Multiculturalism has failed.

[Datepalm]

The problem with social science is that practically any interesting experiment will have a monstrously complicated systematic uncertainty (the latter are very annoying even when you are dealing with something relatively simple, like a bunch of completely identical elementary particles). Personally, I have no idea how to even estimate something like that when it deals with human beings. The reason I became derisive of the social sciences is that when I went to see how they do it, I found that they either don't do it at all (quoting only the statistical part of the uncertainty) or they make some pitifully incomplete attempt and leave it at that. You'd think they'd call each other on it (that's how peer review is supposed to work), but instead they split along ideological lines and only call the other side out for bad methodology.

lol, I can't figure out from post to post if you're defending or attacking the SS's. (Is that good lawyering or bad lawyering?) Can you give an example of what you mean by an interesting experiment, in this sense? When I think of social sciences I generally think more about observations of a large amount of people - like entire cities/countries/classes etc, rather than any small scale experiments. (I fully agree various Milgrams and things and those experiments with dollars and coffee cups or whatever in economics can be made to say whatever you want them to say and are not particularly useful to understanding actual society.)

[TrueMetis]

It's just that this is not the reason why science exists, it exists because it provides useful things ("things" being all sorts of stuff, not neccessarily that directly related to the scientific inquiry in question).

So what useful things did they get from evolution when Darwin proved it? I'm not talking about what we are getting from it now I'm about what they got from it when Darwin published the Origin of Species. At the time they got fuck all but their curiosity satisfied and as far as society was concerned Darwin just shat on the bible.

[shadowbinding shoe]

In general that seems likely. However, I wouldn't neccessarily underestimate the controversy of physics and maths. (it's just that THOSE battles were fought long ago) there's probably a reason why mathematicians tends to be religious weirdoes :P (from Pythagoras to Leibniz :P)

Err, Platonism and other beliefs Mathematicians hold are interesting to Historians and philosophers of Science but I don't see how they are relevant. They don't cast doubts on the validity of the works of those mathematicians.

Re: Heliocentrism - There's a reason why previous iteration of the concept weren't accepted. They were flawed. When better explanations came along they were accepted, because they were better and harder to disprove. Ditto for Darwin's Evolution.

[Galactus]

Err, Platonism and other beliefs Mathematicians hold are interesting to Historians and philosophers of Science but I don't see how they are relevant. They don't cast doubts on the validity of the works of those mathematicians.

Re: Heliocentrism - There's a reason why previous iteration of the concept weren't accepted. They were flawed. When better explanations came along they were accepted, because they were better and harder to disprove. Ditto for Darwin's Evolution.

I'm not really casting any doubts on scientific findings. If you think that's what I'm doing you've totally misunderstood me, and I apologize for being unclear.

[Galactus]

So what useful things did they get from evolution when Darwin proved it? I'm not talking about what we are getting from it now I'm about what they got from it when Darwin published the Origin of Species. At the time they got fuck all but their curiosity satisfied and as far as society was concerned Darwin just shat on the bible.

Yes. Precisely. And that was a current that was rather prominent (it also justified the ideas of progress and development, justified colonialism, and all sorts of other stuff like that)

Which is not to say that Darwin meant any of those things (I'm fairly certain he didn't) but that's part of the reason why it was accepted.

Had Darwing written his book in 1147 say, I doubt he'd have gained the traction he died.

[TrueMetis]

Yes. Precisely. And that was a current that was rather prominent (it also justified the ideas of progress and development, justified colonialism, and all sorts of other stuff like that)

No actually those ideas where justified by completely different ideas that had nothing to do with evolution. Those ideas being that the other races where sub-species and inferior while according to Darwin's theory all species are equally evolved and the other races aren't separate species at all. The idea that Darwin's theory was used to justify colonialism is bullshit propaganda spewed by modern creationists. (along with the idea that Darwin was racist)

Which is not to say that Darwin meant any of those things (I'm fairly certain he didn't) but that's part of the reason why it was accepted.

No his ideas where accepted because they were right. Even with the many scientist who when origin of species was first published disagreed with him because they contradicted the bible. Eventually though they had to accept that he was right because they could not prove him wrong.

Had Darwing written his book in 1147 say, I doubt he'd have gained the traction he died.

I guarantee he would have, he would have been burned at the stake by the church but his ideas would have continued. History shows that when an idea is right even with harsh suppression by the authorities it will survive.

[Galactus]

The idea that Darwin's theory was used to justify colonialism is bullshit propaganda spewed by modern creationists

Eh, no.

