The cover story in this weeks New Scientist is about how genetics determines political opinions.
However, the story did have some odd assumptions. ‘Liberals’, who the New Scientist seemed to be defining as people who vote Democrat, were described as people who are “open to new ideas”. However, the basic characteristic of such a ‘liberal’ is that they are not “open to new ideas”. For example, they continue to support spending ever more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare programs, regardless of the evidence that this does not work and disregarding any argument for reforms.
‘Liberals’ have a set of assumptions that they never question – for if they questioned them they would no longer be liberals.
- More government Welfare State spending – good, anyone who opposes this hates the poor.
- Government support for the arts – good, anyone who opposes this is a philistine.
- Anti discrimination regulations – good, anyone who opposes them is a bigot.
- Anti trust regulations – good, anyone who opposes them is in the pay of big business.
And so on and so on.
So any group of ‘scientists’ who accept the assumption that “liberals are open to new ideas” are not scientists at all. Still I suppose the dream of finding an ‘anti-Progressive’ gene (or combination of genes) will continue – so they can seek to exterminate us. But then that might be interpreted as proving another finding of the studies “conservatives fear death more than liberals”.
Hard to square this with the fact that conservatives are more likely to join the armed forces than liberals are. But then I think this form of ‘science’ (depending as it does on ‘surveys’ and so on) is best described as ‘crapology’.
If they ever discover a gene for smug self-regard, you can bet 99% of “liberals” will be found to be carrying it.
I’ve never met a liberal that understood the value of freedom of association.
Some science is crap. Some is not. The trick is to understand which is which. (I would suggest that if it requires a high level of numeracy, this is a good sign, although this is still a good way short of being a sufficient condition).
I wouldn’t say that liberals are open to new ideas. Rather, they’re open to some by now quite old ideas that haven’t worked and won’t work but have the advantage of sounding very good on paper.
apex
I’m not sure the science, such as it is, is crap; though much of the interpretation almost certainly is. That personality is largely heritable and that personality goes towards forming political attitudes is extremely believable.
I suspect that both Paul and some of the liberal interpreters are making a similar mistake, in eliding attitudes and orientations with particular stereotypical policy positions, which may or may not have a covariance with the political classifications used.
Conservatism or radicalism is surely contextual, and dependent on the currency and structure of ideas in the surrounding society.
I can quite imagine that my natural contrarian tendencies might have made me an acolyte of William Morris in the 19th century. I once read an academic country-by-country survey of the extreme right in Europe. (This was more than 25 years ago, so forgive me if I do not cite.) On coming to Greece, it ran into trouble: the authors confessed their model broke down, with ALL the established political movements showing the violently particularistic nationalism that was the distinguishing feature of neo-fascist parties in other countries. The go-ahead socialists and free-lovers of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Shaw and Lawrence, were very admiring of fascism. The go-ahead socialists (and crypto-fascists) of the first half of the 21st century are neurotic puritans.
Someone reads New Scientist? Why? It’s not even funny anymore, and that was it’s best feature.
The go-ahead socialists (and crypto-fascists) of the first half of the 21st century are neurotic puritans.
Well Shaw was that’s for sure!
Y’know, there’s a reason I keep saying that academia is the wellspring of all the evil against which we strive.
This isn’t crap science. This is just crap.
Real science is physics, chemistry, biology…
This is just shite speculation.
Nick, the question I’m currently taxing my increasingly porridgy brain about is whether it’s possible to prove it’s crap. Not this particular sociological finding, or indeed any particular sociological finding. I’m musing about whether a proof that all sociology is crap can be found- a kind of Godel’s Theorem class slam-dunk.
It means going down to the basics; to mathematics. Math has something nothing else has. It’s about proof. Science (phy, chem, biology etc) aren’t about proof. Theories are always provisional. But math deals in proof. If a mathematical proof exists that social science problems are part of a class of inherently insoluble problems, e.g a proof that society is inherently a dynamical system (chaotic) and thus inherently unpredictable, it’d be Game Over for the sociologists. It should be open to a mathematical analysis. Sadly, I’m a rubbish mathematician so I doubt I’m going to get very far with this 🙂
Von Mises, Hayek et al attempted to show that economics cannot for fundamental reasons be planned, however economics as a field is too soft a “science” for proofs ever to win the day; in the end economics comes down to consenus views based on opinion (I’m a Keynesian, a Friedmanite, an Austrian). There should be a deep, incontrovertible mathematical proof that social (and thus economic) planning and analysis (beyond historian style opinion based analysis) is inherently impossible. If such a thing were rigorously demonstrated in pure math it’s Game Over, we pass Go, we collect £200 and socialism/progressivism/whatever goes into the bin.
