Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences
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Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method.
I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them.
In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.
I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues.
Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.
I agree, I sometimes thing economists like quantitive approaches because it makes them feel like "real scientists" and numbers have an air of credibility.
It look a lot of arguing to let my MSc dissertation supervisor let me do one on financial theory (which I am good at) rather than econometrics (which i struggled with).
I think the problem is more with the institutions and incentives e.g. to publish a lot for funding, than it is with social sciences as a thing. Qual stuff is much lower effort... And to be clear I think Qual has a place there, it just shouldn't be the only thing and it certainly shouldn't be masquerading as quant... But going all quant in social sciences could quickly become harmful if it isn't tempered with some qual/experiential studies. There needs to be a better balance imho.
Elon Musk owns $400B. Earth will become uninhabitable after 1 billion years from now (when the heat of the Sun becomes too large for us).
This means that Musk, if he lived that long, would be able to spend $400 every day until the death of all life on Earth.
This is 15 times the current average daily income worldwide.
If this is not insane, then what is?
One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains were going to take his companies from him and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have been so many companies where the founders sold out and retired because they had enough money and they got bought by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all that money to create bigger and bigger companies using his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal of launching an era of space exploration.
Elon is an oligarch plain and simple. SpaceX is impressive, and I'm a big fan of NASA's research, but let's look past the marketing of him trying to save the human species or whatever.
I do think humanity may have to settle another world (or move to a post-biological existence where we can just park our satellite brains around a star for energy), but this is going to take a lot of scientific advancement over many centuries. Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there. In short, our best approach is to save the planet we already have and continue funding scientific research.
People always look at this with hard nosed pragmatism. That's the wrong lens to view Space colonization. It's a vision and a dream.
That is true for lots of other things. What's the point of building the Taj Mahal? What's the point of running a marathon? What's the point of getting the world record for the longest time spent underwater? Just to show that we can.
> Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there.
I agree that we probably won't be able to have a viable Mars colony in our lifetime. However, I do think that the pursuit of that goal will result in lots of useful inventions; just look at what SpaceX has accomplished already.
It may simply be as a result of population and overcrowding, it may be to flee war and persecution. I think there is a small chance we have already made changes to our atmosphere that make life here incompatible with humans.
Its possible that within just a few hundred years, humans need to live entirely within climate controlled environments. If I had Musk level money I would be working on this now.
it may be a hot take, but yes. A lot of humanity has indeed been ways to show off how big someone's dick is, or as a dick measuring contest.
The moonlanding was an amazing but ultimately useless landmark in the grand scheme of things. Very little of the tech used back then is useful for a practical space supply line. The ability to launch out of our atmosphere and later put sattelites into orbit was 90% of the worth of such resarch 60 years later.
Ungenerous interpretations don't make sense and don't fit the known facts.
Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He wants to make humans an interplanetary species. He wants his name to be associated with that for millennia. I don't see anything wrong with that and have trouble understanding why people hate him souch for it.
What people say about what and why they do things and why they actually do them are rarely correlated.
- his work pracices at all his companies are that of an imbecile manbaby. There are very public reports of this for Tesla and SpaceX, at the very least.
- his "hyperloop" plan delayed a proper trans-state transportation system for a decade+
- he proceeded to further ruin twitter and be completely contradictory on his whole "free speech" advocation
- he literally tried to buy votes for a national US election. Then admitted his lottery was never a fair lottery (i.e. fraud). Pretty much knowing any lawsuits after the election was a cost to do business.
- and his punishment? being a part of a stupidly named cabinet organization that will probably do the opposite of its stated goals, given his history.
Those are just off the top of my head.
What reasons do I have to like Musk? Because he didn't screw up SpaceX as hard as NASA was screwed by the federal government? That he was first to market for American EVs (because US was too busy defending oil and ignoring that other countries were pushing ahead)?
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
This isn't Twitter.
Sure, that's one of the things he wants to do. But his actions don't demonstrate that this is the primary thing he wants to do.
You can't build a sustainable colony on Mars without establishing a sustainable supply line until it reaches self-sustainability. Given what we know about Mars at this point, we're easily centuries away from achieving self-sustainability on Mars even if we fully committed to this goal right away. This means it's not just a cool tech problem, it's a logistics problem and logistics are boring. There's a reason Musk has repeatedly said he merely wants to make it possible to colonize Mars, not that he wants to do it. He's also smart enough that he doesn't want to go there himself because he knows it would mean dying in a barren wasteland even in the best of cases. Musk doesn't want to do the digging, he wants to sell the shovels.
If we want to build up the supply lines to colonize Mars, we at the very least need not just cool space tech but also boring stuff like a permanent supply base on the moon. But the moon has become boring ever since the end of the Space Race and building a supply post on the moon is - again - a boring logistics problem first, not a cool space tech problem. And because it's boring, it's far easier to see the big problems with it (all of which not only hold true for Mars but also do so to a much greater scale): any supply lines you build to the moon require supply lines on Earth first.
If you want sustainable supply lines in space, you have to build sustainable supply lines on Earth. And to have sustainable supply lines on Earth for space, you need a sustainable source of surplus resources. And even if we ignore the social implications of generating such "surplus" when millions live in abject poverty, this can only work if we prevent climate change from spiraling further out of control because it's difficult to run a business when the economy has collapsed and even more difficult to get work done when all the workers keep dying (presumably dying consumers are a smaller issue if we only consider valuations not revenue).
Tesla initially produced four reasonably mass market EVs but the most Musk contributed to them personally concept-wise was the childish naming scheme to spell out "S3XY". This was followed by an electric semi that is largely forgotten after the initial hype and the Cybertruck which literally isn't considered road-safe in most countries and hardly qualifies as "mass market". Despite promising FSD for years, the best Tesla has demonstrated since were robotaxi concept cars that again don't seem to have been designed with mass market use in mind. As for FSD and robotics: again Tesla hasn't yet demonstrated any ability to come anywhere near Musk's promises. So contrary to the popular narrative Tesla is not "building an EV future" - not that it would be helping address climate change even if it were because that would require a focus on mass transport.
Which brings us to the next thing: the Boring company. Again Musk's narrative sold this as an important step in preparing for Mars because if water is underground on Mars we'll need a lot of tunnels but the company is best known for its many projects announced and subsequently cancelled or abandoned across the US - and the Las Vegas "Loop" which is a claustrophobic underground shuttle service with gamer lights and mostly exists because Elon Musk hyped the idea of a (high speed vacuum tunnel) "Hyperloop" to - and it's worth pointing out that he has literally admitted as much since - preempt plans to build a public highspeed rail system.
What else was part of the narrative? Oh, right: SolarCity. Again Musk bought a company and claimed it was part of a plan to colonize Mars because we don't have fossil fuels on Mars so certainly the future must be solar - and of course those Tesla Superchargers need to be charged somehow, too. The company was eventually folded into Tesla (as Tesla Energy) and has shifted from mass market solar panels to making most of its revenue from batteries and selling primarily to big customers.
SpaceX at least largely does what it says on the tin if you ignore that it mostly still exists because the US government all but abandoned direct investments in space travel and SpaceX managed to collect a number of lucrative government contracts by controlling a de-facto monopoly position. Starlink also mostly seems to exist to exert an uncomfortable amount of political power over the governments that have bought into it (as the Ukrainians had to find out the hard way).
Elon Musk has an almost obsessive hyperfixation on the letter X and the idea of colonizing Mars, yes - he's autistic. But that doesn't mean everything he does he does in service of that goal. It doesn't even mean he actively contributes towards that goal in a meaningful or well thought out manner. It doesn't explain why he decided to father an uncomfortable number of children with an even more uncomfortable selection of partners (especially when it comes to business partners and employees) or why he's extremely selective in which token child he decides to shower with praise and attention (if not his own then at least in public appearances). It doesn't explain why he actively sabotages more climate friendly public mass transit projects to favor unsustainable individualized transport deliberately designed in such a way it can not be accessible to most. It doesn't explain why he decided to make a great show of "leaving the left" and presenting himself as "anti-woke" just in time when a big hit piece on him was about to be published because of his inappropriate behavior toward women. Etc etc. None of that logically follows from the goal of making humans an interplanetary species except in the most trivial of ways (i.e. stranding a person on Mars would technically make humans an interplanetary species for as long as that person survives).
The hate (if you just want to lump all criticism or distate into that label) Elon Musk gets is not "because he wants to make humans an interplanetary species", he gets it for the things he does. And in many cases what he does is actively damaging to his stated goal.
I didn't say "making mankind an interplanetary species" isn't his primary goal, I said that it's not the primary thing he wants to do. What he seems to want to do is be rich, father an absurd number of children with different women and be cheered on and celebrated by his fans and sycophants. He literally bought Twitter on a whim because he liked the attention he got there. He's obsessed with appearing "cool" ever since people called him "real life Tony Stark" and he let it get to his head even though his popularity massively took a nosedive shortly after.
