Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by carterklein13 2043 days ago
This is an interesting take. As someone who is relatively interested in this stuff but by no means an expert (i.e. I've read a few pop-psych books), do you have any further reading I could do to see where you're coming from with this claim?

Because, by my very limited understanding, I always thought something like electromagnetism was always thought to be "concrete," for lack of a better word - whereas I always thought that sociology and psychology were much more subjective fields (and this is why it's impossible to, for example, predict whether a stock will go up or down). Is there any reading to suggest the latter?

1 comments

Understanding the history of science gives a sense how progress works when dealing with things extremely complex .

Here are 3 good starting points.

1. The little book of psychology (penguin randomhouse) charts the important milestones and people in psyc. (Michael Lewis's Undoing Project not many like but it shows why understanding complex non obvious things take time)

2. Faraday and Maxwell by Nancy Forbes charts how long and why it took long to stumble upon EM field theories.

3. Infinite Powers by Steven Stogratz charts the history of calculus. Which shows why it took thousands of years to get to Newton's Laws.

Textbooks present the math without showing people the journey. Psychology and Sociology are going through those same moments Physics and Maths witnessed when new discoveries suddenly start exploding.

Super cool, I've never thought about it this way before. Having read about this stuff somewhat intensively, it just goes to show how many blind spots I have.