Although the social sciences have undeniably helped a lot with our understanding of ourselves, their refusal to follow the scientific method is disgraceful.
As a social scientist (who spends a LOT of time and effort developing rigorous methodology in keeping with the scientific method), I find your dismissal of my entire academic superfield disgraceful. Perhaps you’ve confused social science with punditry?
Computational Social Science (which is extremely methodology-oriented). I was trained in Political Science, but the lines between the social sciences are pretty fuzzy. I do substantive work which could be called Political Science, Sociology, or Economics.
The definitions that I found are very wide and very fuzzy, and, essentially, boil down to “social science but with computers!”. Is it, basically, statistics (which nowadays is often called by the fancier name of “data science”)?
I doubt you can find a widely-acceptable definition of Data Science which is any less fuzzy. Computational Social Science (CSS) is a subset of Data Science. Take Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn Diagram: If your Substantive Expertise is a Social Science, you’re doing Computational Social Science.
Statistics is an important tool in CSS, but it doesn’t cover the other types of modeling we do: Agent-Based, System Dynamic, and Algorithmic Game Theoretic to name a few.
Computational Social Science (CSS) is a subset of Data Science.
Ah, I see, so you’re coming from that direction.
But let me ask a different question—in what kind of business you’re in? Are you in the business of making predictions? in the business of constructing explanations of how the world works? in the business of coming up with ways to manipulate the world to achieve desired ends?
Nope! Not to say that an intervention proposed by a computational social model has never influenced policy in real life—I just don’t know of any examples. That said, I’m workin’ on it.
Perhaps you were exposed to better education. In Latin American universities, the humanities are plagued with antipositivism. If you’ve managed to stay away from it, kudos to you.
Oof. You just trampled one of my pet peeves: Social Science is a subset of the Sciences, not the Humanities.
There’s still a persistent anti-positivist streak in the Humanities in the US, but mostly positivism has just been irrelevant to the work of Humanities scholars (though this is changing in some interesting and exciting ways).
More importantly, the social sciences in the US are overwhelming positivist, even amongst researchers whose work is not strictly empirical. I wish I could take credit for those good influences, but I think you’re probably the one deserving of kudos for managing to become a rationalist in such a hostile environment.
When I said humanities I didn’t mean social sciences; in fact, I thought social sciences explicitly followed the scientific method. Maybe the word points to something different in your head, or you slipped up. Either way, when I say humanities, I actually mean fields like philosophy and literature and sociology which go around talking about things by taking the human mind as a primitive.
The whole point of the humanities is that it’s a way of doing things that isn’t the scientific method. The disgraceful thing is the refusal to interface properly with scientists and scientific things—but there’s no shortage of scientists who refuse to interface with humanities either, when you come down to it. My head’s canonical example is Indian geneticists who try to go around finding genetic caste differences; Romila Thapar once gave an entertaining rant about how anything they found they’d be reading noise as signal because the history of caste was nothing like these people imagined.
And, on the other hand, we have many Rortys and Bostroms and Thapars in the humanities who do interface.
a) Actually Thapar’s point wasn’t that there were no genetic differences (in fact, the theory of caste promulgated by Dalit activists is that it’s created by the prohibition of inter-caste marriage and therefore pretty much predicts genetic differences) - but that the groupings done by the researchers wasn’t the correct one.
b) I should actually check that what I surmised is what she said. Thanks for alerting me to the possibility.
Actually Thapar’s point wasn’t that there were no genetic differences (in fact, the theory of caste promulgated by Dalit activists is that it’s created by the prohibition of inter-caste marriage and therefore pretty much predicts genetic differences) - but that the groupings done by the researchers wasn’t the correct one.
So do you have independent evidence that the theory promulgated by the Dalit activists is correct, because theories promulgated by activists don’t exactly have the best track record.
Actually, with the caveat that I don’t have any object-level research, I doubt it; they assign a rigidity to the whole thing that seems hard to institute. My point was that ‘do there exist genetic differences’ is not the issue here.
So, Romila Thapar is not a Dalit activist, just a historian (I’m guessing this is a source of confusion; I could be wrong).
I’m saying they should have read up before starting their project.
I can’t find the study for some reason, so I’ll try and do it from memory. They randomly picked from a city Dalits (Dalit is a catch-all term coined by B R Ambedkar for people of the lowest castes, and people outside the caste system, all of whom were treated horribly) and people from the merchant castes to look for genetic differences. Which is all fine and dandy—but for the fact that neither ‘Dalit’ not ‘merchant-caste’ is an actual caste; there are many castes which come into those two categories. So, assuming a simple no-inter-caste-marriage model of caste, a merchant family from village A thousands of kilometres from village B has about as much (or, considering marginal things like babies born out of rape, even less) genetic material in common than a merchant and Dalit family from the same village—unless there’s a common genetic ancestor to all merchant families. And that’s where reading historical literature comes in—the history of caste is much more complicated, involving for example periods when it was barely enforced and shuffling and all sorts of stuff. So, they will find differences in their study, but it won’t reflect actual caste differences.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Humanities is not only an useful method of knowing about the world—but, properly interfaced, ought to be able to significantly speed up science.
(I have a large interval for how controversial this is, so pardon me if you think it’s not.)
Do you mean humanities in the abstract or the people currently occupying humanities departments?