Gwynne Shotwell is more responsible for SpaceX's operational success than Elon will ever be, she's clearly done a great job of managing up and letting him take the "glory" he so desperately yearns for, but all he really provided was the initial vision and money. Not to understate that contribution, but his supposed "brilliance" is pure marketing. We've seen what happens we he actually gets meaningful operational control of a company (Twitter) and a product (Cybertruck), and it isn't good.
Thanks for taking up the mantle for the poor multibillionaires. The poor guy is homeless, after all.
There’s nothing more hilarious than folks devoting time to simp for people like this.
I can think of a prominent politician with the same qualities.
Just because an orderly liquidation would take some time does not mean it would be impossible for him to sell.
As a case in point, when he decided to invest in twitter, he was able to use his wealth pretty easily.
Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
That being said, just because you need to structure a big sale does not mean it can not be done, or that you can not leverage your asset to have cash available at short notice. For instance, a loan with your actions as collateral will let you structure your divestment over years for a very moderate price.
Again, what I’m describing is not science fiction, it’s litterally what happened with twitter.
Imo it would be a harder challenge to find valuable stuff to buy than to divest orderly.
> Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
From what I remember, the issue was more along the lines of him making an offer without thinking it would be accepted, and then be under the gun because he was not prepared. Even then, he eventually found a reasonable financing scheme.
3-400b? No way. There isn't capacity, you would cause a massive dip in prices. The timelines you would have to exit over would be very long, so disclosure also causes market reaction.
Loans work to an extent, but you get risk adjusted and eg 1bn of amazon stock is pretty low risk whilst 100bn is high risk. Concentration/size vs market cap and adv matter.
You can do it all, at a price, but it would be a lot lower than the current stock price for obvious reasons
Your claim seems to revolve around the idea that a fire-sale would crash the market, but no one is arguing for a fire-sale.
Again, structuring a sale over a long time span isn’t a big issue, since you can get cash now by selling the future revenue.
The real hard question would be to find $400bn worth of stuff to buy.
Dimon sold some stock and it was front page news, and it wasn't that much.
"Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars. There are 300 million people in America, so he could give everybody a million dollars."
For fun, calculate how long the billionaires of America could fund America's social programs if they were taxed at 100%. If you ask people this, the off-the-cusp estimates are usually something like a thousand years, a century, some huge number like that...
Of course that assumes you think Earth's and society's (or at least the US's and Americans') resources should exist for all humans (or Americans) and the ideal balance would be based on as little as one needs and as much as one can contribute, i.e. literally how early human communities operated and how human communities still often operate outside economical contexts (e.g. after a natural disaster). You can say that model doesn't scale but I don't see a good argument for why that should be a reason to use a completely different model unless you're literally among the few people it disproportionately benefits (if you ignore how ruinous it usually is to them too at a human and interpersonal level because of how much it alienates them from almost anyone else around them).
As a Brit I think I’ve derived significantly more than $1000 in value through Amazon’s existence as compared with the status quo beforehand, and that’s exclusively counting the shopping part and not anything else they do. You can ask the question about whether it would have happened anyway in a communist paradise or whether Bezos gets the correct percentage of the reward but I mean, it actually is a very useful thing.
Similarly with Apple and Google and so on. These companies make things that people for the most part choose to use.
Capitalism is not a zero sum game, and people can choose to turn effort into wealth or they can choose to sit around and do nothing.
It's usually based on nothing other than pure vibes.
It could theoretically be true if e.g. some billionaire just decided to buy up a load of houses and leave them empty just to piss people off, but whilst theoretically they probably could do this (e.g. if I back of the envelope it, Elon actually has enough net worth to offer everyone in my hometown double the market value of their house and then just leave them to rot without even renting them out), no-one actually does.
Even in this populist age, math still counts.
If musk was using his money to bang hookers on solid gold yachts, fine, complain about it. But he isn't. He doesn't even own a house.
Stop worrying about another man's dollar and start worrying about being a better and less covetous person.
Musk is a great argument that while the government is inefficient, they are still beholden to laws and people. Musk isn't. Tax him to high hell.
At that level of wealth, it doesn't make sense to think about fancy cars and mansions and living an extravagant and luxurious lifestyle. At that point, you got it made.
However, if you're talking about building something meaningful, that's a different matter entirely. That requires far more capitals than what is required to sustain a person indefinitely. There are shows that I would love to revive and reboot, such as Stargate. There are researches I want to do or fund, such as research into 3D printing, or do long term research grants so that people can do meaningful work.
The money's not for living. It's for projects. If your personal projects don't require that much money, you can always give it away to fund other people's projects.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea of cutting basic research programs and how it's actually structured(short termism, prioritizing novel results over building solid foundation, etc).
Elon Musk owns hundreds of billions worth of stock.
First, the value of those stocks varies from day to day. He can gain or lose billions of dollars in "net worth" on any given business day.
Second, he is not free to sell that stock however and whenever he wants; he has to get approval from the boards of his various companies and is limited in the timing and amounts he can sell. Additionally, selling large amounts of stock causes the price to drop, AND dilutes his ownership in, and therefore control of, those companies.
I think a lot of people have this stupid idea of Scrooge McDuck swimming in pool of cash, when they think about billionaires. That's not how it works, for most billionaires (I'm not sure about middle eastern oil royalty).
In reality, businessman billionaires have most of their wealth in stock, and it is not liquid, and they borrow against the stock (i.e. use the stock as collateral for personal loans) and sell small percentages of it to finance their lifestyles.
If you created a company, and it became wildly successful, and it was publicly traded, who should "own" the company? Should you be forced to divest, and therefore cede control to people who had no involvement in the company's initial success? Is that good for founders or for companies? How does it benefit society?
Also note that profitability influences stock price, so taking away control from the people who made a company profitable, has a high likelihood of making the company less profitable, which in turn will almost certainly result in each stockholder becoming poorer. Remember that most stockholders aren't Elon Musks, they're John Q. Publics with a 401(k).
Absolute clown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
I think Piketty does kind of do what you're talking about -- and though he makes a good case, I think when he argues for concepts like universal inheritance, that's more an act of political advocacy than economic scholarship. It's for the economist qua economist to study/analyze the conditions under which the rich get richer, or where class mobility decreases, etc -- but it's up to people and governments to choose what they want society to look like.
We have a gigantic broken window, but the house still works. And ofc my government system has generally had a reactionary response rather than a preventative one; nothing gets done until it's too late and many people die.
You could start with the work of W Brian Arthur.
Unless by "discussed prominently" you mean youtubers who don't know what they are talking about. Then you would be correct.
Economics research is a series of cults who all predict different outcomes for the same series of inputs based on how the original founder of the cult, I mean school, felt about the king and his ability to tax the wealthy several centuries ago.
There are several trillion social sciences more rigorous than economics.
As far as I can tell economic researchers actively discourage experimentation because the results of an actual well-run valid experiment would ruin everyone's career.
Also please note that me calling these theories non-scientific is not a colloquial dig at them. I'm speaking precisely that the literature contributing to these theories explicitly and frequently opposes the scientific method as a tool of oppression. Even though I believe in (bounded) rationality, I do agree with this viewpoint in part. Science, as practiced by fallible humans, can be used for bad things! But, where I disagree with critical theory and its children, is that this somehow delegitimizes scientific epistemology.
A specific publication I remember reading years ago as an assigned reading cites, as a limitation of the paper their use of the Cartesian plane in mapping, as the Cartesian plane is incompatible with queer theory: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/000456007017340...
It's easy to make fun of some of the overwrought academic papers that are out there. Nevertheless if you're a huge fan of the scientific method and rigorous thinking, as you seem to claim that you are, then making your own overwrought and specious claims about the issue is not a way to solve the problem.
If so, then it seems to me that there's much more nuance than "mythology as science". Certainly there are aspects of traditional knowledge that deal directly with facts and therefore could be in conflict with science. However, that's not the same as recognizing that different cultures can have different ways of understanding and thinking about the world. Understanding those different ways of understanding could be a valuable tool in allowing society to develop creative approaches to problems.
In their historical context, tools that we would now consider to be wildly unscientific (like oracles to gods or various alchemical practices) were intertwined deeply with scientific practice. It is not unreasonable to draw these kinds of connections in research. I know some people doing interesting work connecting ancient cipher technology with various divination techniques.
Just because these techniques don't work doesn't mean that they aren't relevant to understanding why things are the way they are today.
It feels like epistemic weaksauce to claim that entire fields explicitly reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject “the scientific method” on the basis of “I’ve read some case study / qualitative papers”.
