Ah, he could be talking about 'climate scientists.' It's the hottest 'science' going today because you don't have to prove jack, just keep throwing virgins into the volcano until they 'stop global warming.' I'm only sorry I haven't figured out a way to make money from it yet.

why, sell carbon indulgences of course! also, there's tons of grant money you can get.

Richard Feynman is, as always, on the mark. Social Sciences and humanities in general is a sort of pseudo-science, with "evidence" that can't really be proved.

I disagree that "climate science" is the same sort of pseudo science, because climate science is based on actual evidence. That fact the charlatans can make it big of pretending to be climatologists does not make a case against actual climatology.

... certainly an ironic comment...

'I think all of the social sciences are bullshit because they don't gather the data and do the checks and intense work that we do in the hard sciences, but I don't really know because I haven't gathered the data and done the checks and intense work to know anything about what I'm talking about.'


(p.s. I think science all boils down to good statistic and good experimental design; there is no wall between social sciences and hard sciences.)

As one who studies and will one day practice Political Science, I'm offended. I can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for the development of democratic institutions with the same certainty that a biologist can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for bacterial growth to take place.

technically, psychology is a social science and as a psychologist, I can say that many of the studies are rigorous, controlled, careful, and tedious. There are certainly exceptions (in any scientific discipline), but I believe that social science can be just as rigorous and significant as (some) physics, albeit to a point of a 5% probability. And it just doesn't get much more statistically significant than that in psychology, for the most part.

"'It's like this: when mathematicians began fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound results.'

'Or at least internally consistent results,' Rudy said.

'Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps.'

'It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really TRUE or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?'"

- © Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

my point being that the rigour and internal consistency is not enough, the connection to the real world is essential for it to be called a science... And a lot of the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences or whatever, deny this real world, and just think up thought experiments - they might as well be studying Klingon.

(PS: the taxonomies of disciplines is different from place ot place, so what i'm critisizing is not a certain discipline, but an attitude)

>> ^Throbbin:
As one who studies and will one day practice Political Science, I'm offended. I can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for the development of democratic institutions with the same certainty that a biologist can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for bacterial growth to take place.


Both of my degrees are in social sciences (they're multidisciplinary degrees so I dabble in economics, psychology, sociology, demographics, politics and anthropology) and for the most part I agree with him. The more you learn and the more you try to understand with the social sciences the less that you can be certain of.

Let me take your example: you say you understand the prerequisites for the development of democratic institutions, but do you really? I'm sure that you understand how democracy evolved in the U.S and other Western nations, but other states take different paths to democracy. And the institutions that result often look and act different from those of other places. Political scientists can try to quantify what was the underlying cause for a move towards democracy, using the forms and the statistics of scientific method, but they don't arrive at a firm conclusion.

It is in this way that the 'pseudo-science' can become dangerous. It is why Western institutions tried to spread democracy by advocating economic liberalization and symbolic elections throughout the 1990's and today, often resulting in ruined economies, failed and collapsed states, and further conflict. Political scientists arrive with their detailed studies and impose their institutional design on another culture because they believe they have the science to prove that they know best.

In many ways, it is because the hard sciences don't have to account for the unpredictable behavior of humans that they can arrive at any conclusions. Social sciences have no underlying laws and theories because people are necessarily ineffable.

My respect for him just went down quite a few notches -- how hypocritical is he to make such derogatory and self-righteous claims when he hasn't collected any data to prove them? He really comes off as a pompous prick in this interview who couldn't be bothered to do any research to back up his attacks.

He was talking about "organic foods" too, not just social sciences. And I study humanities, and it's basically all bullshit. Lots of theories, but no concrete evidence in any direction. This is what makes it different from, ahem, "real" science, where there are actual objective truths that can be found.

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A scientist asks the president of the university for $20,000 to upgrade his lab. The president says, why are you always asking for so much money? You should be more like the mathematicians. All they need are pencils, paper and wastepaper baskets. Or even better, be like the philosophy department, they don't even need the wastepaper baskets!

Pfffft. Social sciences aren't called a "science" due to the certainty of it's theories. They're sciences because one applies the use of the "scientific method" when studying and exploring it's theories. That's what differentiates something like psychology from say, astrology.

Science is not just about defining what is concrete and true and what is not. It's about making an effort to increase human understanding of the universe we live in.