It was clearly used as such. Any even cursory study of colonialism shows it. IT wasn't the only contributor (or even a particularly important), but it WAS used to justify colonialism, that's a fact. Social-Darwinism did exist, it was inspired by Darwin's theory (the fact that Darwin himself disagreed with it has no bearing whatsoever on this historical fact)

I guarantee he would have, he would have been burned at the stake by the church but his ideas would have continued. History shows that when an idea is right even with harsh suppression by the authorities it will survive.

And how would you know that? Seems like a tautology to me. Basically you are saying that true ideas will continue to exist because they continue to exist. (which isn't to say that you're saying that all ideas that continue to exist are true) but you can't REALLY argue that, can you? Becuase the only ideas we know of are those that exist. It's quite possible there have been millions of people with true ideas that have been lost to history.

[TrueMetis]

Eh, no.

It was clearly used as such. Any even cursory study of colonialism shows it. IT wasn't the only contributor (or even a particularly important), but it WAS used to justify colonialism, that's a fact. Social-Darwinism did exist, it was inspired by Darwin's theory (the fact that Darwin himself disagreed with it has no bearing whatsoever on this historical fact)

No it wasn't social Darwin is a twisted version of evolution. It is nothing like evolution. Evolution wasn't used to justify colonialism the crazy ideas of Darwin's cousin was.

And how would you know that? Seems like a tautology to me. Basically you are saying that true ideas will continue to exist because they continue to exist. (which isn't to say that you're saying that all ideas that continue to exist are true) but you can't REALLY argue that, can you? Becuase the only ideas we know of are those that exist. It's quite possible there have been millions of people with true ideas that have been lost to history.

Because this is what history tells us. The ideas of the Greeks, Romans, etc would have been destroyed had the authorities in charge of them at the time had their way, but a combination of luck and certain people being there kept that knowledge alive. Same thing would be true of Darwin's ideas as the same thing was true of Galileo.

[Galactus]

Because this is what history tells us.

No it's not. That you think it does shows a fundamental misapprehension concerning the limits of historical inquiry.

I find the entire idea that science is somehow unconnected to the rest of society to be... Laughable, to be honest. It's crazy. Science doesen't just crop up because, it exists because people have an interest in it (either "I hope this creates something I can use", "I hope this creates something I can brag about" or even "I like finding out new things") it is funded by private, governmental or commercial ventures, it is created in a social context, it is influenced by the personalities of the scientists and of their surroundings.

That does not make it wrong or incorrect or even particularly flawed. It's just something to take note of.

Really, the idea that you can take any part of human experience slice it off neatly from everything else and say "THis is science" or "this is economy" or "this is history" is folly. A useful, even neccessay folly, but the fact is that these aren't discrete things, but huge and very complexly interlocked things. What kind of science you can do depends on your surroundings (material, economic, social, etc.) and what your material and economic or social surroundings are like are in part determined by scientific ideas, tools, concepts, institutions... I'm honestly flabberghasted that people would claim otherwise.

[TrueMetis]

No it's not. That you think it does shows a fundamental misapprehension concerning the limits of historical inquiry.

I find the entire idea that science is somehow unconnected to the rest of society to be... Laughable, to be honest.

Are you high? I never once claimed that.

[Aemon Stark]

First, statistics is not something you can learn in one course. It's very tricky and even people who have studied it extensively occasionally get it wrong. Second, even if you do know statistics, that is not enough to do real science: any experiment (even something as simple as a measurement of length) will always have systematic uncertainties which no amount of statistics will help you with and it is this which typically leads to wildly different results.

Huh? By "systematic uncertainties" you mean forms of bias? And that statisticians don't encounter and attempt to account for this? Um... what?

For example, suppose the science project of some child in a rural area is to measure the average height of the cornstalks in a local farmer's field. There will be a statistical component to this because the field typically has tens of thousands of plants (or more) and the kid is not going to measure every one of them. But there will also be systematic errors that would not go away even if every plant was measured. For example, if the ruler the kid was using claimed to be 30cm long but in fact was only 29.5cm, every measurement would always be off by a little under 2%. There might be other subtle effects like the child only measuring the plants at the edge of the field, but the ones in the middle being slightly different.

This trivial example has a trivial response, namely the use of standardized rulers and procedures to avoid such measurement bias. I mean, give me a break - you think that people involved in experimental design don't think about this kind of stuff? And I don't know you could get through even one stats course without talking about forms of bias.

The problem with social science is that practically any interesting experiment will have a monstrously complicated systematic uncertainty (the latter are very annoying even when you are dealing with something relatively simple, like a bunch of completely identical elementary particles). Personally, I have no idea how to even estimate something like that when it deals with human beings. The reason I became derisive of the social sciences is that when I went to see how they do it, I found that they either don't do it at all (quoting only the statistical part of the uncertainty) or they make some pitifully incomplete attempt and leave it at that. You'd think they'd call each other on it (that's how peer review is supposed to work), but instead they split along ideological lines and only call the other side out for bad methodology.