I don't reject non-scientific scholarship. But I see the focus in some disciplines a little like twinkies and soda: a bit of them can be fine and maybe even be good in some circumstances (brings joy; maybe as a recovery item for some diabetic conditions). But my feeling is that some of these disciplines have indexed a bit too much on twinkie and soda.
I think of science in much the same way that you think of other disciplines.
Psych is getting a brunt of this because they have actually done a good thing and funded replication studies, which naturally will produce a bunch of "this fails to replicate" findings. So then you get headlines talking about the replication crisis in psych and then people who maybe took a single class in college a decade ago dismiss the entire field as bogus.
I invite such people to go speak with some CS academics for a better understanding of the mess in our own field.
1. I definitely did not say that economics does not strive for generalizability. Quite the contrary. I think the vast majority of economists strive for generalizable conclusions (i.e. go to great care to find study samples that are representative of the population of interest and use statistical methods that might allow them to plausibly conclude things about that group)
2. I never said "all" work in other social science disciplines rejects generalizability as an aim. However, I do believe, that more "empirical" scientific method based studies in a number of disciplines would be good. That is predicated on 1. a belief about the prevalence of qualitative/theory based scholarship. 2. a normative preference that the ratio is undesirable. I could be mistaken on my perception of the first point, but I don't think I am. On the second point, you're welcome to disagree. These are, like, opinions, man!
3. "reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject 'the scientific method'" makes me think you've either missed my point, or you don't understand the nature of other forms of academic scholarship.
I'm not leveling a diss that e.g. a participant observation case study isn't a method intended to generalize from. That's just an intrinsic feature of that kind of study method. Of the qualitative researchers I've known, I can't imagine any thinking there is anything controversial about what I've said on that point. Though, some would definitely disagree with me on my opinions about what ratio of scholarship should be of this kind.
And lastly you've selectively quoted me there at the end, and attached a conclusion to it that is not mine. Consider this a bit of original qualitative research on my part: a sampling of non-empirical research that I've read in recent years has suggested to me a lapse in rigor in certain disciplines. But this conclusion is grounded in my "situated knowledge" of the space, and thus shouldn't be used to generalize without a suitably operationalized quantitative study ;-)
Pragmatically speaking, I'm unsure why you would choose this language if you wished to convey the nuance that qualitative methods are actually great, that you're merely wishing that more "empirical" studies would also be undertaken, where "empirical" I guess means "quantitative" and "rigorous" though you don't make that explicit.
For what it's worth, you absolutely can generalize from an observational case study. RCTs are not the only way of drawing generalizable conclusions—it depends a lot on what your epistemic goals are.
It kind of sounds like you don't like that some social sciences rely more on non-quantitative methods because you don't think those are definitive. That's fine, you're welcome to hold that belief, but let's not pretend like you're a fan of all methods and just wish there were a few more quantitative studies in sociology (or whichever discipline).
Does that resolve what I think you are perceiving to be a contradiction, but that I do not see as a contradiction?
Where I think you and I have a fundamental disagreement is in the nature of e.g. qualitative research methods such as case studies and whether a case study is generalizable. This feature was taught to me by... qualitative researchers. If you truly believe a case study is a generalizable research method, then either you are defining generalizability in a different way than is typical, or you hold a minority viewpoint not shared by mainline qualitative researchers.
Not all research methods need to be generalizable to have some scholarship value, and I'm not using the concept of generalizability as a colloquial stand-in for ~"bad"
BUT, I still think social sciences could use fewer qualitative studies and pure theory grounded scholarship (i.e. "a correction is warranted"). It's what I said from the start, it's what I mean now, and unless I someone provides me a compelling rationale to change my mind or the world changes, it'll probably be what I believe going forward.
It seems important to you to attribute to me a total rejection / disparagement of these methods. I am just not saying this. I do not reject these methods, just as I do not reject apple pie. I just don't think that a steady diet of apple pie is good. And I don't think the research methodology diet of many social sciences is healthy either. A correction is warranted.
What will be the outcome of that shift? Some kind of better research?
On what basis do you think that field should agree with your perception?
On what basis do you think your perception is correct?
Note that I’m using “qualitative” and “quantitative” as stand-ins for whatever you think there’s too much of and too little of, respectively—please feel free to clarify if these words don’t effectively capture what you are trying to say.
It’s not at all important to me to attribute to you a “total rejection” of these methods, your writing implies to me that you have a preference for quant methods and think they’re better. You’re not, for example, complaining about too much quant methodology in economics, and too little qualitative. Sure, you don’t think that qual methods are bad per se, but you do think that the social sciences could use fewer of them, and that they’re overused.
I imagine you would agree that these methods can tell us different things, and that they’re not interchangeable for any given research question. You’d probably also agree that some fields bias towards certain types of questions, and that maybe the ratio of methods of work in a given field reflects the bias towards questions that are best answered by those methods. So, are you suggesting that entire fields should focus more on different questions, specifically those that can be answered quantitatively?
If not, I’m not sure I understand what the implications of your argument are.
For what it’s worth, here’s my bias: I am both a quantitative and a qualitative researcher, and I actually think the underlying issues holding back the production of generalizable knowledge have little to do with choice of methodology, and to the extent that they do, it’s in part due to a fetishization of quantitative methods that tell us something generalizable—but not necessarily something useful or even something true.
At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can disagree with it.
Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with sophisticated mathematics. I’ve heard the approach referred to as ‘physics envy’
It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative. But it’s not like physics
It’s conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people are perfectly rational, etc.
For example we have published economic research that forecasts that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%.
They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
I’m unclear what you’re arguing for here, that we should not attempt to estimate because we have to make some assumptions about future events? Or is it that the estimators in this case should have used different assumptions? Or is it that they should also be estimating the potential for famines and political instability (which maybe they don’t feel qualified to do?)
> They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
> It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
You are the one making incorrect assumptions, specifically that food production is a steady and constant process like producing iPhones.
In the real world, crops fail due to seasonal weather all the time and it affects global food prices.
Research predicts multiple famines due to simultaneous crop failures in global bread baskets. That’s why responsible countries like Norway started stockpiling food.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-05/global...
The point is not even that - economists are simply not qualified to assess accuracy of their base assumptions.
now I have to debate people who claim we should not address climate change because worst case is 1% damage to GDP.
What are the report margins on that? Suppose there is a 10% chance that the drop is higher, like 30%/35% and does cause a famine specifically concentrated in the US, or nuclear armed Pakistan, and Global GDP falls by 40%.
Have you seen them report finds the n a way that accounts for, however small; possibility of total disaster?
> Research predicts multiple famines due to simultaneous crop failures.
What research?
do at least some basic reading on the subject.
Economics, sociology, psychology, even ecology in relation to humans are all really one subject. Then to make matters worse we are using the tools of reductionist linear science to study the already artificial subsets of this subject as independent, stationary, ergodic chunks, leading to obviously ridiculous conclusions when these chunks are reassembled.
Then somehow complex systems and non-linear dynamics has really failed to gain any traction in the popular discourse. Labeling the subject "Chaos theory" in the 80s was really really dumb.
On the other hand, the popular mind has a delusional view of science. As if there is an efficient market hypothesis for scientific truth. That scientific truth is instantaneously transmitted and discounted.
This is all just one of the many examples from history happening in real time of a decades long Kuhnian paradigm shift while the popular mind continues to argue outdated nonsense like the best way to measure aether and phlogiston.
Isn't that any correction? changing the status quo is about as purely political as it gets
For this example, was the decision made by academics who analyzed the situation and felt that some aspects of study were underfunded? Or was it outsiders who entered the process with a specific objective and didn’t bother with the details so long as their ideological objectives were achieved?
Both are “politics” but they aren’t the same.
They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs.
The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer.
Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.
One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.
It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.
The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.
You could choose what you wanted to do.
This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.
Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?
I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.
Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.
There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.
The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.
Objectivity is impossible
These two statements are at opposition with one another.
I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."
Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.
Except no reporter would write this single sentence as a story.
Please present an example story which is both realistic (could be published or broadcast as is) and also completely objective.
The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.
For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.
All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.
At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested.
It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective.
Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!
1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones),
2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).
The UK's Rachel Reeves was suddenly falling over herself to associate any scrap of experience she's had with "economics" [0].
All the actual scientists and hard business decision makers I know try to distance themselves from such jibber-jabber.
[0] https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-econom...
[1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf
Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an uneven playing field for less well-known and connected researchers.
Economics is falsifiable.
For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke
A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right, another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted tax cuts would spur growth:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio...
Others predicted it would not, and turned out correct:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
Amsterdam ended up running a bit of an 'experiment' on what happens when you tried banning houses owned by investors:
* https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%2...
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261
* Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers
There are "schools" that put forward various models that get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of the field in general, or of those that actually try to get their models to match reality.
