[crazygringo]

This is a terrible article.

First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities.

Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences, and only "humanities" in a very broad umbrella term. "Humanities" is more often used to refer to disciplines such as history, art, literature. So a complete mix-up of fields.

Third, the assumption that social sciences has a "reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any given point" is simply flat-out wrong. For example, of course political science relies on "big-N" studies which try to find or refute correlations between democracy and various other country indicators. But political science also relies heavily on "comparative politics" which is much closer to literature or history in a classic "compare and contrast" aspects of two countries. Similarly psychology has many different approaches taken in published papers and books, some quantitative and others more qualitative.

I could go on and on. But this article is completely ridiculous, arguing against a straw man that simply doesn't exist. It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia. Bizarre.

[unishark]

She did not confuse humanities and social sciences. She started off focusing on humanities then segued into a bigger complaint about humanities and social sciences together sharing the same problem. The author has a doctorate from Columbia in psychology. So there's probably a lot more thought behind her frustrations.

As for the home departments of the authors, that doesn't change the fact that their work was humanities research. Unless you're saying humanities departments shouldn't be blamed for arguably bad humanities research produced by "outsiders" and published in physics journals. It doesn't appear to me that the publication contained any new applied math or physics.

Correlations are not science by the way, no matter how repeatable they are, they're just statistics. You need to prove causation to be scientific. Big analyses of countries generally can't do controlled experiments so their findings are always dependent on what they chose to include (and not include) in their models as the supposed causal mechanism.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

It may sound silly, but the article seems like a caricature of Big Bang's Sheldon disdain for social sciences. All the ingredients are there ready for easy consumption.

In all seriousness, there some valid criticisms of social sciences, but the article reads like a pop version of them.

[sytelus]

I call these hard science vs soft science. Please do not get me wrong, I shuffle from math and art quite a bit these days and get to take a look at various approaches in both areas. There is a trend of applying hard science approach to soft science. This is good thing until it results in research that is quite wishy washy. When you see "study" where experiment is mainly surveying people, its soft science. Unfortunately such soft science gets a lot of press. When you see articles like "Coffee found to reduce cancer by researchers in a study", you are reading soft science. A huge problem is that people doing hard as well as soft science are referred to as "researchers" or "scientists" and both of their works referred to as "science". But its quite not. Science demands not only evidence but understanding. If coffee was found to reduce cancer, can you elaborate exact mechanism? If you can't then science requires not to make such claims. Doing survey of graduate students is not sufficient. That's the nature of hard science which soft science (including economics) violets too often. Media needs to be more aware otherwise the trust in science that has been developed over centuries will no longer be there.

[kissickas]

You had me for a second with the survey comment, but we don't know the mechanism for a lot of biology and that doesn't mean it's not a science. In fact, we didn't understand most of the things we take for granted today but that doesn't mean there were no scientists until Newton came along (or any other arbitrary point of "understanding").

[leeoniya]

i think the monimum bar for something to be science is that it has to have a rigor to it which can be used for removing doubt:

- hypothesis

- control group

- well chosen or random samples from representative population

- statistical significance

- a way to separate correlation from causation

- enumeration of conflating factors and potential for flaws in the chosen methodology

- list of prior studies or research

- peer review

- reproducibility, possibly using alternative methods

until all of this is done, a survey (or any study) is not science. convincing the layman is insufficient; you have to convince other experts in the field.

[sytelus]

In a way, science is a process of creating a model. To create a model, you first need evidence (i.e. data) and then you form hypothesis which your proposed model. Then you make prediction using your model that wasn't known before. If predictions continues to remain true over time then you have higher confidence in your model. However, a true scientist would never set his/her confidence to 1.0 in any model because all models are eventually wrong and needs to be improved further. So the science is the process of continuously gathering evidence, improving model and remain skeptical that you might be wrong. It is very much like training a machine learned model using training data. Most soft sciences do the first two steps and bypass everything else. It's like you created ML model, you had good result on training data but you never tested your model on hold out set, assumed your model was good enough and just moved on to make a press release.

