any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn’t very cool, therefore let’s not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum...”
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and “application is for peasants” type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
Also perhaps worth noting that the effect within the LW subculture in particular may have to do with lots of LW users knowing a lot about ideas or disciplines where there are a lot of popular but wrong positions so they know how not to go astray. Throughout the Sequences, before you figure out how to do it right, you hear about how a bunch of other people have done it wrong: MWI, p-zombies, value theory, evolutionary biology, intellectual subcultures, etc. I don’t know that there are any sexy controversies in fluid mechanics.
Interesting points. There are controversies in fluid mechanics, and they are discussed at great length in the field, but I don’t know of any popular treatments of them.
In particular, there a large number of debates centering around turbulence modeling which actually are extremely relevant to modeling in general. The LES vs. RANS debate is interesting, and while in some sense LES has “won”, this does not mean that LES is entirely satisfactory. A lot of turbulence theory is also quite controversial. I recall reading a fair bit about isotropic turbulence decay in 2012 and I was surprised by the wide variety of results different theoretical and experimental approaches give. Isotropic turbulence decay, by the way, is the among easiest turbulence problems you could devise.
The debate in turbulence about the log law vs. power law is a waste of time, and should be recognized as such. Both basically give you the same result, so which you use is inconsequential. There are some differences in interpretation that I don’t think are important or even remember to be honest.
Thinking about it, things like QM are a fair bit easier to explain than turbulence. To actually explain these things in detail beyond what I’ve mentioned would take a considerable amount of time.
“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.” (Horace Lamb)
(Indeed, today quantum electrodynamics makes correct predictions within one part per billion and fluid dynamics has an open million-dollar question.)
If you consider finance a subset of social science then the U.S. puts a lot of its best and brightest there.
Hedge funds do manage to employ the best and brightest, on the other hand I’m not sure whether the same is true for the academic subject of finance.
Finance is not social science. I think it’s more similar to engineering: you need to have a grasp of the underlying concepts and be able to do the math, but the real world will screw you up on a very regular basis and so you need to be able to deal with that.
Behavioral finance is supposedly a big thing.
Taking psychology into consideration doesn’t make finance a social science any more than sociological factors make civil engineering a social science.
The bigger shame is the kind of BS that passes for humanities/social science these days.
Is that a fact? I’ve seen social scientists complain that social science is trying too hard to emulate the hard science.
Yes, most social science is cargo cult science. That’s perfectly consistent with it being BS.
Look, it may very well be that social science is low-quality. But your comments in this thread are not at all up to LW standards. You need to cite evidence for your positions and stop calling people names.
Well, to be pedantic he’s called social sciences names but AFAICT he hasn’t called social scientists names.
I think there may be a self-reinforcing spiral where highly logical people aren’t impressed by social science, leading them to avoid it, leading to social science being unimpressive to highly logical because it’s done by people who aren’t highly logical. But I could be wrong—maybe highly logical people are misperceiving.
It’s not just a self-reinforcing spiral. There is also a driver, namely since social science has more political implications and there is a lot of political control over science funding, social science selects for people willing to reach the “correct” conclusions even if they have to torture logic and the evidence to do so.
Well that’s a self-reinforcing spiral of a different type. In general, I see a number of forces pushing newcomers to a group towards being similar to whoever the folks already in the group are:
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, insofar as it’s accurate.
Self-segregation. It’s less aversive to interact with people who agree with you and are similar to you, which nudges people towards forming social circles of similar others.
Reputation effects. If Google has a reputation for having great programmers, other great programmers will want to work there so they can have great coworkers.
This is why it took someone like Snowden to expose NSA spying. The NSA was the butt of jokes in the crypto community for probably doing illicit spying long before Snowden… which meant people who cared about civil liberties didn’t apply for jobs there (who wants to work for the evil empire?) (Note: just my guess as someone outside crypto; could be totally wrong on this one.)
Edit: evaporative cooling should probably be considered related to the bullet points above.
You’re assuming that “intelligent” == “logical”. That just ain’t so and especially ain’t so in social sciences.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Is there data about the average IQ of PHD’s or professors in the social sciences?
I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there’s engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up ‘social science’ and ‘humanities’, then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I’m not very confident in any of my Google results, though—they all looked slightly dodgy—so I’m not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it—not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don’t require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor’s if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn’t conclude that social science is worthless—I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don’t need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one’s mind to do good social science, because you’re doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly “proving” whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you’d produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society’s ability to test for IQ is much better than our society’s ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
That might actually have been a problem once. Apparently the Pythagoreans had serious problems with irrational numbers...
And current mathematician have them with infinitesimally small numbers ;)
Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.