In fact a lot of the time people know that what they're putting forward is wrong:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
I'm sorry but you can't say that about a field that gave a “Nobel” prize to Fama, shared with Shiller for his work which falsified Fama's.
And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.
Or it shows things are complicated.
I once read the remark from a physicist (Feynman?): My job would be much harder if particles had free will.
Which is exactly what economics is trying to model: there are aggregate trends that tend to be followed (on average) by larger number of people, but there are plenty of folks off in the tails of the curve doing strange things (sometimes out of spite: see Gamestop and /r/wallstreetbets).
I participate in personal finance sub-Reddits, and during March 2020 when the world was going sideways, and markets were going crazy (e.g., oil prices went negative) there were a lot of people panicing about their retirement savings. There was a lot of explaining to people that they should not liquidate their investments, but just to ride it out, and you'll be fine over the long run:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
A lot of people also learned that they weren't as comfortable with the risk of being in 100% equities as they thought.
Another regular question in those forums "I got an inheritance and want to invest, but markets are at an all-time high." Well, the 'mathematically correct' answer would be to do a lump sum and put it in all at once:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/dollar-cost-averaging-vs-lump-s...
But most people aren't comfortable with that, so you tell them "DCA is fine" because waiting for the market to dip is worse than DCA:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...
> And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.
Yes. See also Flat Earthers. But their existence does not invalidate the fields geology or astronomy.
This is true in all sorts of areas in life. I live in Ontario, Canada and the provincial government made a controversial splash† recently about ripping out bikes lanes to put in more lanes to improve traffic flow, never mind the decades of data on the topic:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Do their actions invalidate the fields of urban planning and traffic engineering?
† It's really just a move to distract folks from incompetence on other topics.
If flat earthers could become geology university professors then the field would be invalidated instantly, that's exactly my point!
Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation. This isn't what science is about, this field is still behaving with the ethos of political philosophy it is born from, not like a science even a social one (History is a good example of how you can do science on societies, and yes this is very different from physics in terms of what kind of knowledge it brings us, but so is biology).
Well then, better invalidate geology:
> Kurt Patrick Wise (born August 1, 1959) is an American geologist, paleontologist,[1] and young Earth creationist who serves as the director of the Creation Research Center at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia. He writes in support of creationism and contributed to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wise
> Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation.
When there are enough folks who believe a certain thing there can be a 'critical mass' for it to become self-sustaining so that there may be consequences from outside the bubble, but the folks in question simply ignore the external groups and live in their own echo chamber. The funding for this can continue because—in the case of economics which touches on (e.g.) tax policy—when there are billions of dollars floating around, and you can fund bullshit so that you get to make more billions and keep more of your billions, there will also be "support" for ideas:
* https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examin...
Why do we still hear about climate change not being real? Or that it's real, but not caused by humans? Is climatology a bullshit field? What consequences can there be when oil tycoons throw money at people to keep repeating the same message over and over? How many oil-funded think tanks are there that publish on climate change? Or billionaire-funded think tanks that publish on tax policy?
One reason why you continue to hear about invalid ideas is because to some people truth is irrelevant, reality is irrelevant. The only thing relevant to them is "what can I get?" and they're willing to continue to throw money at getting what they want, and they don't care what is said as long as it gets results:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Even medicine and biology has a bubble of folks that ignore reality:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/rfk-jr-aaron...
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/health...
Here we are in late-2024-going-into-2025 and we're still "debating" the benefits of polio vaccines.
You seem to think that the [Tt]ruth will overcome the [Ll]ies. Maybe. Eventually. But that is the optimistic take—and which I tend to lean towards as well—but I also recognize human psychology and human history, and know that humans can (and do) choose another path. There are plenty of things that true that people choose not to believe in or trust, even with the evidence staring them in the face.
In fact, showing people evidence often prevents people from changing their minds and they makes them dig into their (invalid) beliefs more:
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
* https://today.uconn.edu/2022/08/cognitive-biases-and-brain-b...
If you don't see the difference (and can't articulate your arguments without annoying walls of text), it's time to end this discussion.
Good day.
Can it happen another way?
Hard to see a social science field that fits this description better than economics though…
didn't the changes that you would like corrected happen as part of a charged ideological / political process?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-for...
It's 23rd by GDP per capita, next to France
So France is over 10x richer then
I'm a kiwi living in the US so admittedly I'm not helping matters but I do worry about my home country being on a slippery slope.
It's also common in the US for companies to fund research so that they can manipulate results to their benefit and/or to bury results showing that their products are harmful. One of the many nice things about publicly funded research is that its purpose isn't to increase sales/stock prices, advertise, or manipulate/hide the truth from the public.
How repeatable is the field of economics?
That’s a bad heuristic. When something is failing, that approach’s ideological proponents will continue to defend it, while the ideological opponents will call out the shortcomings. That’s just how everything works. You should evaluate whether or not the thing is working on its own merits, not based on who is leveling the criticism.
So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what the overlords are doing.
These are things which shape our world, it’s worth understanding them at a level which doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker – and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always has spin-off benefits, even if that’s just providing a place for people to learn general research skills they take on to the workplace.
And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of those could be a hundred research projects.
Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence, you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that just requires a lot of detailed research. For example, compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all, because "social networks bad"?
Social media is a similar type of problem. You probably can't outright ban them, in democratic countries there is too much demand and there would be backlash. Even if not, underground social media would arise, as it does already in countries where it is restricted. Can you regulate it? If so, what works? Certain ages? Restrict algorithmic curation? Chang liability rules? Better educate people about the costs and benefits and good use? Enable more heavy handed censorship and content filtration? Require real names and public have strong libel laws that are enforced? What about foreign ownership or influence campaigns? Corporate advertising? Monopoly and anti-truest issues? What about standards around interoperability and federation? Should they be free, or require subscriptions?
Tons of stuff to figure out.
I am in New Zealand
The people behind d this policy do not think there is "Tons of stuff to figure out."
They are like many commentators here, they (think they) know it all.
It is, I hope, the last gasp of the old Thatcherist guard. "There is no such thing as society...just individuals "
They see everything through a materialistic lense, are desperate to reduce taxes (it is a fetish), and are doing incredible damage to the infrastructure of our society
Politics, sigh
The government they replaced (earnest left wing types) had some good ideas but were very centrist, paternal, and astoundingly incompetent
The prognosis is not good for my home country
Most annoyingly to me there is no true green party to vote for. The actual NZ green party's primary focus is on what would be labeled socialist outcomes by someone with a US perspective.
This is a social network
I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.
You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert.
That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.
Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence.
I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts.
Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.
The negative feedback loops are particularly hard to set up by yourself. At some point if you're going to be at the researcher level (construed broadly), you need help from others in developing sufficient dept, rigor and self-criticality. Others can poke holes in your thoughts with an ease that you probably can't muster on your own initially; after you've been through this a number of times you learn your weaknesses and can go through the process more easily. Similarly, the process of preparing for comprehensive exams in a PhD (or medical boards or whatever) is extremely helpful, but not something most people would do by themselves--the motivation to know a field very broadly and deeply, so you can explain all of this on the spot in front of 5 inquisitors, is given a big boost by the consequences of failure, which are not present in the local library.
The time is also a hard part. There are relatively few people with the resources to devote most of their time for learning outside of the classroom. I spent approximately 12,000 hours on my PhD (yes some fraction of that was looking at failblog while hungover etc. but not much). You could string that along at 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, which is a 'serious hobby', but it would take you 24 years. How much of the first year are you going to remember 24 years later? How will the field have changed?
But it does happen intentionally that way some times for sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded gun research to prevent any inconvenient facts from coming to light.
I think good professors that focus on that are the exception and not the rule, sadly.
I am in New Zealand
I have been through the university system here, my family still closely involved
A great deal of critical thinking happens in New Zealand universities
On the other hand Western democracies largely seem to fund this kind of "exploratory and associative free-will" to the benefit of their aristocracies (i.e. wealthy people who hold a lot of social, economic and often political power but can not actually directly control the government itself despite often benefiting from selective enforcement) while at the same time clearly being aware that ideas like the state monopoly of violence (even in the US) or the "right for a country to defend itself" are vital to the state's continued existence and that democracy is a threat to that ulterior motive if taken too seriously.
China seems to be an example of a "disciplined obedience" system adapting to its economic environment (more the international one than the internal one) whereas "the West" seems to provide examples of systems creating layers of misdirection to hide their inherent "disciplined obedience" based nature that ensures their self-preservation.
So the "they" here isn't a unified, coordinated group. But you'll rarely find those in structural problems. But there is a "they" in the sense that we can define a set of people who will act to oppose critical thinking either through direct self interest or class interest.