[sytelus]

Biology had always been red herring. Lot of biologists actually are careful about making big claims until they understand the mechanisms. There is an evidence based clinical science but that's been made very watertight through structured trials that must comply to well defined standards unlike studies like "Coffee was found to reduce cancer" which is often half-assed surveys with too many statistical biases.

[kissickas]

We don't know the mechanisms of plenty of things that we accept as proven with scientific principles, like most of pharmacy.

And what about physics before Newton? Or before Einstein? In fact, we still don't know exactly how gravity works. Or magnetism. At what point are you drawing the line of being able to "elaborate the exact mechanism"?

[TheOtherHobbes]

You never elaborate the exact mechanism. But if you can consistently make accurate predictions, you're onto something.

The real argument is about the validity of the predictions. Core science - basically undergrad - is very good at making predictions in its domains of interest. Outside of that everything gets more speculative.

The real problem with soft science research is that it cargo cults data -> statistics into data -> weak correlations -> "truth." And that's not how good science works - because there's just a statement based on correlations that may be accidental, and there's no attempt to make a model at all.

[unishark]

The hard versus soft science distinction is an old one, cutting off around biology. Basically physics is the "true" science and as it gets harder to relate phenomenon back to the underlying physics involved, the study is seen as more soft.

[kebman]

Hi, there. I've studied Political Science, Film "Science" and IT. And Pedagogy. Why do I say Film "Science"? Because I had to use refuted "science" to analyze films, among other things (Freudian Analysis, which was of course groundbreaking at the time, but that does not hold up to modern scientific standards anymore). The professor said to me that, "Yes, I understand you when you say that this isn't stricly 'science,' and that it has indeed been refuted. But you see, everyone in this field does these things, and so you should too, at least for the experience, and to communicate with these people." So since he wasn't trying to force me view it as sience, I accepted it and did it on those grounds, and I passed. Despite this one incident, Film "Science" was my favourite topic at college, not least because it teaches you genre and narrative techniques. But yeah, some of it was definitively "out there," and I wouldn't classify it as science in any meaningful way, though it is a valid system to communicate ideas. Hell, even postmodernism is, which I sadly know too much about now. Too much about now.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Ironically this thread - and the OP - is a superb example of why everyone should study narrative techniques so they can understand the kinds of categories that common arguments and positions fall into.

You can learn a huge amount from ad hoc observational models of behaviour that aren't based on equations or statistics. You can even use them to make accurate predictions.

I used to know a manager who had an outstanding intuitive understanding of organisational and personal psychology. He probably couldn't have formalised his knowledge, but he had a real talent for getting shit done with individuals and groups, and for knowing exactly the right moment to apply leverage in a negotiation - all without bullying, shouting, or underhanded manipulation.

He simply knew exactly what people would do in one set of circumstances, and how to change their preferences by presenting them with alternative circumstances.

This isn't "science" in a formal sense, but it's certainly a very real form of knowledge. It seems to me STEM types tend not to understand how valuable and effective it can be, and how important it is to have some of this skill if you want to change what people do.

[kebman]

There's definitively a value in knowing about culture, and being able to categorize it and discuss it on many levels. If you simply want to get through to more people, the most direct approach I can think of is to study things like rhetoric or take communication classes. There's a wealth of knowledge there for how to improve the way your communication impacts and includes other people. And while I'm at it, let's not forget the cross-section between marketing and psychology, for all those boiler-room types among you. :D

[jccalhoun]

totally agree. And then it even brings out the good old "tax payer money" line and asks if it is useful. As if we should only pursue that which seems instantly useful.

More frustrating is that there is some valid criticism of "digital humanities" for being the cool new discipline that while capable of some great stuff is guilty of all too often neglecting the "humanities" part of the term in favor of just throwing up some graphs.

[fmoralesc]

> First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. Not humanities.

Nonsense. Whether a piece of research belongs to the humanities doesn't have to do with the credentials of the researchers but with the subject matter. If we genuinely want to say that scientific and mathematical methods are fruitful to explore questions in the humanities (contra the main claim of the article), we have to at least allow this. Or would you say that the paper on the network structures in fictions is a piece of theoretical physics?

[torrance]

A lot of people have been and continue to make this criticism that’s in the article, across a variety of the softer disciplines. (It’s like you’re not even familiar with this line of critique.)

