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Andrew Gelman weighs in on whether or not social scientists “know things”, in response to Robin Hanson’s statement that indeed they do. I have no real comment, except to say that I’m moderately pleased to see that he classifies biology as a field that gets shit done.
(Republished from GNXP.com by permission of author or representative)
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• Category: Science
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hah, i was going to blog (link) that exchange.
also,
We’re not in a war economy and people do all sorts of things that are less useful than the development of effective pesticides, high-grade plastics, etc. etc. To compare social science with physical/biological sciences and engineering is like saying to somebody, “Why do you repair lawnmowers? You should be a paramedic, that would save more lives!”
regarding use…i’m not sure that social science isn’t useful, or at least doesn’t add value. the key to me is beating expectation. because of all the noise social science won’t ever get as precise as physical science. due to the inability to do things like experiment directly on large numbers of people in any way you want to for indefinite periods there are some deficits in relation to some branches of biological science (consider ethologists who want to study chicken behavior). but, beating random expectation or exceeding knowledge through pure intuition can be very useful in a comparative sense. though i think applied social science has only modest utility in improving total human happiness, i think it can really do well in increasing relative human happiness (that is, you know how to “game” other people now).
to give an extreme example, i know that a number of GNXP-style ubernerds actually benefit from reading psychology. true, it’s stuff most people already know…but many of us are social retards and it helps us close the gap with normals.
but many of us are social retards and it helps us close the gap with normals.
How true- ubernerds just dont intuit things very well I suspect, they need a generalizable theory to apply, prove, disprove, or modify. does that make us them part of the asperger spectrum????
does that make us them part of the asperger spectrum????
yeah, i think so. i’m pretty extroverted and have never been an outcast, but i “get” people a lot more after reading a fair amount of psychology. in hindsight it is clearly obvious stuff to most people, but a lot of it is enlightening to me 😉 i still don’t think like other people, but i have a much better sense of how other people think (in rough descriptive terms, if not viscerally).
by the way, what about stuff like comparative advantage in economics? i am open to the idea that it can make individual nations (or the average in nations) poorer, but it seems clear that it increases total human utility, right? does the death penalty deter crime? and so on. social science often doesn’t give clear answers of high confidence, but some of these questions are pretty important and i think it is useful to at least make decisions on more than blind/gut guesses. when the fate of nations hang in the balance certitude on the margins are nothing to sniff at IMO.
here’s a though. stuff like ‘better living through chemistry’ expresses the reality that a lot of natural science has immediate & personally concrete applications. but if economists advise the gov. toward a more rational monetary policy then i think it is pretty useful, but in a more diffuse manner that the public can’t/won’t appreciate. similarly, if biologists figure out the equilibrium amount of antibiotic usage which reduces disease while at the same time preventing the rise too many super-resistant strains, i don’t think most people will think about how great mathematical biology is making their lives. but i think it’s obviously practical & relevant to our lives.
here’s another problem: compared to math or physics or chemistry most humans are social geniuses. that makes it harder to impress, and people are more likely to trust their intuition than what social scientists tell them (this is a big tendency in free trade for example, where people see the negatives [job loss] in a concrete manner, but don’t see the positives [e.g., cheaper goods] in so directly).
I wonder if there is a fitness cost to the ubernerd/social retard phenomenon. Perhaps the ubernerd tail of the distribution is continually clipped because the social retard factor is selected against (i.e. the fitness cost is due to the social retard factor and not the ubernerd factor). …no doubt some ubernerd has written a paper about this, and some other ubernerd has read it and can provide us with the reference. …and meanwhile the rest of the world is off getting laid while we ponder the phenomenon.
…and is there a subnerd/social genius tail? Britney Spears? …are they clipped too. Spears seems fecund, but her offspring don’t seem to stand much of a chance. Interestingly, it is probably the subnerd factor rather than the social genius factor clipping fitness at this end of the distribution.
Social scientists know a lot of facts, and they have come up with some useful concepts, such as marginal utility (Jevons) and conspicuous consumption (Veblen). But there is very little in the way of non-trivial, empirically tested social theory. This may be because human behaviour is very complicated, or it may be because social scientists have (mostly) held false assumptions about human nature. (E.g. the ‘blank slate’.)
Wake up, people. Added value? Useful? Our financial markets are riddled with (and in some cases based entirely on) implementations of theories (like Black-Scholes) devised by social scientists. They are as quantitative as any physical theory — in fact, if you want to learn about Borel sigma algebras and measure theory, you’d do worse than to learn it from a derivatives trader.
Including economics into the “social sciences” defeats the argument: yes, economics have been massively useful. No question there. Our current standards of living (including our ability to procrastinate on the present site) are due both to technological progress and to economic insight – see the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China for how lack of the latter strongly reduces the benefits of the former.
As for non-trivial, empirically tested propositions in social science, the standard answer (given by Samuelson to Ulam) is “comparative advantage”. It is true (under certain assumptions, mainly “labour plasticity”) that two countries will always benefit by engaging in trade, even if one country is “cheaper” for all possible products. It’s also definitely not trivial!
Much of economics looks more like a branch of physics and applied mathematics than like a social science such as anthropology or “media studies” *cough*
In fact it may be difficult to put a clear line between “Natural” and “social” sciences. What is anthropology, if not ethology (a field of biology) applied to humans?