Well, it’s something to think about while gardening, kind of thing.
Ian, I think that if something can be proved mathematically, that would make that something science by definition. What it means is that because sociology, for example, is not a science, it necessarily follows that nothing about it can be proved mathematically, including the fact that it is not in fact a science. Not encouraging, so I do hope to be proved wrong. Nick?
Ian,
I happen to know a fair bit about Kurt Godel (I wrote an MSc thesis on his work in Gneral Relativity) and I “minored” in discrete math as an undergrad…
The Incompleteness Theorems require the strict, formal, definition of all concepts used. That is why (so to speak, “logic can limit logic”*). But social “sciences” are just bunk as science. They are expressed in words which are not rigidly defined. It allows for “schools of thought” (i.e. non-comensurable paradigms) which can argue the toss over definitions (not consequences but definitions) for well over a hundred years and get nowhere. Why? Because their paradigms are essentially what they want to believe. Also because they’re gits who ought to be spayed and relegated to the hottest and noisiest jobs but I digress.
In the sciences, the real ones, there is no such pointless arguing over definitions. There are paradoxes of course but these are a means and not an end. And in anycase there is a broad agreement on such things along the lines of the basic unit in Chemistry being the atom. What’s the basic unit of society? Depends who you talk to, doesn’t it?
Kuhn in “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” suggests the reason that the social sciences have got nowhere despite the quite obvious forging ahead of real science** is that the social mob have never settled on a unifying paradigm. I agree, but I think something more needs to be added. Microbes and atoms, stars and galaxies are real (they point to something that truly exists) whereas the theories of Durkheim and Marx don’t.
These people are pussy-willows claiming the legitimacy of Newton, Maxwell and Feynman to bolster their utter shite. They are either liars or thick and probably both.
That’s no absolute fisking of “social thought” but I believe it is a piss-take to append “sciences” to “social”. It’s an abomination.
Of course they will never be convinced but so fuck. They will live pointless, tragic lives. I’d respect them more if they sat in back alleyways offering to drop their pants for food.
Less polemic. It just isn’t science. Screw ’em because they pretend it is.
BTW, not all dynamical systems are chaotic.
Lot’s are but try explaining a Lyaponov exponent to the average Social Policy Prof. It’s best done with a claw-hammer.
In short, if social scientists actually had other than micro-genitals they’d be wankers.
*Essentially that there will always be some statements in logic sophisticated enough to include the basic principles of arithmetic that are true but unprovable within that system.
Bad bot for sitting on my previous comment.
Anyway.
One can not prove MATHEMATICALLY that certain economic theories are false.
But that does not mean that one can not prove they are false.
Nor do I mean experimental proof.
Yes I am pointing at “old fashioned” logical reasoning – pointing out contradictions and mistakes of thought.
It is not “soft”.
As for sociology.
Ludwig Von Mises used this term in his youth, but he came to the conculsion it was too messed up (possibly from the start).
So he used the term “praxeology” for the study of human action.
Of which catallactics (the study of exchanges – “economics” is a bit of a misleading term due to its origins) is only part.
The study of exchanges and production is certainly a real subject (although not one that should use the methods of the natural sciences), but “praxeology” is a more difficult question.
Even we “Social Scientist” Law students despised Sociology.
We had a much simpler method than maths.
If it sounded like Sociology and smelled like sociology and tasted like sociology
Then yes, It was crap!
Reminds me of a quote from 12 Monkeys(Link):
Unfortunately, the getting better part doesn’t apply.
I checked out the original paper, which can be found at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ (requires a free subscription). The exact reference is:
John R. Alford, Carolyn L. Funk, John R. Hibbing, “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?”, American Political Science Review, May 2005
The basic issue raised by the paper certainly makes sense: certain patterns of thought and behavior could be genetically influenced, which might lead to a genetically based preference for particular ideologies. There is nothing inherently absurd or contradictory in this hypothesis. At first it seemed to me like the New Scientist journalist had put an unfair spin on the original paper, which generally has a quiet and neutral tone typical of peer-reviewed publications, but then I came across this gem:
Notice how the sentence is worded so as to include only those opinions and activities towards which the modern “liberals” indeed show more tolerance on average, thus leaving the impressions that “openness” is a characteristic virtue of the left. But I wonder what the authors would say if we included, for example, gun shows or smoking into the definition of “counter-cultural activities”? After all, such activities certainly collide with the modern establishment and ideological mainstream much more than the pre-packaged patterns of “rebellion” and “thinking for oneself” peddled by the media and the quasi-artistic posturing that nowadays passes for “counter-culture” in leftist circles! And notice how communism is the only extremist ideology included into the above list; just imagine how uncomfortable the argument would have sounded if it also compared the level of tolerance towards other sorts of extremist views!