This is an excerpt from his well known Horizon interview.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Feynman-The-Pleasure-of-Finding-Things-Out

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http://xkcd.com/435/

I have a degree in economics, and I agree with Feynman 100% (at least with regards to economics). Beyond the simple operation of supply and demand, economics is complete bullshit. It imitates the rigor of real science, with the math and everything, but it starts from fundamentally wrong assumptions about human behavior. It actually assumes away all psychology, biology, circumstance, tradition, institutions, politics, physics, sociology - until all you're left with is an optimizing machine bearing no resemblance to any human being. Economics is a branch of math - it is not a science. In fact, calling it "science" gives science a bad name.

In my opinion, psychology is the most scientific of the social sciences. Even though they cannot come up with laws of human behavior, they at least do actual experiments where they try to discover statistical regularities of human behavior. If economics were based on psychology, while incorporating insights from other disciplines, it might actually be a science.

I don't quite get how organic foods vs non organic is connected to social sciences?

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Quick! Someone name an unbreakable natural law discovered by a social scientist...

>> ^Ryjkyj:
Quick! Someone name an unbreakable natural law discovered by a social scientist...


AHAHHAHAHAHHA

Nothing hypocritical about it really, he's just pointing out that he isn't a social scientist, so he might be missing something. It's a kind of disclaimer: "I'm not a social scientist, but this is what I see...".

>> ^Ryjkyj:
Quick! Someone name an unbreakable natural law discovered by a social scientist...


Throbbins Law: The more 'hard science' a person knows, the less pussy they get throughout their lifetime. (Einstein actually died with negative pussy).

Chomsky talks a lot about how Social Sciences are hard to go about proving. However he also points to ways and things you can do to bring them closer to Hard Sciences.

My degrees are in Psychology as well, and I can see some of the truth in what he says, but there is also a lot of true experimentation. The problem with disciplines like psychology is the things that are being studied have a high number of variables and its difficult or unethical to control those variables. You can isolate a particle and bombard with all kinds of tests to learn its properties, but do that with a child and suddenly you've gone too far. Ahem, as I was saying the science part in a lot of social science is just limited by our ability to measure the subject of our curiosity. This leads to a lot of supposition, which I don't think is a bad thing, when better measurement tools come along those suppositions can be tested or refined.

The fundamental problem with social sciences is it is far more difficult or impossible to isolate factors in an experiment as you would in a laboratory setting. Therefore the level of certitude that you can attain is far lower than that of an experiment in the physical sciences.

Take the development of a democratic society in various countries. You have an incredibly low number of samples or cases from history versus an incredibly large number of factors - or nuisance variables, if you're looking to investigate certain factors in particular. This makes it impossible to look beyond simply values such as correlations to more complex analysis because you will be getting negative degrees of freedom for the error term in your experiment. Yes if you drastically simplify the experiment by removing factors it will become possible, but you would be assuming away factors. In many cases such as the one mentioned here, there is simply no way to replicate it as in a laboratory experiment either.

That doesn't make it a useless science, although really Feynman never implied this, he simply suggested it was not as rigorous as he would have liked it to be.

Yes, taking economics as an example, it is founded on simplifying assumptions such as rational selfishness and yes, exceptions are constantly being found. When prices go up demand goes down unless it's a Veblen or Giffen good. Yes, markets will generally adjust to supply and demand automatically and price accordingly but wages and prices are generally sticky when moving donwards as workers tend to be unwilling to accept pay drops, and price adjustments are generally staggered and made relative to competitors rather than on the spot.

There's certainly a great deal of uncertainty, but surely this is preferably to being in ignorance over how to best stimulate an economy in recession or what factors contribute to a democratic society. The key point is to take this uncertainty on board when you apply it.

*dead unfortunately. Such a great video!

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>> ^Throbbin:

As one who studies and will one day practice Political Science, I'm offended. I can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for the development of democratic institutions with the same certainty that a biologist can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for bacterial growth to take place.


i studied political science and practiced law.
one is not a science, and the other has nothing to do with justice

actually if you want to study political "science" i recommend you study mass psychology and marketing.

Social sciences are real sciences; the problem is they're startlingly unsophisticated compared to their cousins.

All knowledge doesn't progress at the same rate. At the moment we're stuck with comparatively a mediaeval or pre-mediaeval understanding in some fields. As astrology is to astronomy, as alchemy is to chemistry, so the modern social sciences are to their future successors.

Give it a few thousand years...