Well, to put it simply, you make reasonable approximations and reasonable assumptions. It's not really that complicated, particularly since "social science" isn't some black box that's uniform in purposes or character. I cannot begin to go through the epistemological pondering that goes on among, say, political scientists about the strength of forms of knowledge. And they're always aware when things have a normative basis - the trick is going forward with clear assumptions.

[Red Sun]

I call bullshit. First, let's separate the social sciences from the humanities. The social sciences use the scientific method. They are science. Whatever people say, I would disagree that history is a social science (I also happen to disagree that women's studies is even a discipline, but that a whole other issues). People do not use the scientific method to do history.

There is no truth in history. You say we know who killed what king, but we do not. We do not know. It is impossible for anyone to know. There is no "truth" in history.

That is a bit harshly worded, but I don't disagree altogether. You didn't address me directly, but since I was the one who talked about methodology that allows empirical research and because I didn't correct Datepalm when she said that we know which king killed which, I think I should make my point clearer. I agree that there is no "truth" in history, because the intepretation of individual findings is always subject to bias. However, sources exist, they don't always give all the answers, but they can at least be categorisied according to their materality (what writing material, what ink, the composition of the ink that can even be chemcally proven, what writing) and based on that sometimes according to their function. That is the only area of historical "sciences" that allows an empirical approach, apart from maybe use of scientific methods from the Social Sciences in modern or contemporary history. The methods of examining sources can be scientific (when used in combination with natural science) or can be pre-scientific (if the categorisation relies on collections of examples). Unfortunately, that area of historical research is considered more and more obsolet, especially because it does not offer the "truth" for everything. However, at the end, it's the only exact basis for all kinds of theories and interpretation.

/tl:tr

[shadowbinding shoe]

That is a bit harshly worded, but I don't disagree altogether. You didn't address me directly, but since I was the one who talked about methodology that allows empirical research and because I didn't correct Datepalm when she said that we know which king killed which, I think I should make my point clearer. I agree that there is no "truth" in history, because the intepretation of individual findings is always subject to bias. However, sources exist, they don't always give all the answers, but they can at least be categorisied according to their materality (what writing material, what ink, the composition of the ink that can even be chemcally proven, what writing) and based on that sometimes according to their function. That is the only area of historical "sciences" that allows an empirical approach, apart from maybe use of scientific methods from the Social Sciences in modern or contemporary history. The methods of examining sources can be scientific (when used in combination with natural science) or can be pre-scientific (if the categorisation relies on collections of examples). Unfortunately, that area of historical research is considered more and more obsolet, especially because it does not offer the "truth" for everything. However, at the end, it's the only exact basis for all kinds of theories and interpretation.

/tl:tr

History is not the only field dealing with unrepeated past events. There is a well known approach in the scientific methodology for dealing with such problems. Geology needs them, biology needs them, physics needs them.

- You make conclusions from the data you have and then see if new data supports it (a kind of blind test)

- You try to reconstruct the circumstances and run simulations of the event.

[Galactus]

I find the disdain for sociology kind of funny, btw. It's the clearly most positivistic of the social sciences.

[Altherion]

I find the entire idea that science is somehow unconnected to the rest of society to be... Laughable, to be honest. It's crazy. Science doesen't just crop up because, it exists because people have an interest in it (either "I hope this creates something I can use", "I hope this creates something I can brag about" or even "I like finding out new things") it is funded by private, governmental or commercial ventures, it is created in a social context, it is influenced by the personalities of the scientists and of their surroundings.

You are arguing against a position that nobody holds. Of course science is funded by society and it can slow it down by other means (e.g. burning people with new ideas at the stake). But, as I said before, all of this is only in the short term. In the long term, if some accepted idea is wrong, it will lead to inconsistencies in places which are not directly related and will eventually be corrected even if the scientific community or society in general greatly prefers the wrong idea. Unless you stop all studies, the truth will win out in the end.

[Galactus]

You are arguing against a position that nobody holds. Of course science is funded by society and it can slow it down by other means (e.g. burning people with new ideas at the stake). But, as I said before, all of this is only in the short term. In the long term, if some accepted idea is wrong, it will lead to inconsistencies in places which are not directly related and will eventually be corrected even if the scientific community or society in general greatly prefers the wrong idea. Unless you stop all studies, the truth will win out in the end.

