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Comment by Gimpei | Hacker News Reader

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but then we should accept that the conclusions from qualitative analysis are less firm and judge them accordingly.

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We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react.

Even a lot of engineering deals with similar types of uncertainty. We build huge structures out of metal, concrete, and wood on top of soils and other geological materials, often with the assumption they they are all homogeneous with constant material properties through the structure (they aren't). However, we can do this because the variations in properties tend to average out as the material sample gets larger. If we try to make the same assumption on very small scales, we find that there is a lot more uncertainty and our predictions aren't going to be as accurate. We see this in physics and many other scientific fields as well.

I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works).

Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from a very "respectable" set of academics at Yale -- that is based on a flat out fabricated economic model:

We focus primarily on the moderate scenario. That is, our baseline assumption is that diminishing returns play a larger role than accelerating returns (so that α ≤ 1) but not so large that they lead to α < 0. We stress that U depends both on the variation in economic value attached to different activities and on the model governing the disease transmission

Translation: we made some equations that makes the BAD thing BAD and the GOOD thing GOOD.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v...

This is a problem I find tiring about most studies, even in the sciences (excluding most physics and all mathematics). It seems as if most researchers are looking for a novel or interesting correlation or apply an interesting model to a new domain. Generally, I've found this puts insufficient effort into any kind of disconfirmation.

It makes sense, though, with the incentives most academic journals put into study authors. Nothing's sexy about disproving some random model fits.

Replication and publishing negative results do not get the respect they deserve. They should be given equal attention and funding as novel results. That would fix the replication crisis.

Are they not published in the major journals, or are they not published at all? The latter would seem insane. "We've tried this, it didn't work, but nobody will know and somebody will try it again next week to find out that it doesn't work."

They get published in lower impact journals because it's not as sexy. They get less funding for similar reasons.

I think a change of bureaucratic structure might be needed, like funding for every study should include funding for at least one independent replication.

Not only would the replication itself cull some of the false results, but knowing a replication was coming might make researchers more open and honest, ie. less p hacking, document more of their methods and in greater detail, etc.

I think most, if not all self-respecting social science scholars would resent being lumped in with economists

Which fields are you referring to? I think of psychology as perhaps more rigorous, but none of the others (sociology, anthropology, political science).

Sociologists often complains that economists don't bother reading established peer reviewed sociology and opt for own guesswork based on own intuitive observations whenever they attempt to incorporate sociology-lite into their writings.

Anthropology contains biological anthtopology and archaeology, both of which are a lot more like the physical sciences than psychology.

FWIW experimental economics results seem to be more reproducible than psychology.[1] Though this is a bit of a pot-kettle blackness contest.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/1433

> I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular

This construction makes it seem like you view social sciences as a subset of humanities. I was taught that neither is a subset of the other.

Where did you get your impression from? I assume it’s not the university in your username, since I’m certain they don’t share this view. (Source: I’m married to a humanities professor at that university. Also: https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofhumanitiesandsci...)

At least my wikipedia tells me that.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studia_humanitatis#Humanities

They make assumptions and then foreground them so the reader can understand them. What's wrong with that? Have you discovered a way of drawing conclusions without assumptions? Or do you think you can "just observe" without being guided by theory? What would a non-"fabricated" model look like?

The problem is, that the assumption is not rooted in any empirical phenomena. They have neither historical data to fit to (which itself would be tenuous) nor do they have any sort of first order justification for it.

It's like doing a car crash safety simulation and stating that the airbag provides protective force "linearly proportional to the force of impact, with alpha > 1" ... without ever measuring it or doing any calculations on why this would be the case. Would you drive in a car that was tested this way?

I'm too damn lazy to read the paper, so you may be right. But normally, we practice a division of labour. Theoreticians build models in the expectation that empiricists will (a) test them and (b) estimate key parameters. If these guys have said "we have the answer, this is what you should do" then maybe you are right.

I'm not saying either that this phenomenon never happens. I just think it's rather rare, especially among sensible and skilled economists. See also the great Bob Sugden's paper "Credible Worlds", which is available here at the moment.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tony_Lawson2/publicatio...

It's a paper on epidemiology, that utilizes econometric thinking. I understand the theoretician / empiricist divide very well. But I chose this paper to illustrate because it is very clearly aiming to impact immediate policy (it states this in the abstract). Furthermore it is not trying to create fundamental new theoretical models... but rather provide a justification for why lockdown is economically justified.

I hate to be the one to say this -- but most of modern economics is crap, given how reflexive it is. People know how the fed acts -- they know how policy makers act. The models don't take into account this reflexivity.

Someone like George Soros is a thousand times more savvy on how the economy works than post-docs publishing econometrics papers for $40k a year.

>We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react.

I think the issue here is very similar to the one in predicting the weather. The uncertainty of our models increases so quickly that we can only predict a relatively short amount of time ahead (in the case of weather it's about 1 week [0]). We can see patterns in human behavior, but the uncertainty just grows too quickly for long-term predictions. Small things that are hard to account for can make a big difference in where even large groups of people end up at.

[0] https://www.yourweather.co.uk/news/science/long-range-weathe...

I agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

Username checks out

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.

Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.

Maybe, but the laws as we know them do. People create and change them.

Sure. But updating the equations doesn't change the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment or make a ball fall up instead of down -- it simply converges on a more precise outcome.

