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Comment by dmvdoug | Hacker News Reader

> It should do that in total epistemological freedom, being informed by everything from the latest in ML to the oldest in sociology and not bound by conventions of what constitutes a scientific explanation, etc.

So the author wants all the shine that being labeled a science brings without any of the heavy-lifting that science requires (i.e., following the “conventions of what constitutes a scientific explanation”).

I can play this game too: my life is evidence-based and data-driven, by which I do not mean that I gather and use data to help decision-making like crusty old “data scientists” learn to do nor do I follow any accepted standard of evidence, because I am an epistemological anarchist! My data is my experience and my evidence is how I feel in any given moment. I should get grants from grant-making agencies just for existing!

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If I’ve read the article correctly, all that stuff seems to have mainly to do with avoiding becoming tied to the particular, distinct norms, methods, and standards of the various disciplines CSS might touch, interact with, or be applied to.

It explicitly opposes having no norms or standards. It appears to be intended to stake out CSS as an independent discipline, rather than a study of pure methods that can end up “living under” any of several other academic areas, with mutually incompatible norms and cultures. (I’ve no idea whether that’s, in fact, a good idea)

Yeah, I think that’s fair, as I just said in response to a different comment. [0]

Of course, the institutional and political factors of universities and funding will make establishing an entirely separate discipline an extreme uphill climb. I suspect the author realizes that when they emphasize the importance of having some traditional disciplinary knowledge.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746815]

A more charitable interpretation would be that the author is being tactical in addressing a discipline where the dominant fashion has been to critique or dismiss scientific methods. By packaging “let’s be more scientific” in an argument that sounds like “let’s not be narrowly prescriptive about epistemologies”, they may have a better chance at getting through to the most relevant target audience.

Yes, and now that I reread it I also see there’s a bit more emphasis than I perceived on first reading on the author speaking to people who do computational work to convince them that social science disciplinary knowledge is important to have. In other words, the author is saying to computational workers, “Don't pigeonhole us as totally outside academics” and to academics, “Don’t pigeonhole us as merely methods people.”

Of course, a manifesto proclaiming the independence and usefulness of computational social science will never get you as far as actually demonstrating its usefulness.

Things like total epistemological freedom always end up being a euphemism for chasing fashions.

To be fair, it’s not like the traditional academic social sciences need much excuse to chase fashions as it is. If anything, that very tendency might be what gets computational social science’s foot in the door. “Hey, we’re the hot new thing!” (That they can leverage the ML/AI hype to generate grants will be the main thing, of course, that secures their place.)

I always took it as a warning that you're about to be asked to make a gigantic leap of faith.

Is playing make believe (like mind reading the goals of the author) just for fun, or is that more of that scientific rationalism that everyone claims is so powerful, yet is powerless to turn around the warming of the planet that it kicked into gear?

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