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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (143157)	11/9/2019 1:24:04 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 364649

"Science is specific!!" I know, and the social sciences aren't.

To: koan who wrote (143157)	11/9/2019 1:35:55 PM
From: bentway	2 Recommendations Recommended By i-node Wharf Rat Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 364649

Is "Social Science" an Oxymoron? Will That Ever Change? blogs.scientificamerican.com Excerpt: ..Some social scientists—I'll call them "softies"—shrug off this criticism, because they identify less with physicists and chemists than with scholars in the humanities. Stevens Institute is a case in point: Social science falls within the jurisdiction of the Stevens College of Arts & Letters, which also encompasses philosophy, history, literature, music and my own humble discipline, science communication. As far as I can tell, my social-science colleagues aren't seething with resentment at being lumped together with the humanities folks. Other social scientists, "hardies," yearn for and believe they can eventually attain the same status as, say, molecular biology. Softies and hardies have been fighting for as long as I can remember. In 1975, for example, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson contended in his blockbuster Sociobiology that social science would only become truly scientific by embracing evolutionary theory and genetics. Horrified softies denounced sociobiology as a throwback to social Darwinism and eugenics, two of the most noxious social applications of science. The term "sociobiology" became so controversial that it is rarely used today, except by softies as an insult. Hardies nonetheless embraced the tenets of sociobiology. They tacked the term "evolutionary" to their fields—spawning disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary economics—and churned out conjectures about the adaptive origins of war and capitalism. More recently, as the prestige of neuroscience has surged, hardies have discovered the benefits of including magnetic-resonance imaging and other brain-scanning experiments in grant proposals, and they have attached the prefix "neuro" to their disciplines, yielding coinages such as neuroeconomics and neuroanthropology. Hardies also emulate the hardest science of all: physics. Thus we now have econophysics, which models economic activity with concepts borrowed from fluid dynamics, solid-state physics and statistical mechanics. (For a terrific overview, see the aforementioned The Physics of Wall Street.) This alliance has especially deep roots: Comte sometimes used the term "social physics" in lieu of sociology. But modern researchers, unlike Comte, can run their complex mathematical models on powerful computers. Softies look askance at the aspirations of hardies—with good reason. The recent recession provides a powerful demonstration of social science's limits. The world's smartest economists, equipped with the most sophisticated mathematical models and powerful computers that money can buy, did not foresee—or at any rate could not prevent—the financial calamities that struck the United States and the rest of the world in 2008. As philosopher Paul Feyerabend once said: "Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics, but it surely holds its own vis-à-vis some parts of economics." Even when fortified by the latest findings from neuroscience, genetics, and other fields, social science will never approach the precision and predictive power of the hard sciences. Physics addresses phenomena—electrons, elements, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, gravity—that are relatively simple, stable and amenable to precise mathematical definition. Gravity works in exactly the same way whether you measure it in 17th-century England or 21st-century America, in Zambia or on Alpha Centauri. Every neutron is identical to every other neutron. In contrast, the basic units of social systems—people—are all different from each other; each person who has ever lived is unique in ways that are not trivial but essential to our humanity. Each individual mind also keeps changing in response to new experiences—reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, watching Lord of the Rings, banging your head on the ice while playing pond hockey, having a baby, teaching freshman composition. Imagine how hard physics would be if every electron were the unique product of its entire history...