Guest essay by Steven Burnett
This is an essay regarding the fundamental differences between the hard and soft sciences. While I don’t emphasize climatology much in the essay, I believe this may provide some insight into the chasm of evidence and approach between the two.
Recently, more climate consenters have been starting to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that the discrepancies between models and reality are, in fact, significant. While there are still some holdouts there have been more than a few mainstream discussions about some of the “softness” in climate science.
In a way it’s an olive branch to the climate skeptics. While there are crazies on both sides of the climate debate, I find that the core of climate skepticism stems from articulating the differences between the hard and soft sciences. I have studied and been degreed in both, and would like to offer up some explanations and examples of the differences between them.
I have been a scientist since before I had proper memory formation. My father, an engineer, and I used to go for walks and he explained the physical world the way an engineer sees it. So, as the story goes, by the time I was 13 months I pointed to a condensation trail by an airplane and explained to my mother what it was and how it was formed.
My first childhood Hero was Egon Spengler, a ghostbuster, and I pulled out my encyclopedias and looked for definitions of all the terms used in the movies and cartoons. I was then introduced to Back to the Future and my interests moved from nuclear particles to space time. Naturally my hero moved to Einstein. But it wasn’t just movies that influenced my development as a scientist. I had children’s books on Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ballard, Edison and Galileo. Each of these scientists drastically moved humanity’s understanding forward, despite enormous criticism of their theories and hypothesis. Needless to say my scientific heroes weren’t particularly popular in their day and age.
As a child I was listed as gifted learning disabled. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, dysgraphia, and ADD while I was young. I thus had poor social skills, a short attention span, and couldn’t write legibly. As an extrovert, having trouble with nonverbal communication was a massive struggle. I turned to my books, encyclopedias, and the library to attempt to understand and solve the problem. There is an incredible amount of information and not being able to focus appreciably on a single source led to research threads through multiple disciplines. At the end of the day my choice was simple, experiment with social techniques or give up. I chose the former.
I still perform regular experiments and log the data. All results are mentally catalogued, anomalies flagged and reviewed until I thoroughly understand what nuances I missed. The system isn’t perfect, I can intone or inflect improperly, I can also mistakenly use accurate but socially improper lexicon as my vocabulary is immense. Failures can lead to hostility, repudiation or ostracization. Society is more unforgiving than many realize, but my experiments have been fruitful. The application of successful techniques has helped me mitigate eccentric behaviors and evolve or cultivate strategies which help me appear normal. The proper application of the scientific method in my daily life is the difference between being functional and not.
Being able to screen good hypothesis formulation, experimental technique and results was an integral part of my development. Determining logical fallacies and errors, standards of proof and reproducibility was the difference between keeping friends and losing them. It is also how I fundamentally distinguish behind the hard and soft sciences.
The whole reason for this essay came from me stumbling upon the Wikipedia article attempting to distinguish between the two and being frankly dumbfounded. I have to reproduce the second paragraph in full so that everyone truly understands my issue.
“Philosophers and sociologists of science have not been able to confirm the relationship between these characteristics and perceived hardness or softness in empirical studies. Supposedly more “developed” hard sciences do not in fact have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. Psychologists use controlled experiments andeconomists use mathematical modelling, but as social sciences both are usually considered soft sciences, while natural sciences such as biology do not always aim to generate testable predictions. There are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs,[4][11]and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.”
In short philosophers, and sociologists of science, both soft science fields, haven’t been able to confirm the differences. They point to a lack of consensus in the hard sciences, controlled experiments and mathematical models. The analysis is about as meaningful as finding no difference between a peewee and professional basketball game because they both shoot rubberized orange balls at hoops. That is exactly the problem with the soft sciences, they can get the results they want by only evaluating the characteristics they choose.
Ironically I have been degreed in both the hard and soft sciences. I possess a bachelors in chemical engineering and psychology. Asking someone what they want to do for the rest of their life at 18 is a bit tough to answer especially when your knowledgebase and interests were as tremendously varied as were mine.
I started as a biological engineer, thought it was a ridiculous amount of work compared with the political science and business majors I roomed with and switched to psychology. I wasn’t too far into the psychology program before I realized I despised psychology and by extension the other soft sciences. I only graduated with the degree to spite the psychology program, I’m not joking.
The soft sciences spend the first two weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method. When my research methods professor used Carl Sagan’s essay a dragon in my garage as a means of saying that nothing can be proven or disproved, I dropped my textbook on the floor, so it would make a rather loud sound, stopping the lecture. I then dropped it again, and remarked that maybe next time it will stay up because we totally can’t prove the existence of gravity. Looking back it wasn’t very nice, but there is only so much rage I can contain.
That isn’t the only instance of things that resulted in a massive mental face palm in that program. In the soft sciences it’s accepted that the phenomena are inherently complex, thus it is acceptable to formulate a study that does not eliminate variables beyond the one being studied. Statistics is used to sort for the significance of a result.