Don’t have time to develop this in detail, but one explanation is that hard sciences pick all the low-hanging fruit (i.e., problems which have definite answers to be found, e.g. Boyle’s law and Mendel’s genetics). At the higher levels of complexity there’s less low-hanging fruit. The science in linguistics + AI + psychology + neurology + evolutionary biology, though, is hard to scorn.
Paul Veyne, as I have said, just lumped all the social sciences except economics into history, as techniques or methods of historians. I think that he overestimates economics, though.
My idea is that as science progresses, from time to time chunks of the less-understood whole will be torn off and scientifically understood, but there will always remain a residual whole which is not yet understood because its emergent complexity is too great and also because it’s not stable.
Britney spears a social genius?? – um….
Yeah right. The whole “social genius” dribble always takes precedence in lefty circles because real intelligence is something that they completely lack. And also, the difference between the hard sciences and the social sciences (my stupid opinion anyway) is that the hard sciences only have the following answers: Yes and No.
The social sciences, most of them, are so nonsensical that it makes me wonder how anyone could possibly stomach the crap that they drone out. Maybe it’s because I am prejudiced against everything that doesn’t involve math equations and logic. Oh well…
anthropology before the fall (i.e. the rise of postmodernism and cultural cunstructionism) was a useful and interesting social science.
Part of the problem is that the ‘social sciences’ include both actual science, and nonsense that people tend to confuse with the science.
Psychology, for example, includes both rigorous scientific examination of the nature of the mind and practical applications thereof, and an utterly nonscientific and usually nonsensical medical specialization used to classify people society deems undesirably unusual.
One is utter garbage. The other is not. But historically, the garbage has predominated, which is why universities lump psychology in with the “liberal arts”.
Wake up, people. Added value? Useful? Our financial markets are riddled with (and in some cases based entirely on) implementations of theories (like Black-Scholes) devised by social scientists. They are as quantitative as any physical theory — in fact, if you want to learn about Borel sigma algebras and measure theory, you’d do worse than to learn it from a derivatives trader.
but a lot of these people aren’t trained as social scientists, right? as mathematicians and physicists or computer scientists. that’s a distinction worth making.
My idea is that as science progresses, from time to time chunks of the less-understood whole will be torn off and scientifically understood, but there will always remain a residual whole which is not yet understood because its emergent complexity is too great and also because it’s not stable.
i’d call it philosophy and not history. but same difference.
Britney spears a social genius?? – um….
i think she had what gardner would call ‘physical intelligence,’ once upon a time….
One is utter garbage. The other is not. But historically, the garbage has predominated, which is why universities lump psychology in with the “liberal arts”.
chris of mixing memory has complained about the conflation of the former with the latter many a time. to most people a clinical psychologist is a psychologist….
In fact it may be difficult to put a clear line between “Natural” and “social” sciences. What is anthropology, if not ethology (a field of biology) applied to humans?
one problem with non-scientific anthropologists is that they got carried about by the need to analyze human psychology. obvious humans are agents who model others as agents and that adds a layer of complexity. but, not only did they get carried away, but they made little recourse to real psychology. instead, some of them say weird shit about the power of language to scaffold cultural conceptions and what not (some of it might be there, but they push it way too far).
Spears is social genius in Robin Dunbar’s sense.
Think of a human network connected by social relationships. Spears would definitely be a hub and not a spoke, and the flow of resources is definitely primarily heading towards her and not away from her.
…kind of argues against Dunbar’s idea that sociality selects for intelligence though!
…kind of argues against Dunbar’s idea that sociality selects for intelligence though!
the distribution of ‘social intelligence’ has a strong skewness. ‘we’ are at the left end of the tail 😉
chris of mixing memory has complained about the conflation of the former with the latter many a time. to most people a clinical psychologist is a psychologist….Psychiatry is not scientific. It’s the nonsensical medical discipline of which I spoke – concerned with dealing with problems, not accurately identifying them or determining their causes.
There’s lots of good research trying to identify physiological correlates of psychiatric diagnoses, of course. Sadly, it has inspired more than informed the currently fashionable claims about mental disorders.
Religious wisdom has infinite value with zero probability of validity. Sociological wisdom has large value (to government, businessment, undergraduates) with low probability of validity.
Religious wisdom has infinite value with zero probability of validity. Sociological wisdom has large value (to government, businessment, undergraduates) with low probability of validity.
functionalist models of religion would beg to differ. even though the rationale may be unreality based, the material consequences might be beneficial in some manner nevertheless. e.g., think weber’s models.
‘Comparative advantage’ is a brilliant and useful concept (due to Ricardo, I think), but as usually presented in textbooks it is a tautology rather than an empirical fact. My own prejudices are in favour of free trade, but I would find it difficult to prove that protectionism is always bad (for the country doing the protection). Some of the most successful economies (e.g. Britain in the 18th century, or Germany in the 19th) have actually been quite protectionist.
I followed the link and am appalled at the simplistic logical examination of the social sciences. I know of nothing more evil than an accurate model of human behavior.
I left this comment there.
I skipped the comments section since this should be a no brainer. An effective social science is the end of any individuals creativity, conscience or worth. Only by destroying their (they being: governments, academics, corporations or your family) models do we as people effect change in our living conditions. I’m talking history people, recent history, how about the polling failure in New Hampshire for example. Always lie to pollsters, sleep with inappropriate people, be unexpected and then try to take over the world. I do love my physics and computer science but never ever confuse them with real life.