[wallace_f]

>No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny

Here is Orwell on the matter:

>"When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all."[1]

Feynman:

>"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

People lived for a very long time without a proper appreciation of controlled, repeatable experiments, and progress was very slow.

1 - www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_saw

[oblio]

Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got.

Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

[jfoutz]

I have an unpopular view, that physics is probably the easiest science. Chemistry is harder, biology is even harder. Heading up the chain into social sciences is just unbelievably hard to get good answers.

With physics, you can build a machine an test to your hearts content to determine what the underlying rules are. That's real tough to do when you're studying, say, an economy.

So, i don't mean this as a slight to physicists. It would never occur to me to use oil drops to measure the mass of an electron. It was a brilliant insight. But, with modern tools, I kinda think i could replicate that experiment in my apartment. Evolution? I mean, golly, that's a really subtle insight. I might be able to do something with petri dishes and poisons, but that seems like a pretty tough thing to detect. I'd like to compare Darwin to Newton, but Darwin is probably closer to Aristotle. We haven't begun to get to the really good stuff yet.

I'm skeptical of phycology, there are issues with replication all the time. But clearly they're on to something. The whole advertising industry is built on psychological insights.

I've dealt with crazy race conditions that make me want to pull my hair out. They're not consistently reproducible. Eventually i work out the logic and things fall into place. But i have access to the source :) I can't imagine how hard it is to get anything out of random interactions of black boxes. Social sciences just aren't for me.

Anyway, yeah, i believe it's possible to model human interactions. We do it all the time. As with all things, some models are just more useful than others.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I think your unpopular view is very true. Worse, it's the key to finance and politics.

I used to know someone who had nothing but contempt for developers and the IT team, because while he was busy playing the corporate ambition game, they just wanted to do a good job.

As far as he was concerned, this made them easy prey.

Guess which kind of person runs the world?

Engineering and science won't teach you this. You can finish your PhD with a completely unrealistic view about how politics works, and how political outcomes are generated.

Neither science nor engineering are immune to this. Popular beliefs and high-status areas of research are decided politically, not dispassionately.

It's tempting to say that things would be better if we had dispassionate objective AIs deciding policy, instead of individual and tribal ambition - but of course one of the challenges of AI is that instead of simply automating math, AI has the potential to automate and amplify influence and persuasion.

When you don't really understand influence and persuasion - but others do, in practice if not in theory - that's not necessarily a good place to be.

[wallace_f]

Yea, and even if it were possible, it would still only be the realm of theory until it could be experimentally proven

[dredmorbius]

Look up Peter Turchin.

http://peterturchin.com

[watwut]

That is argument for experimentation against theorizing. Math people have awful habit of theorizing and even rejecting experiment that is right there in front of their eyes. They will argue for hours based on what systems/people/departments are assumed to do in simplistic model they did in their head, ignoring what is actually happening. They are also masters in cherry picking when it comes to history and it is especially bad when they talk about history.

They also have tendency to take conflict like the above, completely ignore politics and motivations that drives the arguments (meaning involved money), pretend it was all technical question people magically could not figure out until someone did something simple.

[musage]

How is that Orwell "on the matter" of humanities vs. hard science?

> People lived for a very long time without a proper appreciation of controlled, repeatable experiments, and progress was very slow.

And now that we strive to only see what we can count and repeat, and worship our own creations as objective reality, progress seems to shift into the pathological. Even just the concept of "progress" as some kind of thing you can get more and more of, rather than a journey on an tree with infinite branches every moment, is in lockstep with that and betrays an incredible impoverishment of thought. Every single great scientist who also loved wisdom seems to have pointed out something along those lines which mediocre scientists seem to ignore.

Hannah Arendt in Vita Activa has a bunch of relevant parts, here is one:

> The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.

> [The German physicist Werner Heisenberg has expressed this thought in a number of recent publications. For instance: "Wenn man versucht, von der Situation in der modernen Naturwissenschaft ausgehend, sich zu den in Bewegung geratenen Fundamenten vorzutasten, so hat man den Eindruck, ... dass zum erstenmal im Laufe der Geschichte der Mensch auf dieser Erde nur noch sich selbst gegenübersteht ... , daß wir gewissermassen immer nur uns selbst begegnen" (Das Naturbild der heutigen Pkysik [1955], pp. 17-18). Heisenberg's point is that the observed object has no existence independent of the observing subject: "Durch die Art der Beobachtung wird entschieden, welche Züge der Natur bestimmt werden und welche wir durch unsere Beobachtungen verwischen" (Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft [1949], p. 67).]

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My sloppy/literal translation of Heisenberg:

"When one attempts, beginning with the situation of modern science, to feel towards the fundaments that have been set in motion, one gets the impression [..] that for the first time in history man on this Earth is only facing himself [..] that we kind of only meet ourselves"

and

"the type of observation determines which traits of nature are defined and which traits we muddle with our observations"