The authors go on to define the categories of “absolutist” and “contextualist” that supposedly provide a meta-framework for all ideological divides that humanity has even known. Once we take off the sugar coating of abstruse statistics, it’s basically the usual leftist story about enlightened, open-minded progressives versus troglodyte “absolutist” reaction.
In fact, the ideological blinkers of the authors can be clearly seen from some of the very first sentences in the paper:
I’m hardly a behavioralist, but it’s pretty obvious to me that the only reason for seeing this “standard left-right spectrum” at every time and place is the ideological blindness and block-headedness of whoever wrote this. In reality, the notions of “left” and “right” have been used to designate utterly different sorts of ideologies in various times and places; the notion of “standard spectrum” is an almost complete fantasy. It is only the moralistic desire of the leftists that leads them see any ideological conflict at any time and place in terms of “left” vs. “right” so that support for the former side could be included into their norms for correct thinking.
Look, there is a problem with New Scientist. It always has some interesting titbits init, I always learn something new when I read it, but it is not objectively scientific in its presentation and editorialising; it is just so f*****g political. In this respect it is just another lefty rag, without even the depth of thought of a typical Polly Toynbee polemic.
Hell, look at its name, New Scientist, from the days when “New” in the title of anything meant lefty. Just as “progressive” does.
If such a thing were rigorously demonstrated in pure math it’s Game Over, we pass Go, we collect £200 and socialism/progressivism/whatever goes into the bin.
Ian,
Frankly I doubt it. Social sciences thought has reached the point that I doubt whether any evidence will make a difference.
May I recommend this article by Peter Risdon for those who don’t otherwise read the most excellent Free Born John.
Nick, I agree entirely with your comments, and no doubt many other people do; but that’s no use to us. Opinion in the arena of debate gets us nowhere. The question is, is social science actually science, and if it isn’t, can we prove it? If we can’t prove it isn’t, then the opinion that it isn’t is groundless and useless.
For instance, astrology isn’t science. Everybody within science agrees that astrology isn’t science. Ask any physicist, chemist, or astronomer and they will happily explain why it isn’t science. There is no controversy over whether astrology is science. It just isn’t.
So, if that statement is true, then social science is not science and should be dispensed with forthwith. Can we prove your statement to be true? If not, what provenance has it?
The problem with logic is that logic in debate is simply argument. You can make the most logical argument in the world and if people don’t want to agree with it, they won’t agree with it.
But they can’t argue with formal logic. If the primitives of social science are not rigorously defined, and that can be conclusively demonstrated as mathematical logic, then social science loses the game. Likewise, it seems to me that social science includes implicit assumptions of linearity and predictability (and indeed reproducability)- “if I adjust social input A social output B will be affected thus”. If, as it seems to me, society is a non-linear system, then such assumptions are inherently worthless. E.g. if a government relaxes gun controls, some think crime will rise. Some think it will fall. But the actual result is inherently unpredictable. Is not this unpredictability mathematically demonstrable? (I’m thinking chaos theory here).
I’m not sure if I’m getting across what I mean very well. Look at it this way; if we believe that social science is wrong, can we prove that? And if not, what justification do we have to believe that?
Good points Ivan.
Especially the one about the “scientists” only wanting us to be “open” to “counter cultural activities” that they approve of.
Ian B.
Reasoning does not have to mathematical
For example the law of noncontradiction does not have to be stated in mathematical terms – nor does one gain anything by stating it in mathematical terms.
In economics it is actually often establishment economists who hide behind mathematics – for if the equations look impressive, people can be made to forget that the assumptions behind the equations are false.
There are also other subjects that are neither natural sciences or logical reasoning subjects (such as “economics” – when done correctly).
For example, history.
When an historian says “William of Normandy landed in England in 1066” he is doing something different from when a scientist says “time is slightly faster for an object in high orbit of the Earth than it is on the surface of the Earth”.
But the historian is not doing anything soft headed.
Just as an economist saying “if you enforce a maximum price regulation under the market price for a good or service you will eventually have a shortage” is not doing anything soft headed.
Even though neither mathematical or empircial proof may be available.
Indeed “empirical evidence” may even be trotted out to “disprove” the obvious.
For example, some “economists” (of the social science type) thought that they had “proved” that minimum wage laws do not increase unemployment by pointing to a minimum wage level increase in New Jersey that was not followed by a rise in unemployment.
All they in fact proved was that they were unable to reason.
They did not even understand what market prices over time are.
