On priors, it would be incredibly surprising to me if the best introduction to learning how to think about society did not include any of the progress we’ve made in fields like microeconomics and statistics (which only reached maturity in the last 100 years or so), or even simply empiricism and quantitative thinking (which only reached maturity in the last 500 years or so).
I believe there has been an absolutely outstanding amount of genuine conceptual and distillation progress in understanding society since Ancient Greece.
Another part of my experience feeding into this prior is that my undergrad was in philosophy at Oxford, and some professors really liked deeply studying ancient originals and criticising translations. In my experience this mostly didn’t correlate with a productive or healthy epistemic culture.
On priors, it would be incredibly surprising to me if the best introduction to learning how to think about society did not include any of the progress we’ve made in fields like microeconomics and statistics (which only reached maturity in the last 100 years or so), or even simply empiricism and quantitative thinking (which only reached maturity in the last 500 years or so).
I think that while there’s truth in what you say, nevertheless you are (by implication) lumping together things which do not, in any classification system of ideas (rather than a historical or sociological classification of how those ideas arose, developed, and are used today), really belong together.
For example, I have long believed that the gap in understanding of the world between someone who can (and habitually does) think in terms of distributions, and someone who does not, is vast. I am not a historian of mathematics, so I am unsure when frequency distributions or probability distributions were first described, but what little I can find on the matter suggests that this is a historically semi-recent idea. So in that sense, I agree with you: any introduction to learning how to think about society that doesn’t include the concept of distributions, could not be taken seriously as a candidate for the title of “best” such material. (Correlation—and measures thereof, such as Pearson’s r—is a similarly important idea.)
Yet if you pick up a textbook on statistics, how much of the material therein will consist simply of getting across these two ideas? And how much will be devoted to statistical techniques of a sort for which the marginal benefit of knowing that specific concept, or specific mathematical technique, is vastly lower than the marginal benefit of greatly improving one’s understanding of historical and social/economic/political patterns? (For example, what would be more valuable, toward understanding the world: knowing how and why wars are fought, or familiarity with Student’s t-test?)
And a similar point can be made for microeconomics…
Instead of Clausewitz’s On War, you might read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
As far as understanding concept behind modern statistics Keith E. Stanovich’s How to Think Straight About Psychology. It also discusses other important ideas such as operationalization.
[Epistemic status: this comment is much less clear in elucidating the inputs rather than outputs of my thinking than I would have preferred, but I share it written roughly rather than not at all.]
On priors, it would be incredibly surprising to me if the best introduction to learning how to think about society did not include any of the progress we’ve made in fields like microeconomics and statistics (which only reached maturity in the last 100 years or so), or even simply empiricism and quantitative thinking (which only reached maturity in the last 500 years or so).
I believe there has been an absolutely outstanding amount of genuine conceptual and distillation progress in understanding society since Ancient Greece.
Another part of my experience feeding into this prior is that my undergrad was in philosophy at Oxford, and some professors really liked deeply studying ancient originals and criticising translations. In my experience this mostly didn’t correlate with a productive or healthy epistemic culture.
I think that while there’s truth in what you say, nevertheless you are (by implication) lumping together things which do not, in any classification system of ideas (rather than a historical or sociological classification of how those ideas arose, developed, and are used today), really belong together.
For example, I have long believed that the gap in understanding of the world between someone who can (and habitually does) think in terms of distributions, and someone who does not, is vast. I am not a historian of mathematics, so I am unsure when frequency distributions or probability distributions were first described, but what little I can find on the matter suggests that this is a historically semi-recent idea. So in that sense, I agree with you: any introduction to learning how to think about society that doesn’t include the concept of distributions, could not be taken seriously as a candidate for the title of “best” such material. (Correlation—and measures thereof, such as Pearson’s r—is a similarly important idea.)
Yet if you pick up a textbook on statistics, how much of the material therein will consist simply of getting across these two ideas? And how much will be devoted to statistical techniques of a sort for which the marginal benefit of knowing that specific concept, or specific mathematical technique, is vastly lower than the marginal benefit of greatly improving one’s understanding of historical and social/economic/political patterns? (For example, what would be more valuable, toward understanding the world: knowing how and why wars are fought, or familiarity with Student’s t-test?)
And a similar point can be made for microeconomics…
Instead of Clausewitz’s On War, you might read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
As far as understanding concept behind modern statistics Keith E. Stanovich’s How to Think Straight About Psychology. It also discusses other important ideas such as operationalization.