When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron.

Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.

I agree that absent Locke, there would be no US as we know it.

We also got eugenics based on “science”

Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.

Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage

What do you mean? It's selective breeding for humans the same as we do for farm animals and cats and dogs. It's not pseudoscientific.

No - it's pseudo moral. It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots who don't even understand the limits of the science - or why breeding humans like farm animals really isn't such a great idea.

The GP didn't seem to claim it was moral. Making nerve gas isn't moral either, but that has nothing to do with whether making nerve gas is pseudochemistry.

> It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots

It's reviled because it's inherently immoral. Its proponents are indeed usually racist idiots, but even if they had the best of intentions, it would still be immoral.

Is part of it not based on breeding, which we have done with plants and animals?

We've successfully applied it to animals so it works. Just because it's against your sense of morals doesn't mean it's not based on real science.

The problem with eugenics isn’t the idea of selective breeding, but the conflation of mostly irrelevant traits or uninheritable traits with important and inheritable ones. Leading to a loss of genetic diversity and concentration of genetic diseases.

“If done right”, but I doubt it can ever _be_ done right...

Huh? You can cherry pick an attempt to do something in any discipline and then go on to doubt if it can ever be done right.

What you said is not even an argument - it is just an expression of personal preference towards specific actions.

I like apples, you like bananas, where do we go from here?

I heard somewhere that there are three types of information: facts, fiction and fiction masquerading as facts.

It seems to me that you're engaging in the third type, as are many others who hear an opinion that seems to make sense and aligns with their preconceived preferences, which they then go on to repeat with an incredible level of certainty. I'd argue 99% of what people say is of this variety, which is a problem because it is so pervasive, that hardly anyone seems to notice. It's like we're in the matrix, maaan.

> What you said is not even an argument - it is just an expression of personal preference towards specific actions.

Which is the whole point. Eugenics is “fiction masquerading as fact”, as you put it. The core hypothesis (selective breeding works) is sound, but the traits that historical Eugenicists were trying to breed into the populace were all subjective, fictional correlates of what they thought were desirable. It’s not about MY preconceived preferences, but about what preconceived preferences the person running the eugenics experiment has.

When I say it can’t be done “right”, what I mean is that what constitutes the “eu-“ part of eugenics, meaning “good” or “best” is inherently subjective, and the choices of a particular experiment may end up being counterproductive to the goal of creating the “best” humans.

This 'everything is subjective' non-sense is fiction masquerading as fact of the highest calibre.

People liking water and not liking dying of thirst is not subjective.

You're using 'everything is subjective' to defend 'I don't have the faith in humanity to not fuck it up' and you cannot do that because everything is subjective is a non-sensical claim. What you're really expressing is deep pessimism, which I happen to share :)

What I think we should say is, eugenics is an excellent idea, but the current ruling elite is too infantile to implement it in a way that wouldn't lead to a dystopia of one type or another.

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Another interesting thought is to contemplate that we already enable some to breed and raise children in far better circumstances than other people, by design. Is that not eugenics? We're doing selective breeding and providing selective advantages and we always have. Is that not eugenics?

If you ask me, I'd rather we go extinct because of a scientific experiment of immense beauty, than the usual petty fight for limited resources where the rich sit back and watch, while the innocent slaughter each other by the millions.

Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome.

Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new business.

The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect!

A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framework. It’s like assuming that the dollar bill you see on the sidewalk must be fake because it’s there.

If you want a citation; that little theory is vaguely from Karl Marx. Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III according to Wikipedia [0]. Pretty good theory, and somewhat older than 40 years.

Notwithstanding that, what you say may be true.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

> The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting.

This is not only wrong, it's laughable. Governmental interference in the economy has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk. And not with good outcomes, either: the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling over a period of decades finally catching up with everyone.

> the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling

I thought it was because of irresponsible speculation in dubious securities backed by by corrupt rating houses?

The US government had a policy of increasing home ownership through affordable housing.

Irresponsible speculation in dubious securities by investment banks who knew the government would bail them out (or bail out the insurance companies underwriting their risk, which comes to the same thing) because they were "too big to fail".

And the dubious securities themselves were derivatives based on the housing market, which was in a huge bubble caused by government policies that basically forced banks to lend to people who couldn't afford the loans in order to encourage home ownership, as antepodius pointed out.

SO what you are saying is we should distinguish between a descriptive, and predictive science.

I agree with the core premise (scholarships of society are more reflexive), but this nonetheless made me wonder about the relative rates of incarceration and suspicious death among practitioners of the various arts and social sciences.

social science is interpretation of data and much closer to history than science. The data will often change over time and thus the interpretation. Its very problematic that we treat it as science because it can be politized. To the extent its science its very very imprecise and is on the other end of the spectrum than something like physics which makes very very careful conclusions about very specific things and even they are to a certain extent also just interpretations. It should be called interpretational disciplines not science.

I’m not even sure the paper he starts off criticizing is that problematic - it sounds like it’s basically a quantitative study of various tropes in fiction and comparing it to real data.

>comparing it to real data

given that the study goes back as far as the creation of the Illiad I have serious trouble believing that we have high fidelity data about the social graph of individuals at that point in history.

Pretty much all we have is second-hand accounts to begin with which may themselves be as unreliable as fiction. So on that particular case, I fully agree with the author. That's not actually scientific.

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