Paul, what I’m saying here is that while the historian (or economist) is not doing something soft-headed, he is not doing something objective either. An historian offering an opinion of why William invaded England in 1066 is offering nothing more than an opinion. It may be an expert opinion, a wise opinion, a sensible one, but it’s still just an opinion. The methodologies of history and economics are useless to us, since they do not and cannot prove anything. A particular opinion may be dominant, then another, but these subjects cannot bring us closer to a truth, since that isn’t what their methodologies achieve, or even try to achieve. Looking at economics, the fact that there are fundamental disagreements, fundamentally different schools, shows that. If the Austrians are correct, why can’t they prove that they are? What is the value of a predictive subject which cannot prove the validity of its predictions?
Nick M:
However, they are very successful with inventing new unifying paradigms every generation or two, and their new paradigms, while mostly dealing with imaginary entities and concepts or hopelessly skewed distortions of real ones, always manage carry a moralistic load that enables them to successfully attack any opposition to the ideological consensus of the trade without the need to come up with any real arguments. Got a counterargument to this or that part of the correct-thinking canon? You’ll immediately be given a label within the present paradigm that has the moral connotations of grimmest evil.
For example, one major paradigm that is currently emerging is that of “authoritarianism”. Until recently, this used to be a clear and precise English word — unlike so many others, it was largely unpolluted by malicious overuse in ideological polemics. However, right now, the word is in the process of being redefined to designate exclusively those forms of authoritarianism that are in ideological opposition to the modern left. Take a look, for example, at this recent book(Link) by a respectable, mainstream academic (certainly prominent enough to be published by the Harvard University Press). In particular, check out the tests for “authoritarianism” in Chapter 1, and observe how the only threats to freedom that are admitted as “authoritarian” are those to which the modern leftists are opposed. In fact, even in cases where the opinion embraced by the leftist consensus has long become mainstream, and where one has to be one hell of a rebel or even an outright criminal to oppose it, such opposition will still score you points for “authoritarianism”!
I’m pointing this out as an excellent current example of a moralistic paradigm being created. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years, the standard libertarian opposition to the nanny-statist micro-regulation of every aspect of life will be sufficient ground to be branded as an “authoritarian” by the lefties.
hmm. Looks like they’re stealing the word authoritarian the same way they stole “liberal”.
I love this bit-
“You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America.”
Ian B:
The problem is that “social science” is an umbrella term for a large variety of intellectual pursuits. Some of them are solid pieces of empirical work that don’t go beyond collecting interesting data about various measurable traits of human societies. There is certainly nothing unscientific about examining, for example, how various aspects of people’s worldview and lifestyle correlate with each other and with various factors in their social environment, as long as the realistic limitations of the methodology are admitted and no attempt is made to put an ideological spin on the results. On the other end of the spectrum are horrible pieces of meaningless juggling with words and/or skewing and misrepresentation of data for the purpose of scoring moral and ideological points. Most of the work done under the umbrella of “social science” lies somewhere inbetween.
Thus, there is no logical possibility for proving a blanket statement that “social science is wrong”. As long as one stays within the constraints of clear empirical observations and clear logical thinking, it is possible to scientifically reason about “social” variables just like any others. The problem however is that (1) these limitations are much more severe than in physical sciences, and (2) the temptation to go beyond valid reasoning for ideological reasons is much stronger; for these reasons, the percentage of malicious junk is far higher in social than in physical sciences.
As Hobbes put it well:
Book burning is not so popular nowadays, but illogical disputes and moralistic slanders against the messengers are certainly more popular than ever when it comes to any issues where the manifest truth touches the wrong nerves.
Ivan, what I’m arguing here is that a science of society, any science of society, has by its nature, unavoidably, no predictive power. Zip. Zilch. Nada. None. I’m saying that that would apply whether the science was done by socialsits, conservatives, libertarians or anarchists or anyone else. What I’m saying is a “strong” principle, I guess. It’s not just what we know as social science in our society which is fundamentally broken, but any attempt by anybody, however objective they attempt to be, to create a science of society. The best it can do is collect subjective factoids. It inherently has no predictive power. The occasional apparently correct prediction or social plan that “works” is just coincidence.
But obviously the above statement requires proof, otherwise it’s just an opinion and as such worthless. I’m wondering if such a proof can be demonstrated.
I think I’m claiming that the first two of those are fundamentally unattainable, that “social variables” are impossible to define objectively and thus worthless, and that even if all that were possible no predictions are possible because society is a non-linear system and it is impossible to collect enough data to describe your initial conditions at any given point in time.
Ian B:
Well, in my opinion, you don’t necessarily have to demonstrate predictive power to do something I’d call valid science. Just collecting empirical observations about the world, without making any attempts at forming predictive theories of them, can be a worthwhile and enlightening intellectual pursuit. In this regard, there is definitely some value to what (some of the) social scientists do. If you insist that you can’t call it “science” if it doesn’t include forming predictive theories, fair enough. However, there are examples of purely descriptive activities in natural sciences too, for example lots of what biologists do.