I would argue that, in periods of scarcity, it makes sense to prioritize public spending on what has a more tangible economic ROI. I recognize that I am extrapolating from the fact that STEM related jobs tend to be more remunerative than social science.
I could not find any literature regarding ROI of research programs.
Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then normal commercial capital's a good match. If it has large long-term ROI, then that's VC's domain. It's government's job to make investments in public goods, things that don't have ROI in the sense usually meant here.
Every potential decision outcome has a ROI (which we mostly don't know in advance, though we can often guess). The investments for which we need governments are those that won't ever work in the private sector due to misaligned incentives (no company will pay out of its own pocket to educate young children, not because there's no ROI overall but because it's much too diffuse -- the ROI for that company is extremely low).
People can disagree about whether government should also make some investments that would also be made by self-interested people/companies.
I agree one can broaden it to mean something much vaguer, using it metaphorically. But A) I think we at least have to explicitly distinguish that, and B) I think casting societal questions in business terms is a perilously wrong frame, one easily leading to all sorts of errors of thought, ones that have negative social implications.
Just as an example, we could take Elon Musk's recent swipe at funding to fight homelessness. There he uses a common business framing and ends up with some conclusions that are deranged from the point of view of people actually working on the problem. Which wouldn't matter much if he were some random internet commenter, but here his error could have a significant body count.
I tend to agree with you that public spending would be wasted or even misdirected in optimizing for direct ROI (EG prison system, education, healthcare...)
I should have better specified in my original response.
Most historical debate these days is also pretty subjective, egos-versus-egos for clicks and likes (and research money) Don't get me started on the subjective biases of social "science"
This is just absolutely factually wrong and betrays a total lack of understanding of the field. History manuscripts are released constantly that are investigating and discussing contents of the archive that have been sitting in a box unexamined since the time of their creation. Even if you take the outrageously limited view of history that it just exists to document the past, we make significant progress constantly.
There's also no research money in the field for egos to squabble over. Research grants for historians are regularly in the "couple of thousand dollars" range.
Yes and developing new commercially viable tech pays for one's future.
But do you really think state sponsored research gets you commercial success? I wonder if there is a better way?
If you do not study the society you live in how do you act in a socially positive way? How do you know what public services are even required if you refuse to look?
To who's benefit?
That is why social research is as important. Otherwise all the good tech will reinforce tho old injustices. None of us want that, I assume
(Maybe quite a lot. I really don't know.)
I can't speak to Protestant / "Christian" schools because theirs is a very different religion but a Catholic education is 12 years of moral philosophy and formal ethics. It's just filtered through the writings of prominent Catholic theologians whose ideas are informed by but ultimately separate from the bible.
Despite being an atheist I think my theology classes were the most valuable ones I had growing up because more so than any other class, even math which would go on to study, they taught me how to think for myself. I'm sad a secular version of it isn't taught everywhere as standard curriculum.
Scrapping all support for any particular branch of science is an overreaction, but cutting number of graduates in these fields and focusing funding only on the studies with most practical benefits could make sense. As an example, social scientist studying poverty, unemployment or crime could produce useful information for policymakers to reduce these phenomena, and cutting all funding from such research is probably a bad idea.
The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school.
Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied.
It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence.
This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.
For a primary source on how they conceptualized the role of the university, see the charter for the University of Georgia (1785) [0]. It essentially says that universities are really important and it would be unacceptable to have to send youths to foreign countries, so we're starting one here. They weren't reconceptualizing the university, they were funding the rapid development of institutions that would otherwise take centuries to develop if at all.
[0] https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-0...
Academic outcomes are nonlinear. Outside of the job-training-ified fields like engineering, there is seldom a direct "I studied X and then made a ton of money doing exactly that". The success stories, like Tolkien, are more like, "I studied X, then I lost a finger in the great war, then I typed up a manuscript of a children's fairy tale, fast forward 100 years and it's worth untold millions." It is a winding road. All that is gold does not glitter, not all who wander are lost.
And you can't just equate societal value with "how many people consume it". An academic paper is often as valuable as a tool for crystalizing thoughts in the mind of the author as it is a tool for communicating to the reader.
I kind of feel like you are missing the point of academia.
Regardless, what makes money and what's good for society are orthogonal, and sometimes outright at odds with each other. Certainly, it's easier to make money via evil than make money via good. And, certainly, economy is flexible - it can be anything. We can have a strong economy making trains, if we want. "Free market" capitalism is not the sole economic system nor is it the most efficient. It seems China has a much more efficient economic system.
I argue higher education is good for society, even if it doesn't make money. Critical thinking is vital in decision making, and the humanities have a bigger emphasis on critical thinking (yes, really). Software engineering is "hard", but not really. Literary analysis is a different beast which requires a different kind of intelligence, one that is lacking in STEM.
You cannot go to point Z without first going through A-Y. You cannot write legislation, make movies, make music, or do just about anything outside of engineering without first understanding literary analysis. Context, themes, critical thinking, taking an idea and making it into a thing that conveys that idea - that is what the humanities is.
It easy for me to say "learning about Shakespeare is useless!" But if we did not, would those highschool kids be able to read legislation? Would they even be interested in doing so?
The same principal applies. Much of schooling is "useless", as in on it's own it does not produce value. But it is a stepping stone to things that DO produce value.
You learned your times tables so you can pass Calculus 2, which you never use, so now you can be a software engineer. And you got there by problem solving, not by learning to code. You remove a piece from the Jenga tower and it crumbles.
People often misunderstand what they do or what things are for. Literary analysis is not for understanding what Proust is saying. No. Literary analysis is for understanding what EVERYONE is saying. Higher education is not for a job, for a degree, or for graduation. It is for learning to learn. If you don't know how to learn you are no better than a tree or a dog.
You generally want a few scholars on low burn keeping the knowledge alive and contemporary. The idea that something can be studied in totality and then put away safely across generations is farce.
They could instead produce lectures for society - "podcasts" - and continue their mind-numbing paper writing, if that's truly what they want to do all day (hint: no they don't).
This is how you turn your society’s intellectual storehouses into propaganda. Lost to the West, about how Byzantine scholars preserved Roman knowledge through to the Enlightenment, is worth picking up.
What I believe you are saying is that the "popular" researchers will get ad-spend to fund their "research" that won't be peer reviewed. Why even bother publishing research, if no one reads anymore? It would just devolve into a popularity contest and following trends. Those trends will just be co-opted by monied interests.
The esoterism is due to the fact that there is a body of research that you need to know to understand the new research. Just because you can't understand the topic in a short sound bite does not mean it is not worth researching. Not all of the research is intended to be consumed by a lay public either.
Many podcasts and Patreon exclusives are behind paywalls and there is no expectation of peer-review.
In regards to calling this a "college model", not all research is done at college there is also thinktanks (institutions) and industry research which are funded by governments as well.
I think governments should be accountable for making sure the research is rigorous, has a social benefit, and is publicly available.
Forgive me, but I do not think that is a considered position. I think it comes from bigotry
Proust, Elvis, Snoop Dog, and Satoshi Nakamoto are all important to our culture as it is.
It is important to understand culture and society to be able to have meaningful social policy. Social policy that makes good use of our tax dollars
First, you seem to be addressing the weakest form of their argument, not the strongest. It's reasonable to understand that some disciplines become obsolete or outdated.
Second, you framed your point as a rhetorical question with an obvious answer. At best, it waste people's time on a low latency communication platform, at worst, it is condescending and a common from of trolling.
In my experience, effective communication means addressing the strongest interpretation of what they're saying, and cutting to the chase by bringing your strongest most relevant points.
It's a good point insofar as it shows the institution has never been static.
The oldest known university in europe wasn't about technology. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A0_di_Bologna
The former is held in much higher regard as far as social standing goes even if we probably need many more of the latter, it requires lots of training as well, and you can even earn pretty good money.
This has not been true in my experience, I can't say I did it on purpose but I'm very thankful my primary profession is as a knowledge worker and I took on a trade as a side-hustle after the fact. A professional carpenter around here makes about $18-25/hr for what is a fairly time and labor intensive job with tight margins since customers are usually really price sensitive.
Also my first thought was more towards craftsmen like electricians, plumbers or basically anyone working within the field of renewable energies/heating (espeically heat pumps)/insulating older houses. And at least those are in such high demand where i am at that they can demand high prices.
Colleges being mainly a place for elites to fraternize, if it ever really existed, was a short lived phenomenon and certainly not how they were founded or the role they serve now. No one is giving out hundred thousand dollar plus loans so that you can learn for the sake of learning.
> Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests
There were three advanced schools (~graduate departments) at the typical medieval university: medicine, law, and theology.
> For much of American history colleges were places for farmers or engineers to learn their crafts.
I'm guessing you are basing this claim on the Morrill Act, which was to "provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the Mechanic arts."[0] It certainly doesn't describe the earlier American colleges like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, King's College (later Columbia), etc.
