Hacker News Reader

Comment by culebron21 | Hacker News Reader

Many texts on such things dive deep into psychology and evolutionary biology, but ignore sociological and anthropological studies that draw a clear picture of how this system works. In this text there are just 2 references to them, and though Webber's works were foundational, there've been a lot of works in sociology in the past 100 years.

The two most promiment names, that this text doesn't even mention, are Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. Goffman systemized a lot of social interactions. Pierre Bourdieu focused on classes and their reproduction.

Instead, a lot of authors and laymen theorize by building a bridge from, say, macroeconomics and geopolitics, directly into human psychology or bio-psychology, deriving big trends and state structures from simple knee-jerk-like psychological reflexes.

View on HN

Sounds interesting. I feel like I (and most techies as well) am prone to commit the sin of trying to derive all human behavior from economics/psychology, since we like deriving concepts from first principles.

What simple introductionary readings/videos on Goffman and Bourdieu would you recommend?

Bourdieu is easy to read, or at least understand. 'La distinction' is the book I would start with.

Its a great book to read if you have small family issues, even if you despise us post-Marxists, if you have troubles with a son/brother/sister/daughter, it might give you keys to build a more resilient family.

The first 3 chapters are essential imho, and there is a lot of value reading further (and other books) with the caveat that it's a foundational author, and like most foundational authors, he have blind spot (he did not had real contradictors with good arguments until the last years of his career (and BTW, handled it way better than Chomsky did) (free shot, sorry).

I don't think the statement "Bourdieu is easy to read" has ever been uttered before. The normal advice is to go read one of Wacquant's works (e.g. "An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology") before you start with stuff like "Distinction" because Bourdieu's academic prose is famously terrible. His verbal prose and the works intended for laypeople are much less obscurantist.

> sin of trying to derive all human behavior from economics/psychology

To remedy to that, I highly recommend Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success". What we call "human behaviour" in such discussions is often culturally learned (or at least shaped).

His point: our psychology is "programmable", and prestige plays a key role in that programming. Western culture (market norms, trust towards strangers, monogamy as the norm, etc.) is forming our psychology in a way that is very far from (historically) typical humans.

(That said, I'm no expert in this area and cannot put Henrich's work into context.)

Western culture, as putative shaper of behaviour as expressed in the parent comment, even makes it into economics/psychology itself! Most psychology studies are done on WEIRD [0] people: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic psychology undergrads. It was suggested, in 2010 anyway, that "96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world's population". [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...

Definitely Goffman. Bourdieu wrote way too hard, except for some separate articles.

It's the science envy. Psychology (despite the replication crisis) firmly established itself as a hard science. Taking the classical distinction of psychology as based on the individual, and sociology on the emerging properties of social systems, we cannot simply infer that the properties of the individual align to social situations.

I think we in the social sciences with our departure from positivism are unable to produce clear laws, or direct applications, we're more concerned with understanding, and not explaining.

I think I am just expanding on your point.

> Psychology (despite the replication crisis) firmly established itself as a hard science.

What a shameless lie! Replication is the key distinction between sciences and talkings. Do you even know what "Nullius in verba" motto is about?

I think they meant that they tried to, but in doing so, highlighted their hubris and then they grew an identity crisis.

> Replication is the key distinction between sciences and talkings. Do you even know what "Nullius in verba" motto is about?

Replication being a necessity is the opposite of my interpretation of the Wikipedia description.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

Apply "nullius in verba" to someone else's report of an experiment they did, but you didn't witness. What do you come up with?

I agree it would be nice if we didn't have to go to that extreme, but the history of science, and of scientists either fooling themselves about their own results or being willing to outright fabricate results, has made it necessary. The Royal Society when they originally came up with their motto might not have fully grasped that possibility.

> Apply "nullius in verba" to someone else's report of an experiment they did, but you didn't witness. What do you come up with?

I come up with "It is unknown", though this is a rather unusual way of thinking these days.

> I agree it would be nice if we didn't have to go to that extreme, but the history of science, and of scientists either fooling themselves about their own results or being willing to outright fabricate results, has made it necessary. The Royal Society when they originally came up with their motto might not have fully grasped that possibility.