When it comes to theories having predictive power, you are largely right. However, there are apparent counterexamples. To take one example, the elementary laws of microeconomics do have some non-trivial predictive power. Higher level economics, especially macroeconomics, indeed has all the flaws that you mentioned, but the basics are always giving the right predictions — for example, price controls and rationing will always have the consequences predicted by the basic model of supply and demand curves, no matter how much ideologues of certain brands would like it to be otherwise, and no matter what cultural, social, political, historical… context we’re considering. If you count linguistics as a social science, lots of it can also be used as another example of perfectly valid science with empirically justified predictive theories and everything. Admittedly, relative to the entire output generated by social scientists, it’s not much, but at least it’s something, which is enough do disprove your above blanket statements.
As for the “proof” that most of social science is bunk, I think that an argument along these lines can be formulated in fairly simple terms. With human society, it’s impossible to set up artificial, unnaturally simple systems to which theories can be easily applied in order to be clearly validated or falsified (a.k.a. experiments). Thus, social scientists are restricted to observing the natural social phenomena in all their complexity, each with an infinite number of uncontrollable and often unknown, but potentially relevant variables. In such a situation, one must often resort to abstruse statistics in order to attempt to filter out the relevant information from the sheer noise, and in any case, one must ignore many variables that are presumed irrelevant (and relevant variables might easily exist that nobody is even aware of). In such a situation, the reliability of the end result is questionable at best. Add to it the fact that the usual subject matter of social sciences is rarely of the sort that, to quote Hobbes again, “crosses no man’s ambition, profit, or lust”, and we basically get a recipe for spouting ideology with a quasi-scientific sugar coating.
I propose: science is about things that can be measured.
By this standard – “social science” is not science.
I was specifically replying to Ian’s point comparing SS to math…
Ian, forget chaos theory – it’s a very specific thing properly understood. There are many other ways a system can be hideously complicated and impossible to predict. Chaos is a way to get complicated results from simple systems. Oddly enough you can also get complicated results from complicated systems. That’s why I never got around to writing down my grand unified theory of London.
I’ll just add (and I think this significant) that in all Paul Mark’s many contributions to Samizdata on society, politics, economics, history, political economy etc. He has not once referred to his reasoning as scientific. Reasoned, logical, invariably compelling but he doesn’t cloak himself in the “armour” of science.
I suspect the SS add the second S because their arguments are weak and they feel the need to steal the gravitas of the scientist. Hence the pseudo theories and the reams of statistics signifying nothing. It reminds me of the Chewbacca Defense. It also reminds me of a saying of Wolfgang Pauli – “not even wrong”.
They emote leftism and then give it a sheen of “scientific respectability” so that it moistens Polly’s gusset. Interesting she’s named for a parrot.
Ivan,
Exactly, they shift paradigms and the meanings of words like sand-dunes in the desert. Words like “Progressive”, “Liberal”, “Ethical”* spring to mind. And that is why it’s impossible to debate with ’em meaningfully. I also should have read your last paragraph in it’s entirety. You’ve nailed it, have a cigar! I’d just add that the SS are having to do this within a historical context as society changes and develops. The Hobbes quote is a belter too, have a beer!
*On the MSM that almost exclusively now means “Green”.
I read this article in the NS and my reactions to it were similar. It was certainly an oddity and made a number of dubious assumptions and somewhat hazy logical links, but please don’t tar ‘science’ with the same brush.
Over the past few years I have been reading it, NS has become increasingly politicised in favour of the left, with the “editor’s comment” section at the front now dedicated to defending a government regulator or pushing for more regulation, particularly on “safety” issues as well as climate change, more often than it features an article about actual science. Not that I am saying that the safety of chemicals and climatology are not science, but there is a difference between reporting some or other finding and drawing subjective political conclusions from a finding – the latter is not science and never has been.
The article in question… well, again, I’m not entirely sure why it was even there. It seemed to be sociology more than anything, the only link to the natural sciences being the assertion that genes had something to do with it, on almost no evidence (“identical twins have more similar political opinions than non-identical twins, so it MUST be the genes!” Err, how about the possibility that people who spend their whole lives together are more likely to have similar views on things that people born several years apart?). Most science is not like this, as you would see if you read some proper journals, but unfortunately understanding proper journals requires too much background research for most people to be bothered with.
Nick, don’t take this the wrong way but I think you’re missing the point I’m making. Firstly, social science purports to be a science, and is widely accepted as such. It attempts to use scientific methodology to produce scientifically objective results. As such it should be possible to objectively judge whether the premise of the science is valid, as with e.g. somebody who purports that homeopathy is scientific. If they make that claim, fine, let’s take a look.