But even the state colleges that were founded with the help of the Morrill Act typically had loftier ambitions than acting as craft schools. e.g. from the inaugural speech of the founding of the University of California:
"The University is the most comprehensive term which can be employed to indicate a foundation for the promotion at diffusion of knowledge--a group of agencies organized to advance the arts and sciences of every sort, and to train young men as scholars for all the intellectual callings of life." [1]
But surely schools like Texas Agricultural and Mechanical were founded from the beginning with a focus on those practical skills? Nope: "Despite its name, the college taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on classical studies, languages, literature, and applied mathematics." [2]
[0]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/morrill-act
[1]: https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb267nb0qk&brand=oac4&doc.v...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Texas_A%26M_Univers...
You mentioned there were 3 advanced schools at the typical medieval university. While this is true, what I said was what the first ones were founded as which was the divinity school.
Then your claims about what a founder said in his speech about what he hoped the school would one day become is pretty irrelevant to what I said and no way makes me wrong. Overall a pretty bizarre response.
Not really. Higher education started with Ancient Egypt's "School of Life" (surveying, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc - physical sciences) and "School of Death" (religion, philosophy etc - social sciences). Both were intended to produce graduates who would do actual jobs rather than being places of elite making connections or priests reciting religious texts.
“Colleges” aren’t a particular well-defined class. “Universities” in the usual sense are specifically defined as distinguished from ecclesiastical schools, though the first were founded by religious communities, they had secular as well as religious degree programs.
I myself considered a track that would lead to law school, and one of the things that stopped me was there were a growing number of lawsuits against schools for falsely inflating their numbers.
99% of college students and 100% of college administrators whose schools will all cease to exist if they can't convince those students to enroll and pay tuition.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-a...
The natural employer of the social sciences grad is the government- social workers, city planners, etc. This type of government funding has been under attack at all levels of government since the 80's. We don't see any benefit to, say, sociology, because we've bought the idea that those benefits only go to those that don't 'deserve' them, and are paid for by taking what I've 'earned'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
where on earth are the management consultancies supposed to steal their "ideas" from to generate new fads now. I'm for sure none of them have had an original thought of their own.
Maslows hierarchy of needs, while possibly inaccurate, is a very usefull model and concept to have. As our understanding of human condition improves, we need specific terms to understand them.
Imagine is there was no word for love or hunger… for aristicracy or oligarchy… etc.
This is a problem endemic to social sciences due to the replication crisis. Lots of social scientists in this article are saying that their field is important to the economy, but given they mainly produce results that don't replicate (~30% replicate last I checked), maybe they should focus on improving that so their ROI is actually compelling.
> Seems like we need people who study societies to help figure it out.
No, we need people who understand robust quantitative analysis and empirical methodologies. Sociologists are clearly not them. Open science and preregistration initiatives help a lot, but I should note that social sciences were also the most vociferous objectors to such changes.
Even if the problem were related to robust quantitative analysis, the question of why so many people are failing to apply particular methods isn't a question for physics or chemistry.
Yes, I'm aware of the reproducibility numbers, that's why I said social science was the absolute worst, by far. Despite only 50% of medical papers replicating, they've still provided significant improvements over the past few decades. Ditto with chemistry.
The same cannot be said for sociology and psychology. CBT is still the tool with the best track record and that was created in the 1960s. The robust, replicated results from sociology since the 1980s have modest effect sizes and are basically things we already knew, eg. that social isolation is not good, and that social norms influence people's behaviour.
> Even if the problem were related to robust quantitative analysis, the question of why so many people are failing to apply particular methods isn't a question of physics or chemistry.
Neither is it a question of sociology or psychology. Science is a systematic, self-correcting process that should be agnostic to any factors, including human fallibility, conflicts of interest, AI generated nonsense, etc.
They've never needed new ideas before. Why start now?
Out of a total university income of $4 billion per annum from a variety of sources https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-university-sector/how...
It does seem misguided to assume that no research in the social sciences or humanities can drive economic benefits. Aside from economics which can obviously drive insights and recommendations of economic value, psychology includes e.g. industrial-organizational psychology (which can help teams and organizations be effective today), developmental psychology/educational psychology (which should inform education policy), etc. While I can understand a desire to ensure funding is targeted at readily applicable areas, this seems like it cuts off potentially valuable opportunities.
I think this type of work is necessary. It's sad that we have only a handful of people who've thought about society in ways that we can quote... e.g. Chomsky et al. But, sadly, we have to fund the people somehow at least...
NZ in general is starting to suffer from the swings in partisan politics, despite our MMP system. Similar problems happen with bread and butter infrastructure projects.
This looks like a combination of boorish managerialism and politically motivated budgeting - but maybe someone from NZ could comment?
If you have a headache cutting your head is not the optimal remedy.
Then there's economics that tries to take actual people into account, which you basically have to do by experiment. E.g. one thing I looked up recently: do blind auctions or open bids gain more profit (answer was inconclusive). That's more like social science. More relevant questions but less reliable answers.
Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core science research too.
But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather than a one time catastrophe.
My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in feast times, let alone in famine.
Science is in a similar position. The shortfalls they’re talking about now are shortfalls they created last year and left to rot so they could have a crisis now.
It’s cynical and depressing.
Can you point to a link showing this?
Officially:
Our revised budget for 2024/25 is a $1.1 billion deficit. This is significantly lower than the $1.76 billion deficit we were heading towards without our cost reduction programme,” Ms Apa says
Choices need to be made, compromises decided. And everybody will complain that the decisions were wrong for them.
His response was "what's the point of fighting?" And even as apocrypha I think it gets to a point: if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society?
Sure, NZ is financially fucked. I get it. Cut down all the forests, sell the water, sell the land, sell the bees. Sell the lifestyle to Peter Theil.
I like New Zealand. It's not perfect. Cutting social science won't make it better any more than cutting te reo will.
"The flogging will continue until morale improves" also comes to mind.
Helping the economy by cutting wages and living conditions? Is that what they want people to study?
NZ has been broke for decades. They survive on the smell of an oily rag. This is selling the oily rag.
(An Ozzie btw)
This is literally true in the sense that social science isn’t a science because it encompasses numerous sciences, but it is not true if the intent to say “social science (which isn’t science)”.
(Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a laboratory, but then those issues exist for some phyiscal and life sciences as well.
I should have resisted the temptation to repeat the slur.
Demographics couldn't be more important in a world dominated by millions of refugees. Or, for example, we'll be arguing about vaccines forever and having people who study why that is, is important. I think social sciences should be funded properly.
I think NZ will regret this, just like the UK lived to regret Thatcher de-funding Russian studies, only to fail to seize advantages in the end of the cold war: insufficient people with skills facing Russia.
I'm a computer scientist (which isn't a science)
I find it hard to imagine what the UK could have done in terms of taking advantage at the end of the cold war. I mean maybe if we had all moved to Germany then we would have been well placed to get the benefits that those folks got. On the other hand we did, eventually, get to shut down the British Army of the Rhine which saved a lot of money, and a bunch of skilled labour from eastern europe migrated to the UK as well. What potential benefits from a Russian engagment could the UK have realised?
During the initial rapprochement years British banking was nothing like as present in the Russian denationalisation and the emergence of the oligarch kleptocracy. The decision of the Russian elites to invest in London came much much later.
Social sciences have deeply problematic methodologies and the IRB is a cancer that's no longer about ethics but gatekeeping.
The implicit claim that you're making is that state funded academic studies of social science are important for a balanced, happy society. But where's the evidence that this is the case? Someone could argue (and at times have) that the state should fund religious institutions because they're necessary for a happy society. But some would counter that religion isn't necessary for a happy society, while others might counter that religion is important for a happy society but that it's unnecessary for the state to support it.
If we're making the claim that these things should be funded by the state, and that they're important for a happy society, then those claims should be backed up by some fairly strong evidence.
Academics have to apply for funding and one big criteria over the years has been it's "social impact".
So there's three things. The politics of those in charge of funding. The change of academia to only allow research deemed socially useful (utilitarianism). And the third is the co-adoption of researchers themselves.
As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical not to cut the funding.
Furthermore these organisations have, over the years enlarged and entrenched themselves. This is why millions are spent on thousands of people to monitor DEI of the academics.
> As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical
If it were that easy it'd have been done already. You can't tell radical activists to just be reasonable.
Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.
If you want to argue that we should put into funding a specific project to look into the benefits of social science, you can do that.
But saying that we should do widespread funding of a discipline in order to find out if a discipline is actually worth it, and then after decades of doing widespread funding of that discipline you say "well, I don't have any evidence that it's worth it, because you have to keep finding it to find the evidence," is, to be frank, bizarre.