In the abstract. Though, undoubtedly, many of the people can do wonders too.
Although the social sciences have undeniably helped a lot with our understanding of ourselves, their refusal to follow the scientific method is disgraceful.
As a social scientist (who spends a LOT of time and effort developing rigorous methodology in keeping with the scientific method), I find your dismissal of my entire academic superfield disgraceful. Perhaps you’ve confused social science with punditry?
What kind of social science do you do?
Computational Social Science (which is extremely methodology-oriented). I was trained in Political Science, but the lines between the social sciences are pretty fuzzy. I do substantive work which could be called Political Science, Sociology, or Economics.
The definitions that I found are very wide and very fuzzy, and, essentially, boil down to “social science but with computers!”. Is it, basically, statistics (which nowadays is often called by the fancier name of “data science”)?
I doubt you can find a widely-acceptable definition of Data Science which is any less fuzzy. Computational Social Science (CSS) is a subset of Data Science. Take Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn Diagram: If your Substantive Expertise is a Social Science, you’re doing Computational Social Science.
Statistics is an important tool in CSS, but it doesn’t cover the other types of modeling we do: Agent-Based, System Dynamic, and Algorithmic Game Theoretic to name a few.
Ah, I see, so you’re coming from that direction.
But let me ask a different question—in what kind of business you’re in? Are you in the business of making predictions? in the business of constructing explanations of how the world works? in the business of coming up with ways to manipulate the world to achieve desired ends?
I’m in the business of modeling. I do all three of those tasks, but the emphasis is definitely on the last.
Could you give examples of successful interventions that you field has come up with, that wouldn’t otherwise have been put into practice?
Nope! Not to say that an intervention proposed by a computational social model has never influenced policy in real life—I just don’t know of any examples. That said, I’m workin’ on it.
Perhaps you were exposed to better education. In Latin American universities, the humanities are plagued with antipositivism. If you’ve managed to stay away from it, kudos to you.
Oof. You just trampled one of my pet peeves: Social Science is a subset of the Sciences, not the Humanities.
There’s still a persistent anti-positivist streak in the Humanities in the US, but mostly positivism has just been irrelevant to the work of Humanities scholars (though this is changing in some interesting and exciting ways).
More importantly, the social sciences in the US are overwhelming positivist, even amongst researchers whose work is not strictly empirical. I wish I could take credit for those good influences, but I think you’re probably the one deserving of kudos for managing to become a rationalist in such a hostile environment.
When I said humanities I didn’t mean social sciences; in fact, I thought social sciences explicitly followed the scientific method. Maybe the word points to something different in your head, or you slipped up. Either way, when I say humanities, I actually mean fields like philosophy and literature and sociology which go around talking about things by taking the human mind as a primitive.
The whole point of the humanities is that it’s a way of doing things that isn’t the scientific method. The disgraceful thing is the refusal to interface properly with scientists and scientific things—but there’s no shortage of scientists who refuse to interface with humanities either, when you come down to it. My head’s canonical example is Indian geneticists who try to go around finding genetic caste differences; Romila Thapar once gave an entertaining rant about how anything they found they’d be reading noise as signal because the history of caste was nothing like these people imagined.
And, on the other hand, we have many Rortys and Bostroms and Thapars in the humanities who do interface.
Funny humanities people were saying the same thing about genetic racial differences until said difference started showing up.
a) Actually Thapar’s point wasn’t that there were no genetic differences (in fact, the theory of caste promulgated by Dalit activists is that it’s created by the prohibition of inter-caste marriage and therefore pretty much predicts genetic differences) - but that the groupings done by the researchers wasn’t the correct one.
b) I should actually check that what I surmised is what she said. Thanks for alerting me to the possibility.
So do you have independent evidence that the theory promulgated by the Dalit activists is correct, because theories promulgated by activists don’t exactly have the best track record.
Actually, with the caveat that I don’t have any object-level research, I doubt it; they assign a rigidity to the whole thing that seems hard to institute. My point was that ‘do there exist genetic differences’ is not the issue here.
So what is the issue, that geneticists didn’t consult with Dalit activists before designing their experiment?
So, Romila Thapar is not a Dalit activist, just a historian (I’m guessing this is a source of confusion; I could be wrong).
I’m saying they should have read up before starting their project.
I can’t find the study for some reason, so I’ll try and do it from memory. They randomly picked from a city Dalits (Dalit is a catch-all term coined by B R Ambedkar for people of the lowest castes, and people outside the caste system, all of whom were treated horribly) and people from the merchant castes to look for genetic differences. Which is all fine and dandy—but for the fact that neither ‘Dalit’ not ‘merchant-caste’ is an actual caste; there are many castes which come into those two categories. So, assuming a simple no-inter-caste-marriage model of caste, a merchant family from village A thousands of kilometres from village B has about as much (or, considering marginal things like babies born out of rape, even less) genetic material in common than a merchant and Dalit family from the same village—unless there’s a common genetic ancestor to all merchant families. And that’s where reading historical literature comes in—the history of caste is much more complicated, involving for example periods when it was barely enforced and shuffling and all sorts of stuff. So, they will find differences in their study, but it won’t reflect actual caste differences.
The problem is that they’re trying to study areas where it’s really hard to get enough scientific evidence.