Social science has always quite specifically been intended to be a science. A science of society. Early on it was called things like “social physics”.
Now, you may think it’s crap. I may think it’s crap. I agree with you. But your opinion, or my opinion, or the opinion of anyone else, is worthless. Entirely worthless. Likewise, and I think people fail to realise this, any argument based on verbal logic is also entirely worthless. Verbal argument doesn’t, cannot, prove anything, or reach an objective conclusion. It’s about swaying the audience, winning a verbal fight. You may hope to persuade people of your point of view, but that’s the best thing you can hope for. We need something better. The only better thing there is is math. If social science problems can be shown to belong to a particular class of problems which defy predictive analysis, that’s game over.
For instance, there is an implicit assumption within social science that it has predictive power i.e. that linear operations can be performed on social science variables. Is that a correct assumption. It should be relatively simple to show that such problems are either (a)linear, or (b)non-linear, or (c) that it is impossible to know which.
If it’s (b) or (c) then that is a profound proof.
But discussing it and debating it in verbal terms is useless. The world is full of people arguing the toss about such things. The internet itself can be characterised as one big argument. It doesn’t get you anywhere. One might win the argument here at samizdata, say. Try winning it at pharyngula. You won’t win. You won’t even be listened to. You can argue until you’re blue in the face with a social scientist and he’ll just disagree with you.We need something better, formal and incontrovertible.
Ian,
Well, “non-linear” doesn’t mean intractable. It’s usually difficult to get a neat result but it there are ways, means and numerical analysis.
OK. A proof that SS isn’t an S? Or rather that it’s pseudo science… Herein lies the problem. I and others have advanced many compelling reasons here but an absolute proof?
Let’s say Prof X comes up with a whiz-bang idea to lift children out of poverty in the UK. OK, that’s fairly well definable (number of kids with household income
Ivan, Ian B,
Can we call the activity of just collecting facts and describing them a science ?
Historians spend their time sitting in obscure archieves and reading old documents. They sure collect facts (i.e. authentic documents). Then they write books. A perfectly legitimate, useful and interesting ocupation. But it’s not science.
Social sciences are more akin to poetry. They are just words. Words not necessarily unrelated at all to reality, to facts, to things happening. Maybe not entrirely useless words (at least some of the time). But science should somehow be about more than just words, as Ian B says.
My impression of liberals is that basically they prefer a nice sounding theory to nasty sounding reality. They really live in an unreal world, insulated by money. There are few if any poor liberals. Like in some religions, they penalize anyone for suggesting their fantasy world is untrue. That must be because they suspect their fantasy world is really false, and so we all must pay lip service, otherwise it will cease to exist.
But, for an interesting insight on morality or ethics, read this (link below). The author, much like Freud, who tried to analyze human psychology by dividing our mentation into three imaginary but discussible areas (id,ego, superego), this author divides morality or ethnics into five basic areas:
1. Respect for authority (President, Church).
2. Respect for purity (Avoid putrid food, revolting sex acts).
3. Respect for fairness (Don’t cheat others).
4. Respect for a desire to not harm others (Self explanatory).
5. Respect for community values. (Self explanatory)
The author claims that it is clear that certain specialized areas of our frontal lobes are involved when we have to make decisions with moral overtones, otherwise, they are not involved.
Anyway, the author has concluded that “conservatives” give equally strong weight to all five areas of morality, where as liberals “overweight” fairness and harm and “underweight” the other three.
Sounds about right.
This could be genetic. A frontal lobe problem.
I really do think liberals are much less responsible than conservatives. In fact, just by being responsible for your own actions, and insisting other be responsible for their own actions, will get you branded as a conservative.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9804EFDB1F3CF930A25752C0A96E9C8B63&scp=6&sq=morals&st=nyt
The research part of some areas of study,both properly scientific ones, and non-scientific ones (such as history) is not science in itself – maybe it can be called a discipline. Although science has to be backed by research, it is about proof and prediction (two sides of the same coin really). Ian, what you are looking for is to prove that something cannot be proved, or to predict something unpredictable.
There is another way, and that is the way of disproving things. Say an economist tells you that maximum price regulation always will/will not (depending on his chosen school of economics) create unemployment. All that scientific method demands is that you demonstrate at least one occurrence that is contrary to his chosen theory. The obvious difficulty with this approach is that you would have to do this for every single claim every economist/sociologist/psychologist etc. makes. What is even worse, is that even if you actually did that, most of these people would (very predictably) just stick their fingers in their ears and sing the ‘la-la-la, I cannot hear you’ song.