I don’t think modern mathematicians are going to drown someone for using infinitesimally small numbers...
Non-standard analysis is perfectly fine. Most mathematicians just don’t deal with that kind of analysis.
It’s not an argument for disregarding social science, but it is an argument to be more sceptical of its claims.
I disagree but let me qualify that. If we define “successful” as “socially successful”, that is, e.g., you have your tenure and your papers are accepted in reasonable peer-reviewed journals, then yes, you do not need high IQ to be be successful social scientist.
However if we define “successful” as “actually advancing the state of human knowledge” then I feel fairly confident in thinking that a high IQ is even more of a necessity for a social scientists than it is for someone who does hard sciences.
As you pointed out yourself , hard sciences are easier :-)
Ah, I’m sorry—I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn’t great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it’s just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you’ve gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It’s part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn’t that you don’t need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you’d expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It’s really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you’ve come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It’s really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say “people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)” or “people from lower classes are in the lower class because they’re not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they’re not smart (so we should do nothing)” or “people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn’t teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)”. I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you’ve come up with them… how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There’s not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there’s a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They’re subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
Given that teachers who have a masters in education don’t do better than teachers who haven’t, I think there a good case of scrapping the current professors in that fields from their titles.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like “we should scrap Masters programs in education”. But it could also give very good support to “we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education.”
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Who’s responsible for creating such a program? The current professors. Given that they don’t do so, we need different people.
Very true. We should task them with creating a better program, and if they don’t produce results, we should fire them and find new professors. Just the same as firing any employee who is incapable of doing their job, really.
The thing I disagree with would be if we scrapped the positions and programs entirely; I am entirely on board with the idea of firing the people currently holding the positions and running the programs, and finding new people to hold the positions and run the programs differently. I think that I now understand your position better and you’re advocating the latter, not the former, in which case I entirely agree with you.
There are many different ways to teach knowledge. Academia isn’t the only way. You could have a education system where teachers don’t go to university to learn how to teach but where they do apprenticeships programs. They sit in the classrooms of experienced teachers and help.
Decrease the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom to allow for time where teachers discuss with their colleagues what works best.
Different people learn in different ways. I’m really good at textbook learning and hate hands on learning (and suspect that is common among introverted intellectual people). Ideally, why not offer both a university course that qualifies you as a teacher and an apprenticeship system that qualifies you as a teacher, and allow prospective teachers to decide which best suits their learning style? We could even do cognitive assessments on the prospective teachers to recommend to them which program would be best for what their strengths seem to be.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
The job of being a teacher is not ideal for introverts. At the core teaching is about social interaction.
You can’t learn charisma through reading textbooks. Textbooks don’t teach you to be a authority in the classroom and get the children to pay attention to what you are saying.
They don’t teach empathy either. Empathy is a strong predictor for success of psychologists in therapy session and likely also useful for teachers.
“Learning styles” are a popular concept but there no good research that suggests that giving different students different training based on learning style is helpful.
I agree. Get rid of the whole business of giving students grades outside of automatically graded tests to allow a teacher to focus on teaching.
Unfortunately, what is actually happening is that the politicians and beaurocrats decide which policy they prefer for ideological reasons and then fund social scientists willing to produce “science” to justify the desision.
I’m not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting “evidence-led policy” policies, and I’d hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I’m going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it’s doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn’t by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
Yes; you’ll get some politicians who actually want to reduce the crime rate and are willing to look for advice on how to do that effectively.
They’re hard to spot, because all politicians want to look like that sort of politician, leaving the genuine ones hidden in a crowd of lookalikes...
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
I’m sure there could be. It’s not an easy problem to solve—after all, right now, there are professors in social sciences, economics, and other subjects who can tell pretty quickly whether or not a given policy is at least vaguely sensible or not. But how often are they listened to?
Also, it’s not always easy to see which option is the best. If Policy A might or might not reduce crime but makes it look like everyone’s trying; Policy B will reduce crime but also reduce civil liberties; Policy C will reduce the amount of crime but increase its potential lethality… then how can one tell which policy is the best?
Having said that… there should be solutions. Your proposed institute is an improvement on the status quo, and would be a good thing to set up in many countries (assuming that they can be funded).
People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up “technocracy” if you want to learn more). That’s how we got into the mess we are in now.
My understanding is that the technocracy movement were more engineers than social scientists, and were not an influential movement anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that scientists are inherently biased, its that if they mention certain hypotheses publicly they will be fired because of journalists.
Incidentally, I know neuro/cognitive scientists at a very left-wing university, and they believed in certain gender/racial cognitive differences, despite ideology.
The mess where we’re wealthier, living longer, etc?
The mess that what passes for “social science” is a bunch of BS.