Imagine if we did this for other fields. We putting funding into homeopathy for decades. Someone comes along and makes the claim that we need to continue doing this, in order for society to be healthy. Someone asks what the evidence for this is, and the reply is "we have to keep funding homeopathy to get the evidence!"
(I never said, claimed or argued any of the things you mention in your reply, so I'm not addressing those points)
> Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers.
This is almost tautological depending on where those fields lie between physics and philosophy.
Chemistry is just applied Physics. Biology is just applied Chemistry. Neurology is just applied biology.
But psychology (and by extension, sociology) is firmly on the Philosophy side of the fence in my uneducated opinion.
Which is what has been done, and why NZ is defunding it.
My research sort of straddles statistics, epidemiology, neurogenetics, and social sciences, and my impression is there's a great deal of stuff that doesn't become interesting to people until it involves social sciences. I say this from the perspective of someone who often wants the math and whatnot to be more appealing to people when it's not.
You can take some model, or method, or advance, and if it sits somewhere in a wetlab or physics building, no one cares. But if you make it about relationships, or money, or happiness, or children's social development, it becomes interesting.
The value is so built into the fabric of these things we don't even recognize it half the time. It becomes another physics grant, or engineering grant, or medicine grant. They're social science in nature, but god forbid you call it that because it's seen as soft or irrelevant even though that's the thing people are actually most interested in. People don't give a damn about memory models in bare-metal programming, or electrical engineering, but they do care about being able to talk to their relatives on the other side of the globe.
The other thing that always strikes me as odd about these discussions and decisions is we as people are, well social beings. So do you want to leave the study of our social behavior and experiences to ... what exactly? Religious theory? Astrology? What else is there than scientific study of psychosocial phenomena? Are you saying that social phenomena shouldn't be studied at all? That it should be studied nonscientifically?
Within the social sciences there's a well-known phenomenon of people coming in from elsewhere and thinking they can solve all the problems because they're physicists, or chemists, or whatever, and that you can just slap whatever paradigm works in that to study psychological or socioeconomic phenomena. It's seen as naive, and it inevitably fails because it doesn't scale up to the population level, or doesn't address the difficulties of the real-world phenomenon as it is, or whatever.
There's also the problem that some of the biggest contributions of social science aren't what people think they are. Modern meta-analysis and preregistered replication research both came from psychological research for example (meta-analysis from clinical and educational psychology), and I doubt people realize that. But it's widespread in biomedical research, and should probably be applied more widely in many other fields. In certain ways it's more scientifically rigorous than what happens in a lot of biophysical science. But it goes against the stereotype of what "psychosocial research" is.
All developed countries are struggling with fertility declines. If all you have are economists, they will suggest economic solutions (i.e. offer incentives, lower costs of parenthood). A sociologist will tell you that alone won't work, you need to create a culture where child-raising is the social norm and is cool. Ally that with economic incentives and maybe we stand a chance.
But don't worry. Let's get rid of social sciences. My people have a saying "a person who is not knowledgeable about why a fence exists, should be wary of removing the fence"
L
I’m usually supportive of fundamental research where there are no specific benefits known ahead of time, because the track record of fundamental research is pretty good in terms of eventual payoff - but some of the social sciences are definitely on the soft end of this, and the examples given in the article don’t seem to make a strong case for being something NZ needs, when considered alongside all the other things NZ needs.
One of the examples mentioned studies population changes during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research. Such research provides a better understanding of the history and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ society with respect to the economic and political plight of these groups.
The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual level, as well as a community level. Our shared past, heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,... are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount within that never-ending debate.
In a way, defunding research which studies particular indigenous communities within society is tantamount to effacing those communities from a larger national historical identity. However, doing so will never end that drive communities have to remember and to assert their own history and identity.
That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical, cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is fundamental research. And an important one at that.
However, I can do these things without studying social science. Basically what you described is "talking to people" and "gathering information"
We are definitely not. I'm saying that as someone researching how to use computational methods to model human behavior. We know very little about human behavior/mind/brain or society at that level.
avail yourself of the thousands still at work in other allied societies
the world has more people at work pursuing pure academics than ever, and they are sharing their work
Is it 'fucked' in same way some folks from say Staten island or New Jersey say its fucked since they are not central Manhattan so everything else is subpar or wrong? I don't think rich people want to have their SHTF backup location in shithole, you have prettier cheaper places all over the world, yet folks want to go there.
If you meant there are issues, sure they are everywhere, even in nordics or Switzerland. Not an interesting nor helpful position.
Maybe f*cked is hyperbole but if you don't already own property it is quite difficult to sustain a reasonable standard of living (let alone "get ahead") as a wage earner.
I love NZ but it didn't make economic sense to stay.
National have started an "austerity" programme, tens of thousands of civil servants have been laid off, housing is disgustingly expensive (and the quality of it is awful as well), the price of goods and food is pretty expensive (even dairy products that are produced here are often more expensive than in Europe).
The location's only great strategically if you ignore the (huge) future earthquake potential.
Cities like Wellington have also had a chronic lack of infrastructure investment, so there are HUGE issues with water / sewage leaks - pretty much every week there's a new water main leaking somewhere in the city.
(Have lived here for 10 years, and am looking to return to Europe - things are going downhill pretty fast here IMO).
But that's the issue - people want paradise and absolute success on all fronts of existence, now, I mean right fucking now or they are losers. Its immature approach to life that will bring you tons of unhappiness and 0 of opposite, and it definitely won't help you move forward.
Or - good luck with return to Europe. What you write is valid here too if you haven't noticed. Maybe not sewage but some other problem XYZ which is completely absent or non-issue in NZ.
Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming of russian attack on Europe, subtle support of far far right all the way to xenophobia and racism. EU green deal is killing European (not only) automotive industry right now and they just double down on rules, who cares how many coal plants China or India fire up. That's up to 15 million jobs going slowly (or fast) away. That's economical future being taken away from financial core of EU by at best some idealistic bureaucrats. Tens of millions of immigrants and refugees, you see them everywhere, mostly without work, barely surviving. What's the plan for them? Nothing that makes long term sense.
EU is in decline and things are not that great for most folks. We don't have the illusion of 'American dream' to keep poor people in line and chasing some illusion of potential to massive success. And that decline ain't gonna magically stop just because it will be annoying.
They come from Europe to NZ - that is literally travelling the world.
There's a reason a large proportion of kiwis move to Australia and not the other way around.
> People want paradise and absolute success on all fronts of existence, now, I mean right fucking now or they are losers.
Complete straw man argument.
> I have trouble having sympathies with rich folks complaining that they can’t buy central houses in main capital city right out of pocket from first 2 years salary
Ad hominem. Try engaging with the actual point rather than resorting to thinly veiled personal attacks.
> Same situation all over the world
False equivalence.
> Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming of Russian attack on Europe
> EU green deal is killing European (not only) automotive industry right now
This bizzare tangent has absolutely nothing to do with addressing or refuting any of the specific points made about NZ's economy, infrastructure or cost of living.
> You should travel a bit around the world, you would then understand how high NZ stands globally
First of all, they have. They are an immigrant. Not to mention its an appeal to relative privation. You can't just dismiss legitimate criticisms by claiming they are not valid because worse problems exist elsewhere.
> Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming of Russian attack on Europe… Tens of millions of immigrants and refugees, you see them everywhere
Appeal to emotion.
> People want paradise and absolute success… it’s an immature approach
You're projecting.
Do social scientists actually produce the knowledge required to create a balanced, happy society?
But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified with a certain political worldview, to the point where the suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more palatable to gen pop.
Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are surprised when the people on the other side of that social engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to understand.
NZ$75 million is almost negligible? How can New Zealand do any kind of research or afford to just hire graduate students?
https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...
"The annual tourist influx to New Zealand grew 40%, from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2006, has been attributed in large part to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon. 6% of international visitors cited the film as a reason for traveling to the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20N....
Rejecting empirically-proven supply-demand pricing models (no DSGE, I’m talking supply chain models that predict end prices) because it’s politically inconvenient is exactly the sort of nonsense the social sciences are criticised for.
I thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume.
It's pointed phrasing, but it works. When we have overwhelming evidence for a phenomenon that has solid theoretical foundations, it's fair to say it's empirically proven. Not absolutely or mathematically proven. But if you've read Hume or even Popper, you already know that.
The core point remains the case: a lot of economics is uncomfortable for some people (there isn't a strong partisan leaning to this tendency, in my experience) and so they come up with elaborate arguments for why that evidence should be discarded. The top comment illustrates this [1].
Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the chance.
I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.
Philosophy helped me to think critically and find edge cases. Psych taught me about different parts of the brain and their functions. Soci taught me my professor was a giant fraud and the entire discipline was a 'solution' looking for a problem.