So often when I write a comment I loose connection, and everything that I have written.
I do not know whether it is “Wanadoo’s” fault or not, but it is driving me MAD.
Still – yet another effort.
Ian B.
No, when economics is done right it is NOT opinion – it is logical reasoning whose conclusions are inexcapable.
However, a comment is not the right place to show this to you.
If you are interested, and have not done so already, read Ludwig Von Mises’ “Human Action”.
History.
It is true that history is not logical reasoning of the same sort as economics (or rather economics when done correctly).
However, to say it is opinion is a bit quick.
It is a matter of evidence.
For example, William of Normandy may never have existed – the evidence could all be fake.
But the balance of evidence is that he did exist.
Even a natural scientist has to accept the possiblity that some of his theories may be wrong – new evidence may come along.
Although there are differences between the natural sciences and history – and to use the method of the natural sciences in history is an error.
One difference (of many) is the lesser role of experiment in history.
Although there is sometimes a role.
An example of experiment in history – which, I accept, is both like and unlike how experiment is used in science.
For centuries historians had taught that Roman cavalry could not charge straight on – shock charge, due to the lack of stirrups.
However, experiment showed that Roman saddles (with the horns at front and back) offer a much better seat than modern saddles – so, with training, a cavalryman was unlikely to come off even with a shock charge.
Of course some people had long pointed to the heavy armour and lances of late Roman heavy cavalry and asked “if they could not shock charge, what was all this stuff for?”
Ian B:
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to prove a negative statement like that. There are many problems where physicists are unable to perform predictive analysis because of the sheer complexity of the system and its irreducibility to a manageably simple mathematical model, the most infamous example probably being the turbulence of fluids. However, it’s not possible to prove a negative blanket statement that there is no manageable model of turbulence. A brilliant mind might make a stunning breakthrough tomorrow, even though many have already tried, with only meager results. Similarly, however unlikely it might seem, some brilliant mind could conceivably tomorrow find useful models of various aspects of human societies that have defied any exact analysis until now. Just like with turbulence, in social sciences there are some limited and partial models that produce correct non-trivial predictions in certain situations, most notably the supply-demand models from elementary microeconomics. Although it seems unlikely, it’s impossible to positively prove that more such models won’t appear in the future.
But this is all largely beside the point. Except for certain areas of economics, modern social sciences don’t even strive for any sort of results akin to what natural scientists do. They’ve given up such attempts at “social physics” a long time ago. Except for some statistics that is used in gathering and filtering data (and often also fudging it, whether consciously or not), all of their work in interpreting and explaining it is concerned only with what you call “verbal arguments” that are light years away from any reasonable scientific method. Thus, even if it were possible to devise a mathematical proof that this or that area of social science can never produce an exact predictive model, it would be useless, since the practitioners of social sciences aren’t even claiming to be looking for anything like that. They are perfectly content with their verbal fights aimed at swaying the audience — and if they want to give public weight to their conclusions, they’ll do it by moralizing, rather than claiming scientific rigor.
Again, nothing of this applies to social research that merely looks empirically into various concrete questions and doesn’t attempt to do anything beyond the realistic limitations of the methodology. And there is a lot of valid research carried out along those lines (unsurprisingly, the more apolitical a topic is, the more valid research there is in it).
Now you’re using the term “(non-)linear” in a very postmodern way. 🙂 A system might well be reasonably predictable despite behaving according to a nonlinear model. In fact, just about any physical system is like that, including those of high technical interest, such as e.g. silicon transistors or water flowing around a ship, although a good linear approximation will usually make your life much easier when dealing with them.
But as I’ve already pointed out, with a very few exceptions, social scientists nowadays don’t strive towards handling social systems in ways akin to mathematical models used in physics. Thus, you can’t refute them by arguing that such models are impossible, since they aren’t even trying to come up with any. It’s all about mere empirical observations, and beyond that, about verbal arguing and swaying the audience.
The word “science” can mean a body of knowledge – or it can mean “the scientific method” – as in physics.
Historians should certainly not pretend to be natural scientists – but nor are they just collecting facts by reading stuff.
Examining the sources is a very tough skill to learn and it depends on having a lot of grounding in the discipline – this is one reason why trying to teach the skill of the examination of sources to school children is demented (they simply do not know enough).
It is not the same as the experimental method of the natural sciences – but it is not just “opinion” either.
As for economics.
Sadly most economists do try and be “empirical” – not understanding that the subject is not physics. And this does turn into farce.
However, economics done correctly is matter of hard logical reasoning – very rigorous indeed.
I bring up gun control not to talk about guns, but to analyze the use of scientific method on societal behavior. John Lott, when he was an economist at the University of Chicago got the idea of using economic modeling on gun/crime behavior. It turned out to be extremely predictive. He eventually I think did several studies and it is to the point where one can posit an action, and predict the outcome with very good reliability.