Oh, you are preaching to the choir!

No, it's not "talkings". Definitons of science are not based on replication/reproducibility.

Harder one, Popper's, says that a theory must provide a verifiable/falsifiable prediction, and it should be correct. (Problem is, there are too many probabilistic things, so you must lower the bar, by checking error rate/margin.) But not everything is verifiable or falsifiable strictly to this definition.

Then it's Kuhn's definition: a systematic observation and description of nature phoenomenons in own strict terms. Anthropology and sociology are exactly in this department.

Just an example what discovery sociologists made in mid-XX century: poor people tend to learn habits that lead them to risky and reckless behavior, stop them from getting education, etc. (What's the cause is another big talk, too broad for this thread.) And just talks by intellectuals would be like "they're just fools", "they have some genetic deficience", or maybe "they just haven't money, with enough money they'd be fine". That's talks.

Popular psychology that drops broad and seemingly profound judgements and commands, but that have nothing of substance -- that is talks too.

Thank you for a thoughtful response! I always used to have some suspicions about my opinion on psy* studies. I used to search any systematic observations here and I have found exactly one knowledge bomb - Weber-Fechner law [1]

You gave me examples which are not even defend psy* fields as a scientific ones because your examples are from economic fields (I made pro-psy* argumentation here reasonably better). But one systematic observation per all the field is not enough to build a science. It is enough to build religion. Do you want a proof that psy* is a religion? Everything in psy* which is neither neuro-physiology nor economy nor philosophy nor talkings nor [1] nor palliative medicine is... a legal enforcement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law

It's not hard to connect it to economics. Social status = currency.

More like credit rating

What's the diff? They both signal value.

Rewatch Titanic for a (yes, fictional) case study in how this is not true.

I'm looking for the paper called something like "TLDR Bourdieu Goffman Webber: How Social system of fame, status, reputation work?" ;-)

any reco? ;-))

btw, I found "The Prince" by Machiavelli very telling on social dynamics: basic you will say, but that kind of fits my TLDR needs ;-)

Usually the TLDR for any philo/sociology/theory text is it’s introduction as authors tend to expose their argument there so: try the introduction to Distinction for Bourdieu.

The Prince was a satire of the political dynamics of the time.

What makes you think it is a satire?

Exactly, it seems like a clear eyed instruction manual for the time.

I don’t necessarily think it is an obvious satire, but IIRC, at the time he wrote it he was a persona non grata at the Florentine court and was attempting to curry favour.

It was most definitely written to confirm the Medici’s biases and stroke some egos.

> It was most definitely written to confirm the Medici’s biases and stroke some egos

Yes, that is the opposite of satire.

Not necessarily. Machiavelli certainly seems the type to play to the Medicis while simultaneously showing them up in a subtle manner.

Did he believe what he wrote in the Prince was noble or just? Probably not, based on his democratic tendencies.

Imagine if you wrote a send-up of Silicon Valley VCs (for example) and tried to be subtly ridiculous about it, but they took your work extremely well and even applied it. Is that not the most successful and hilarious satire of all?

This idea is popular, but controversial. After looking into it a bit with the help of historians on reddit, I no longer believe this conclusion, but I recommend everyone curious looks for themselves.

The Prince was a hardheaded analysis of governance that was sponsored by a prince, so had to pretend that the prince was the hero. I think the same about Hobbes (or Spinoza or Descartes); with Protestantism came a huge and multiplying number of heresies from Catholic orthodoxy, and materialist atheists could write about rationality through extremely abstract metaphors that they referred to with Christian labels. The same applied to royalty, who were the intermediaries between God and man, and often the patrons of these secular scholars.

i.e. don't deny God, don't deny the King, and you can finally write about reality.

The Prince wasn't sponsored by anyone. Machiavelli wrote the manuscript on his own initiative as a gift to a prince, with the hope of being given a job. It was basically his (unsuccessful) application letter. The same motivation for flattery remains in both cases, however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com