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Empiricism and the Social Sciences


Ser Scot A Ellison

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So, I’m reading a book by Barbara F. Walter called How Civil Wars Start.  She is the Rohr Professor of International affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego.  
 

The book is an effort at an objective discussion about the factors involved in the origination of civil wars in modern societies and possible means of heading off such wars before they start.  She talks about Yugoslavia, Rhodisia/Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and South Africia while also addressing forces she sees pushing the US in that direction.  
 

In the course of the discussion she places great emphasis on things like “polity score” discussing how Nation-State move up and down this scale as they approach or retreat from Civil Wars.  Here’s my question… the factors used in creating the “polity score” are subjective.  They are based upon factors that are based in subjective perception.

Hume criticized empiricism and inference because:

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causality can not be real because in reality, only what we experience are the proceeding and succeeding events separately and not any causal relation between the two events

Isn’t that fact only amplified in attempts in “social sciences” to create the perception of objectivity and quantitative analysis through the use of subjective factors laced together to create the impression of certainty?  Or is this a bigger problem that exists in all attempts at objective analysis of anything?

Discuss.

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I don't think you've given enough information here for me to respond properly. Just what sort of "subjective" things are going into the "polity score"? Of course data used to back up any theory should be as objective as possible, but it is sometimes impossible for various practical or ethical reasons to gather more "objective" data -- and there are always some subjective decisions involved in what data to collect and how to interpret it even if one can obtain "objective" data. There's lots of things one can obtain "objective" data on that might not be relevant.  

For many questions in broader social sciences where the unit of analysis are things like individual elections, you also might have problems of small sample size that make actual "objective" data less useful for prediction than it would seem at first glance.

In terms of the "polity score", it would make a difference whether the "subjective perception" is just that of one person or whether there is a consensus among experts in the field.

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Ormond said:

In terms of the "polity score", it would make a difference whether the "subjective perception" is just that of one person or whether there is a consensus among experts in the field.

I appreciate that point but is that “appeal to authority”?  At one time the concensus in medicine was that we needed to “balance humors” to ensure human health.  That was demonstrated to be false and modern medicine moved on.  Before Einstein time was seen to be a fixed constant that didn’t change anywhere in the Universe.  Special relativity demonstrated that wasn’t the case.

Don’t we take a risk when we rely upon “experts” subjective perception and consenus in science?  Even more so in the “soft sciences” like Political Science and Economics?

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3 minutes ago, Larry of the Lake said:

Scot, you are like 4 months and one mushroom trip away from embracing post-modernism.  

No.  There is objective reality.  The rejection of objective reality by post-modernism/post-structuralism is a greased slope into solipsism.  I recognize that our perceptions are filtered through our subjective impressions of events but what is perceived is objective in its existence.

Deconstructionism is a nice tool to have on the philosophical tool belt… but using it as the basis for all human intellectual endeavors is a road to hell.

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2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No.  There is objective reality.  The rejection of objective reality by post-modernism/post-structuralism is a greased slope into solipsism.  I recognize that our perceptions are filtered through our subjective impressions of events but what is perceived is objective in its existence.

Deconstructionism is a nice tool to have on the philosophical tool belt… but using it as the basis for all human intellectual endeavors is a road to hell.

Totally.  But you also might end up thinking the only thing you're comfortable labelling "objective" turns out to be math or physics or time..oh wait ...

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4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I appreciate that point but is that “appeal to authority”?  At one time the concensus in medicine was that we needed to “balance humors” to ensure human health.  That was demonstrated to be false and modern medicine moved on.  Before Einstein time was seen to be a fixed constant that didn’t change anywhere in the Universe.  Special relativity demonstrated that wasn’t the case.

Don’t we take a risk when we rely upon “experts” subjective perception and consenus in science?  Even more so in the “soft sciences” like Political Science and Economics?

Of course it's a risk. No one is saying experts are always right. However, if we are talking about an issue where "objective data" are non-existent or nearly so, it would still be the case that the averaged opinion of a group of experts would be better than the opinions of a single expert. The opinion of a single expert is certainly much more an "appeal to authority" than using a broader sample of expertise. 

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The only way to objectively study any human behaviour is to have the ability to create a model of such and see what develops as the model runs. Considering the complexity of a single person and their interactions with hundreds of similarly complex individuals, any mathematical modeling will make the modeling of quantum mechanical behaviour look like child's play. Considering there does seem to be a breakthrough in QM with amplituhedrons simplifying calculations, one can only hope that the underlying math leads so similar breakthroughs in modeling human behaviour.

