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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

When have those decades of research ever actually been applied to "create a platform that's more beneficial for society?"

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You're joking right? You're proving the article's point. The social sciences have informed policymakers for decades. The US was founded by social scientists (as TFA defines them, the social sciences include philosophy and so on).

Isn't that more worthy of damnation than praise? Superpredator broken windows, and all other sorts of convenient bullshit. Now policymakers are all about very selective hearing for demagoguery to be fair. We know this well enough because the absolute dumbasses still think cryptography backdoors are a good idea in spite of every credible expert screaming at them for decades "No you fucking morons! It would weaken our own security while not even helping for actual bad actors!"

Definitely, social sciences have gotten a lot of things wrong. And the pipeline from science (social or otherwise) to policy is pretty broken, to put it mildly. Isn't it all that much more important that computer science absorbs that history, so as not to make the same missteps?

Ah, well, if TFA defines the Founders as social scientists, then I can call today's AR-15 a muskeet. Precisely one of the issues of today social sciences is the absolute perversion of language (on purpose).

You can make everything a social science with a bit of imagination.

Isn't this just being pedantic? How is TFA's point changed by substituting "social sciences and other humanities" for "social science"?

“Social sciences and other humanities” would add an additional problem because social sciences aren't humanities.

Digital platforms? They haven't, that's the point.

Outside of that... I would say it's pretty clear that society benefits from research in law, psychology or history, for example.

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