Feynman,surely,joking,social science Richard Feynman on Social Sciences

Richard Feynman on Social Sciences

posted by Crake

1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago • 2070 views

tags: Feynman, surely, joking, social science

Richard Feynman comments on the sloppiness of Social Scientists

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Comments

Ah, he could be talking about 'climate scientists.' It's the hottest 'science' going today because you don't have to prove jack, just keep throwing virgins into the volcano until they 'stop global warming.' I'm only sorry I haven't figured out a way to make money from it yet.

written by zor | 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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why, sell carbon indulgences of course! also, there's tons of grant money you can get.

written by Crake

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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Richard Feynman is, as always, on the mark. Social Sciences and humanities in general is a sort of pseudo-science, with "evidence" that can't really be proved.

I disagree that "climate science" is the same sort of pseudo science, because climate science is based on actual evidence. That fact the charlatans can make it big of pretending to be climatologists does not make a case against actual climatology.

written by gwiz665

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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... certainly an ironic comment...

'I think all of the social sciences are bullshit because they don't gather the data and do the checks and intense work that we do in the hard sciences, but I don't really know because I haven't gathered the data and done the checks and intense work to know anything about what I'm talking about.'

(p.s. I think science all boils down to good statistic and good experimental design; there is no wall between social sciences and hard sciences.)

written by bamdrew

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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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.

written by Throbbin

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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technically, psychology is a social science and as a psychologist, I can say that many of the studies are rigorous, controlled, careful, and tedious. There are certainly exceptions (in any scientific discipline), but I believe that social science can be just as rigorous and significant as (some) physics, albeit to a point of a 5% probability. And it just doesn't get much more statistically significant than that in psychology, for the most part.

written by Trancecoach

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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"'It's like this: when mathematicians began fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound results.'

'Or at least internally consistent results,' Rudy said.

'Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps.'

'It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really TRUE or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?'"

- © Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

my point being that the rigour and internal consistency is not enough, the connection to the real world is essential for it to be called a science... And a lot of the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences or whatever, deny this real world, and just think up thought experiments - they might as well be studying Klingon.

(PS: the taxonomies of disciplines is different from place ot place, so what i'm critisizing is not a certain discipline, but an attitude)

written by Crake

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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>> ^Throbbin:
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.

written by aaronfr

| 1 year 4 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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My respect for him just went down quite a few notches -- how hypocritical is he to make such derogatory and self-righteous claims when he hasn't collected any data to prove them? He really comes off as a pompous prick in this interview who couldn't be bothered to do any research to back up his attacks.

written by nibiyabi

| 10 months 2 weeks ago | CH

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He was talking about "organic foods" too, not just social sciences. And I study humanities, and it's basically all bullshit. Lots of theories, but no concrete evidence in any direction. This is what makes it different from, ahem, "real" science, where there are actual objective truths that can be found.

*promote

written by gwiz665

| 10 months 1 week ago | CH

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Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, July 6th, 2008 11:03pm PDT - promote requested by gwiz665.

written by siftbot

| 10 months 1 week ago | CH

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A scientist asks the president of the university for $20,000 to upgrade his lab. The president says, why are you always asking for so much money? You should be more like the mathematicians. All they need are pencils, paper and wastepaper baskets. Or even better, be like the philosophy department, they don't even need the wastepaper baskets!

written by reed | 10 months 1 week ago | CH

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Pfffft. Social sciences aren't called a "science" due to the certainty of it's theories. They're sciences because one applies the use of the "scientific method" when studying and exploring it's theories. That's what differentiates something like psychology from say, astrology.

Science is not just about defining what is concrete and true and what is not. It's about making an effort to increase human understanding of the universe we live in.

written by GoShogun

| 10 months 1 week ago | CH

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This is an excerpt from his well known Horizon interview.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Feynman-The-Pleasure-of-Finding-Things-Out

written by fissionchips

| 10 months 1 week ago | CH

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*talks *promote

written by gwiz665

| 4 months ago | CH

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Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, January 18th, 2009 3:04am PST - promote requested by gwiz665.

Adding video to channels (Talks) - requested by gwiz665.

written by siftbot

| 4 months ago | CH

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http://xkcd.com/435/

written by berticus

| 4 months ago | CH

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I have a degree in economics, and I agree with Feynman 100% (at least with regards to economics). Beyond the simple operation of supply and demand, economics is complete bullshit. It imitates the rigor of real science, with the math and everything, but it starts from fundamentally wrong assumptions about human behavior. It actually assumes away all psychology, biology, circumstance, tradition, institutions, politics, physics, sociology - until all you're left with is an optimizing machine bearing no resemblance to any human being. Economics is a branch of math - it is not a science. In fact, calling it "science" gives science a bad name.

In my opinion, psychology is the most scientific of the social sciences. Even though they cannot come up with laws of human behavior, they at least do actual experiments where they try to discover statistical regularities of human behavior. If economics were based on psychology, while incorporating insights from other disciplines, it might actually be a science.

written by blackest_eyes

| 4 months ago | CH

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