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2 hours ago, maarsen said:

The only way to objectively study any human behaviour is to have the ability to create a model of such and see what develops as the model runs. Considering the complexity of a single person and their interactions with hundreds of similarly complex individuals, any mathematical modeling will make the modeling of quantum mechanical behaviour look like child's play. Considering there does seem to be a breakthrough in QM with amplituhedrons simplifying calculations, one can only hope that the underlying math leads so similar breakthroughs in modeling human behaviour.

Agreed.  The fundamental problem with “social sciences” is that we don’t have long term modeling… and I think Hume’s criticism of Empiricism is even more pointed in this context.

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22 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 

Hume criticized empiricism and inference because:

Isn’t that fact only amplified in attempts in “social sciences” to create the perception of objectivity and quantitative analysis through the use of subjective factors laced together to create the impression of certainty?  Or is this a bigger problem that exists in all attempts at objective analysis of anything?

.

In a word: Yes

Frankly I find the urge to quantify and simulate the human condition to be anti-artistic and deeply anti-natural. 

Good science, good medicine, and good policy making is the art of observing the recordable factors and applying the most readily available tools in the most purposeful and resultant manner possible. 

The amount of time, money, processing power (human and computer), and literal actual-factual energies sunken into the morass of inwardisms has, uh, well imma be nice and say that it ain't been helping to solve the crises. A complaint to be leveled at a lot of fields of study and professions, to be sure. 

Paralysis by analysis is a thing. And that is what causes civil wars. 

Eta: I just answered homegirl's question in about seven minutes and half-as-many-hundred characters.

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22 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Isn’t that fact only amplified in attempts in “social sciences” to create the perception of objectivity and quantitative analysis through the use of subjective factors laced together to create the impression of certainty?  Or is this a bigger problem that exists in all attempts at objective analysis of anything?

It depends on how the metric is employed.  "How civil wars start" is a very broad research question.  I haven't read the book, but if Walter is using the polity data series to identify correlations between regime type and increased tendencies to have a civil war happen, I don't see what the big deal is.  Now, that metric can (and has, in this case) still be questioned based on its methodology, and that is part and parcel of the research within the discipline. 

For instance, in my research I often rely on agency scores such as Clinton and Lewis'.  These scores are derived from a multirater item response model that combines subjective expert ratings with objective data.  The good thing about the score is its construction is very transparent - if you have a problem with it you can examine their codebook as well as the model specification to replicate and/or tweak it to make your own metric.  And yes, these type of metrics are relied upon throughout the discipline:

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Political scientists use these models to characterize elite voting behavior (e.g., Voeten 2000; Martin and Quinn 2002; Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004; Bafumi et al. 2005), measure countries’ democratic tendencies (Jackman and Treier 2006), respondents’ political ideology (Hillygus and Treier 2006), countries’ political-economic risk (Quinn 2004), the notability of legislative enactments (Clinton and Lapinski 2006), and to analyze graduate admissions decisions (Jackman 2004). The model describes how observed responses—expert opinions in our application—correspond to the latent dimension (i.e., agency policy preferences). [5]

In this case, Clinton and Lewis are relying on 37 experts to help get an idea of agencies' comparative ideological makeup.  While this is obviously subjective, if you're gonna tell me we can't use this metric because we can't objectively "know" the Pentagon tends to be more conservative than the State Department, then you're starting to veer towards the solipsism you so abhor.

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46 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

On the issue of the US being on its way to a civil war.

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But there is a potentially easy fix. Regulate social media, and in particular the algorithms that disproportionately push the more incendiary, extreme, threatening and fear-inducing information into people’s feeds. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers and enemies of democracy. The result would be a drop in everyone’s collective anger, distrust and feelings of threat, giving us all time to rebuild.

So does this mean we can merge this thread with the Twitter thread to create a Super Scot Thread?

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  • 1 month later...
1 hour ago, JGP said:

Couldn't find a better thread in the first bunch of pages, but thought this was a pretty fascinating read:

 

 

I propose we take this new scientific summiting and use it to discriminate (muuuurder?) against anyone whose heartbeat does not meet an entaglement threshold with their brain!

We'll come up with they 'whys' of the thing after we're done. Because the 'why' is because we can.

<alternatively, if my heart-brain entaglement is below the threshold you're all monsters>

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