> I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.
If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a counterargument.
There are some fields that study universal facts about biology or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these will largely yield similar results that can be applied anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating research done in one population on a different population, but humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly necessary.
On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.
This means that even if the net return on investment for medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their own medical research. They can always take advantage of what others are learning about biology, but if they don't research the way that New Zealand works then no one will.
The $ allows the US to have a trillion dollar deficit but most have to start cutting.
Also, discussions about "living within your means" almost always lead to questions about "who?" and "what is really leaving within your means?"
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replicati...
Computer science is also pretty embarrassing as a field of science: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproduci... Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well.
Or it's a wake up call to shift focus to better methodologies that will reproduce more reliably. Time will tell.
> Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well.
Lots of computer science research produces useful products that make their own money directly, and so the need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main criterion. This is not true of pure research in fields that only produce knowledge. Reproducibility is key to be confident you actually have knowledge.
That research isn't being conducted by academics applying for pure research funding from the Marsden fund...
That paper investigates whether papers are well-formed such that the results can be reproducible. That's fair - many research papers today are vaguely written with insufficient information. However, that's not the issue at hand. The issue here is that, even with a perfect paper, social sciences are unable to produce replicable results.
Seeing this sentiment popping up a lot in this thread, but yet planes still fly, solar and batteries are improving like crazy...
We are seeing real tangible results that come from the output of other fields
We cannot really say the same of the softer sciences
I reckon it'll be the artists next ...
That said, isn't the headline misleading? It's not all support, it's all support - from this particular Marsden Fund.
I'm a progressive socialist and it worries me. I don't want to live in a country like that. I want a good welfare/health system, strong LGBT rights etc. My own country the Netherlands became neoliberal (hard capitalist) right at first and now radical right. I wouldn't want to live there anymore and luckily I don't. But it's annoying to have to emigrate all the time. Especially because I can't even vote in the countries I live in and it takes 10 years to change nationality.
I've always thought I might end up living in New Zealand eventually because I think it's the most beautiful country in the world and I really respect how they protect the beautiful nature they have. It would be an amazing place to retire, going on long hikes through their beautiful environment.
"The intimate technology shaping millions of lives: Exploring the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences." - 870k NZD
"It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa" - 870k NZD
"Sensationalising Sleep: Discourses and practices of sleep in Aotearoa" - 360K NZD
etc..
From the Marsden fund 2022: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...
Throwing the baby out with the bath water makes great sound bites for politicians, but weaker societies for everyone else.
or have an arguable, positive overall long-term return on investment hopefully, (e.g. infrastructure spending, sending smart kids to college)
or will enjoy widespread public support and provide non-monetary benefits, (e.g. public parks, libraries, maternity leave)
or will be widely accepted as a core function of government (e.g. police and military), or a morally good and virtuous act (e.g. caring for the disabled, foreign aid)
or will be the pet project of someone powerful, semi-useful, and inexpensive enough no-one cares to fight them over it (e.g. opera subsidy)
or will convince people they're one of the above regardless of the truth of the matter
or will be at risk of cancellation.
Fortunately, the rest of us not computers, and are happy that our tax dollars go to symphonies and art and orphanages and other "unproductive" works.
Do you think it’s not important to know whether all these apps that people are feeding private medical data into actually have any benefits?
Do you think studying why a certain group of children have worse wellbeing than a different group of children is not useful?
Considering how important sleep is you don’t think determining the impact media has on people’s sleep is not important?
I’m absolutely ok with the idea that some research gets funded that shouldn’t. But the fact that even your cherry picked sample shows research that even reading a couple of sentences of the abstract shows a lot of value indicates that this may be even less of an issue than I had imagined.
re: the transgender one, it seems to be one of these social science projects that just involves interviewing people. From the project page: "This discourse-based research will interview twelve transgender young people". Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of money? I don't think so.
It is called corruption.
This is the most likely explanation. Hanlon's razor is not relevant anymore, it's actually the opposite these days.
People who don't want to see this reality are just polezniye duraki that further allow the corrupt people in charge to get away with it.
Slightly derailing the topic, one only has to take a look at US goverment budget for like 0.001 secs to see how deep this problem goes. There are invoices like $500 a piece for a fastener.
The duraki will come up to say "oh but that's probably a fastener that has to be created in space from the rarest material available to be used in an extremely sensitive physics experiment". It's not and you're making a fool of yourself. The real purpose of those fasteners is to get someone a new condo in Miami.
It's just corruption.
> There are invoices like $500 a piece for a fastener.
Please provide an example of this fantastic claim including the accounting methodology.
The example that comes to my mind is the $10,000.00 toilet seat. That turns out to have been three toilet seats for the C-5 that had to be custom made because they were no longer available. They are now 3-D printed for $300.00. These numbers don’t explain what was involved in making the $10,000.00 one, how it was installed, or how long it lasts.
https://www.military.com/defensetech/2018/07/11/air-force-no...
Here's a few of them,
https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/30/air-force-ove...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/04/27/pentagon-over...
There's even this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42410606
This was a 5 minute Google Search, I can guarantee there's much more overspending going on. Oh wait ... yeah, why would one believe me if I haven't performed a detailed audit of all US Govervement expenses and published it to support my claim? Oh no, you got me this time ;).
Wasteful military spending is one of those things people “just know” but the reality is often more complex than a headline.
Or at least live to your own standard,
>turns out to have been three toilet seats
Where's that info?
>that had to be custom made
Where's that info?
>because they were no longer available
Where's that info?
>These numbers don’t explain what was involved [...]
Where's the explanation behind them?
What is the "accounting methodology" that was used?
Anyone could play that game and keep the conversation stalled indefinitely.
It’s not about stalling the conversation. It’s about forming opinions based on actual facts.
72 people.
The full abstract is:
> This research explores transgender young people’s experiences of positive family support in Aotearoa. Family support is protective for transgender youth but we lack evidence of what it looks like for young people of diverse cultures. Our project diversifies research on this topic, extending it from parents to young people themselves and their broader family, from monocultural majority to ethnically diverse participants, and from trauma to resilience. Our gender and culturally diverse team will interview twelve transgender young people (3 Māori, 3 Pasifika, 3 Asian, and 3 Pākehā) and five each of their most valued supporters. We will use the innovative method of reflective drawing, asking participants to draw and discuss their experiences of family support. Our visual and verbal discourse analysis will paint a picture of how families successfully support transgender youth, drawing on perspectives of gender diversity and family in Māori, Pasifika, Asian and Pākehā communities. This will be the first discourse-based research in this area, advancing knowledge in transgender studies, family studies and language and gender. It will explore how young people and their families challenge oppressive social structures through discourse and provide insights for those seeking to be part of the village that raises a transgender child.
With social sciences much of the “qualitative research” involves interviewing a small handful of people, interpreting their responses to fit a preconceived narrative, and then stretching the results into a lengthy paper. This is usually done by using the most convoluted synonyms available and repeatedly invoking terms like “intersectionality”, “lived experience”, and “power structures” to lend the work an academic veneer. The result? A paper that boils down to anecdotal evidence supporting the author’s opinion, which is almost certainly whatever best meshes with their political ideology.
In my book, pure numbers can’t capture the complex realities that people face in their lives.
People can write a blog if they want to document their own stories. We don't need to use taxpayer funds to go interview them and we definitely do not need to be trying to draw scientific conclusions from small handfuls of people's anecdotes
When it was noticed that people working with cows (and who were therefore often exposed to cow pox) didn’t seem to get chickenpox, this seems to me an example of a collection of anecdotes, and yet it was evidence.
A research project that produces a small collection of anecdotes is not scientific research, it is journalism. There's nothing wrong with that. Those anecdotes might be important to share, they might be interesting to hear, they might be historically relevant. But we cannot draw scientific conclusions from them, which is what we should expect from scientific research projects
1. So what? We do research, maybe we find something out, and are we going to do anything?
2. Would the money be better spent on programmes that do something instead of specific research.
3. What's the process for getting funded, and are decision makers bringing their own biases and beliefs into that process?
In the context of NZ which is slashing spending on many many programmes, you might as well cancel all this research spending. Even if research finds that we should intervene and provide support for some kind of minority group, there's no way it's going to get funded anyway.
They're not even making the app. They're trying to find out if an app would be useful, for $870k NZD.
It seemed to be on a collision coarse in some deep way..
I don't call for total abolishing of social "sciences" funding, but we need to stop putting real sciences and social sciences together in the same budget bucket.
1st, because the citizens are misled about the money that is actually making into real science.
2nd, because we hereby pass a message that when they hear the - now - infamous words "scientists claim", they will start being educated on if we are actually talking about proper scientists from physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, etc, or some ideologue from sociology that was being paid by public funds to spread some political ideology by abusing the term "science".