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Google "Biggest Regret"
Atheist Sues U.S. Military
more crybabies
you guys make me think I should get some stock in kleenex
^iloseatlife
indeed, you do
Richard Feynman on Social Sciences
As one who studies and will one day practice Political Science, I'm offended. I can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for the development of democratic institutions with the same certainty that a biologist can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for bacterial growth to take place.
Both of my degrees are in social sciences (they're multidisciplinary degrees so I dabble in economics, psychology, sociology, demographics, politics and anthropology) and for the most part I agree with him. The more you learn and the more you try to understand with the social sciences the less that you can be certain of.
Let me take your example: you say you understand the prerequisites for the development of democratic institutions, but do you really? I'm sure that you understand how democracy evolved in the U.S and other Western nations, but other states take different paths to democracy. And the institutions that result often look and act different from those of other places. Political scientists can try to quantify what was the underlying cause for a move towards democracy, using the forms and the statistics of scientific method, but they don't arrive at a firm conclusion.
It is in this way that the 'pseudo-science' can become dangerous. It is why Western institutions tried to spread democracy by advocating economic liberalization and symbolic elections throughout the 1990's and today, often resulting in ruined economies, failed and collapsed states, and further conflict. Political scientists arrive with their detailed studies and impose their institutional design on another culture because they believe they have the science to prove that they know best.
In many ways, it is because the hard sciences don't have to account for the unpredictable behavior of humans that they can arrive at any conclusions. Social sciences have no underlying laws and theories because people are necessarily ineffable.