See, eg. a criticism of political science in the same vein from a political scientist https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Beca...

[crazygringo]

I've studied political science a great deal, and there are absolutely nuanced critiques you can have here.

I personally, for example, find that political science went overboard in rational choice theory (borrowed from economics) over the past several decades, which hasn't turned out to be particularly fruitful. (And there are 20+ subfields of political science as well, rational choice being just one.)

But that's simply arguing over the relative usefulness of specific methods, like to what degree TDD should be used in software, or have we gone overboard with microservices.

The original article's absurdly broad critique of quantitative methods somehow taking over generally remains bizarre and completely uninformed.

[dntbnmpls]

> Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences

Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science.

> It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia.

Are you? This issue with "social science" has been going on for a few decades now.

Richard Feymann called social science a pseudoscience a few decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

The name social science was invented for the same reason creation science was invented because real science had such a good reputation and they didn't so they decided to manufacture some credibility by attaching "science" to their fields.

[whyenot]

> Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science.

> The name social science was invented by hacks just like creation science was invented by hacks because real science ( biology, physics, chemistry, etc ) has such a good reputation and they didn't so they decided to manufacture some credibility by attaching "science" to their fields.

Do you have anything to back this up? According to Wikipedia's rather extensive article on the history of the social sciences, the term first appeared in 1824, and the discipline was pretty well established by the turn of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_social_sciences

[dntbnmpls]

> Do you have anything to back this up?

Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_social_sciences

"The term "social science" first appeared in the 1824 book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth by William Thompson (1775–1833). Auguste Comte (1797–1857) argued that ideas pass through three rising stages, theological, philosophical and scientific."

What do you think rising through theological, philosophical and scientific implies? The lowest being theological, the highest being scientific?

1824 was around the time of the scientific revolution and enlightenment. Everyone wanted to latch onto the good name of science.

"Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods of research represented a scientific view of history in this model."

"One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy would be John Dewey (1859–1952)."

From history to philosophy to politics, everyone wanted to associate itself with "science" because of the credibility it brought.

Even religion got into the act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science

[whyenot]

The article on Wikipedia doesn't support your assertion that the scholars who coined the term "social science" did so "fairly recently," and that they were "sneaky academics" and "hacks."

Well, unless 1824 is "fairly recently" (to be generous, let's say a century ago, when things really got going), and Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and yes, even Marx are "hacks" (they may be other things, but hacks?).

[dntbnmpls]

> The article on Wikipedia doesn't support your assertion that the scholars who coined the term "social science" did so "fairly recently,"

Fairly recently is subjective. But the article showed that they coined it because of the cachet attached to science at that time.

You can downvote and find things to nitpick, but ultimately I'm right. Just like creation "science". Political "science" is as much a science as creation "science". That isn't to say political "science" is nonsense like creation "science". It's an academic field that belongs in the "arts and humanities" category.

[jccalhoun]

As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities. There might be some valid criticism of the term "social science" and the field but lumping it in with humanities isn't accurate. While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.

[dntbnmpls]

> As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities.

Don't say there is a difference. Name them. I too have a degree in the humanities. That isn't an argument.

> While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.

What's your point? Quantitative and qualitative work occur in science and in the humanities. It's not exclusive to one or the other. The difference between the two is that one deals with natural law and the empirical testing of those laws. While humanities do not. They most deal with the philosophical and the human condition. Morality or the best form of government aren't scientific concerns because they aren't about the natural world and its laws. It's not empiricial testable unlike say the speed of light.

Political science is not a science because it doesn't deal with nature and empirical experiments. Machiavelli was not a scientist because political science isn't a science.

[andreilys]

I'd say social sciences are closer to humanities than they are to hard sciences.

[SI_Rob]

True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general direction of hard science ever since. Though necessarily relying much more on modeling and statistical approaches than on formal analysis.

Due to the inherent impossibility of repeating experimental conditions exactly (or in some fields, at all), the social sciences will never join the hard sciences, but instead occupy terrain adjacent to both humanities (where their data is sourced from), and hard sciences (where techniques are sourced from, increasingly for the "computational"- prefixed subfields).