No, the idea that provides the most benefits (social, economic or technological) will win out. If it happens to be true, that's just an extra. (true ideas do tend to be more useful though, but that's separate)

The idea that science finds "truth" is complete bollocks (read some Popper) it finds provisionaly useful ideas that work out for now. Best.fits. That kind of thing. Science can only find a tentative, "This is what current evidence shows us to be likely."

Which is fine, most cases we don't need more than that, since it's not very useful. But we need to accept that everything we know mightbe proven wrong tomorrow, just like most of the things medieval scientists thought they knew has been proven wrong.

But there's no guarantee that science will evetually find the answers, scientists can just try as hard as they can, with no guarantee of succes whatsoever.

[Altherion]

No, the idea that provides the most benefits (social, economic or technological) will win out. If it happens to be true, that's just an extra. (true ideas do tend to be more useful though, but that's separate)

No, it is not separate -- that is precisely why the truth wins out. Technologically and economically, the ideas closer to the laws of nature are always going to be more useful (you can't build a computer without understanding electromagnetism, solid state physics and a bunch of other things). It may be socially disruptive, but a sucessful society will eventually align itself with the correct ideas.

The idea that science finds "truth" is complete bollocks (read some Popper) it finds provisionaly useful ideas that work out for now. Best.fits. That kind of thing. Science can only find a tentative, "This is what current evidence shows us to be likely."

Which is fine, most cases we don't need more than that, since it's not very useful. But we need to accept that everything we know mightbe proven wrong tomorrow, just like most of the things medieval scientists thought they knew has been proven wrong.

It finds truth, it just doesn't find the whole truth. If you really want to be technical, you can say that it obtains progressively better approximations of the laws of nature.

[Guest Raidne]

Red Sun, I agree with you 100%. Things are certainly more or less true in history. And, by the way, a skeptic would say that there's no truth in anything, and maybe we just do the best we can by using the three legs of Plato's tripod put forth in the Theaetetus - stipulation (i.e. "actually, I'm going to designate this as the 'starting turtle'"), empiricism, and logic.

But in our particular historical moment, this isn't the culture (as Ent and Altherion have aptly demonstrated). In our cultural moment, math and science seek "truths" and nobody - in science, anyway - cares about these skeptical objections.

But in the liberal arts and some of the social sciences, people do care. Post-modernism is inherently skeptical. So it's a strange split. And so we have scientists that are derisive of not only the liberal arts, but also the social sciences, while they totally ignore any skeptical critiques of their own disciplines, and they get away with it. Because they make stuff that works, that has improved our lives in a multitude of meaningful ways. And so we worship science, and let the "hard scientists" take a piece out of other disciplines (even when, say, they are demonstrating a total lack of knowledge on the subject they are criticizing and probably don't even know what the top-ranked peer review journals or best respected-disciplines in the social sciences are). That's the intellectual character of our time.

For now, anyway. It seems like there's a little bit of building resentment towards physicists in the air....we'll see.

[Happy Ent]

It may be socially disruptive, but a sucessful society will eventually align itself with the correct ideas.

Actually, I don’t think that is true. As much as it depresses me, I believe that some truths are toxic and socially destructive, rather than just disruptive. The idea of a “benevolent untruth” seems to me to be a more stable foundation than looking for The Truth when it comes to human nature, unlike, say the behaviour of other animals, topology, or conductance properties of nanomaterials.

This phenomenon arises, for example, in debates about multiculturalism. Education is another example where the whole edifice is built on a factually wrong, but socially useful assumption of equality. So far, that seems to work out quite well. Blank Slate-based societies have won.

Or are they failing now?

In a sense, Altherion, the sentence I quote you for is exactly what authors like Thilo Sarrazin or Charles Murray seem to reiterate in their books: a society aligned with wrong ideas (for example, cognitive indistinguishability between individuals or populations) will cease to be successful. Deutschland schafft sich ab.

I would love this to be false.

[Happy Ent]

And so we worship science, and let the "hard scientists" take a piece out of other disciplines (even when, say, they are demonstrating a total lack of knowledge on the subject they are criticizing and probably don't even know what the top-ranked peer review journals or best respected-disciplines in the social sciences are). That's the intellectual character of our time.

No.

The intellectual character of our time is defined by the social sciences.

For example, even if all Swedish high school absolvents that qualified for it chose to start a science or engineering programme at university, there would still be empty seats. Sweden currently does not even generate enough high school students that took the requisite amount of maths and science course, let alone fill the undergraduate courses. (Of course, most of these qualified students are clever enough to not start a maths or science degree. It’s hard, socially ostracised, and not economically useful. It’s also an evolutionary dead-end.)

The intellectual character of our time is Malcolm Gladwell, not Charles Murray.