Depending on how you view predictiveness, his economic models use the same methods that predict consumer behavior quite reliable to predict human behavior with gun laws/crime.
Is this example relevant to this discussion?
Ivan, a couple of points. If we look here at the Electronic Journal of Sociology we can ask whether “modern social sciences don’t even strive for any sort of results akin to what natural scientists do” as you contend. While many of the papers are just opinion pieces, many seem indeed to be claiming very specific things. For instance Building Indices Of Social Capital And Its Outcomes claims that there is a variable “social capital”, that it can be measured, that it has some objective worth and significance, and that this variable affects other objective variables, for instance–
“The variables related to political commitment/participation, tension and violence were transformed into outcome dimensions through NLPCA. ”
It seems also that such institutions as The World Bank believe in an objective thing called Social Capital. It’s this kind of social theory which purports to be a science which underlies the belief in the efficacy of social planning. You may say that social scientists don’t do this any more, but the above example shows that they quite clearly do and it acts as justification for statist interventions. If we look at the other current great social science- “social medicine”- you will find a tsunami of purportedly scientific data and analysis supporting social interventionism on medical grounds i.e. specifically requesting that governments enact specific policies intended to have specific social outcomes, e.g. to reduce alcohol consumption or encourage less fatness. This stuff matters.
In a generals sense, and I’m sorry if any of my terminology has been inexact, although I deny that any of it is post-modern, I am arguing that we need to attack the root of the problem we face, which is the concept that social planning (a subset of which is economic planning) works. We can’t do that by arguing on the sociologists’ basis issue by issue. We need to look deeper at whether society is a system which works on the principles the planners claim it does. I contend that it does not; but I don’t have the edjication or analytical skills to prove that, simply put 🙂 One way we can look at it is that society is entirely interconnected. Everything within society affects everything else. You cannot isolate one part of the system.
So you might note that an increase in one subjective variable (e.g. “drinking alchol”) causes an increase in another subjective variable (“criminality”) and therefore conclude that by adjusting the first variable you’ll affect the second. But I contend that any such attempted intervention will have ramifications throughout the system of an intrinsically unpredictable nature (e.g. perhaps an increase in smuggling and organised crime or an increase in other drug use). Now you may see those effects and try to incorporate them into your model, to try to improve your intervention, but you will still fail, because tehre will be other unforeseen consequences. You just destabilise the system. It can’t be done.
We recognise, for instance, that attempts to manage ecosystems fail. Preventing forests burning turned out to harm forests. Protecting species causes overpopulation. And so on. We can I think see ecosystems as generally representative of a class of systems which are optimal when not interfered with. I am simply saying that human society is another such system and it should be possible to demonstrate that it is in a scholarly way, as better than just an opinion.
We might look at economics as another example (it is a subset of society after all). We can usefully create simplified models of the economy, and we can learn things from them, e.g. that price-fixing causes shortages. But, I would contend, we learn the same lesson every time which is that attempts at interventionist economic planning damage the economy. We can’t predict precisely what any intervention will cause in detail, beyond that it will make the economy work less well. It wasn’t widely predicted that subsidising biofuels would lead to food shortages, for instance, but that is what is happening. Or raising alcohol taxes may seem to have a subjectively good effect (less drinking) but harms the alcohol manufacturers, who have to lay off staff, which creates unemployment… and so on.
I’m just saying that it’s all very well using specific examples and guesses, as I did above, but this should be generalisable. We can say as a generality that ecosystems are harmed by intervention. We can say as a generality that the weather is unpredictable in the long term, and that turbulent flow is currently (and perhaps inherently) beyond our capacity to predict in detail. We shoud be able to say the same about society.
Perhaps we can look at it as a “meta-sociology” which analyses the claims of sociology. “Social physics” is still everywhere, from the creation of the “happiness index” or an index of social capital or subjective scales of which countries are freest or best educated, or anything else. It drives statism. And, I contend that it is all total bunk. All of it. You can passively observe social variables, as a party game, but only a God could attempt to manipulate them with any hope of success.
Sounds about right.
This could be genetic. A frontal lobe problem.
I think we should run with this. Perhaps a quick Taser shot to the frontal lobes of all liberals would be great!
Midwestener:
It may be.
However, this piece of research was not quite the same thing as natural science.
There is still the “human factor” – the fact that we are dealing with agents (human BEINGS) rather than just matter and energy (although I am not denying this is what humans are made of).
This will always mean that research into how humans choose to act when such-and-such is done is a different KIND of thing to physics research.
My apologies for using capitals when italics would have been better.