For instance in a survey there is no regard given to the difference between people who choose to respond vs simply throwing it out, and all responses are considered correct regardless of the topic’s nature. Imagine performing a survey on human sexuality that asked about frequency, number of partners and propensity for cheating. Accepting any of the responses as representative of the population as a whole is not only unverifiable, it’s also very likely to be wrong.
Personal bias enters any discussion of results frequently. There is very strong evidence from monozygotic twin studies and others that IQ is strongly correlated with genetics. Because of the implications regarding racial IQ discrepancies, we received rather lengthy lectures about any variables, missed test parameters and the like, every time these studies entered the curriculum. Even though IQ heritability has generally been confirmed as 85%[1], regardless of the test used, the idea of nature vs. nurture is still considered a legitimate debate topic in this “scientific” field. More importantly the variables we were warned about are accounted for in the original studies.
Of course it’s perfectly acceptable to present an ad hoc change of the definition of intelligence without a preceding lecture and caveats about possible problems or complications. If it tickles the political fancy it’s taught, even if there are no empirical studies to support the hypothesis. Gardner’s hypothesis was only one politically correct theory taught with no evidence.
Carol Gilligan is a published feminist who wrote about male bias and suppression in adolescent development. Neither she nor her disciples have ever been able to validate her claims. In the textbook Adolesence and Emerging Adulthood, her theories would receive a dedicated page or more, and were filled with notations about how “her writings have received a wide audience”, or, that a school was “so impressed with Gilligans findings that school authorities revised the entire school curriculum”. By comparison the fact that both girls and boys self esteem declines in adolescence, that she only uses excerpts of interviews in her research, or that no corroboration of her results can be found, were minimized. The section concluded with the paragraph,
“although Gilligan’s research methods can be criticized for certain flaws, other researchers have begun to explore the issues she has raised, using more rigorous methods. In one study Susan Harter and her colleagues examined Gilligan’s idea of losing one’s “voice” in adolescence…. ….However Harter’s research does not support Gilligan’s claim that girls’ voice declines as they enter adolescence.” [3]
In the hard sciences, a lack of evidence and poor methodology usually excludes theories and researchers who promote them from the textbooks and the classroom, but in psychology, I was still tested on them.
Unfortunately soft science is spreading into the other domains. In my capstone course we had to watch the thoroughly debunked Gasland documentary. We heard about fracking fluids, well contamination and maybe just possibly earthquakes caused by the process. When I presented three studies that thoroughly destroyed the claims the professor dismissed them with a wave of his hand. We were required to take a course called energy and the environment, which is best described as green masturbation. When you present solar roads, indoor farming, renewables, and local agriculture, as a required engineering course without any sort of cost benefit analysis or numerical pretense what else can you call it?
Overall though, in chemical engineering we have very exact equations that give us very exact answers. These equations are derived from hundreds of experiments, outlining the variables for each substance used. Fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, physics, chemistry and other hard science disciplines have had to prove themselves correct by testing for the opposite conclusion. My thermodynamics textbook didn’t begin with a lecture about how scientific it is, it opened with the statement that the study of thermodynamics exists only because we haven’t found any instances where a system operates differently.
When neutrinos were detected moving faster than the speed of light it was a big deal. The result would have overwritten over 100 years of experiments saying it couldn’t be broken, it still hasn’t just FYI. When cold fusion experiments couldn’t be validated their proponents were laughed out of any major publication. In the hard sciences when the results of a hypothesis diverged from reality they were discarded and checked for errors, but it would still only take a single reproducible experiment to validate or invalidate the concept.
The same problems that plague psychology are rampant in climatology. Tribalism is strong enough that most are willing to break out into red or blue war paint. When faced with an incredibly complex problem they only design their experiments (climate models) to handle the variable they are interested in. Confounding variables, be it ENSO, the AMO, cosmic rays, TSI, ocean heating, surface albedo, UHI, and other impacts are ignored even though they have demonstrably significant impacts on their measurement parameter. When faced with falsifying data, the data is ignored or marginalized. There is no significant internal forensic review of the experimental construct once it can be declared dead, and they essentially keep cashing the checks and publishing as if the hypothesis are valid.
Please understand it’s not that soft sciences are pointless, they’re simply worthless. Examining what makes humans, society or even the climate tick are noble endeavors. The failure to demand reproducible or falsifiable results, reject failed hypothesis, or allow for and defend work that is riddled with personal or political bias is what undermines these fields, it’s what makes them “soft”. More succinctly the problem with these fields isn’t entirely methodological, it’s cultural and it exists at every stage of training.
Inevitably, the ignorance of logical fallacies and degradation of the sciences begs the question why. Perhaps its tied to the ever increasing percentage of American’s who are going to college. After all, more students means more professors. Perhaps it’s a hiring bias[2], and subsequent group think, or maybe hiring more professors simply means they have to lower standards. By the same token, making more money available for grants may allow for more shoddy research. My hard science background was rooted in survival, perhaps not needing to worry about your next meal is bad for scientists. Like Kohlbergs sixth stage of moral development, maybe it’s simply too difficult to uphold the standard. It’s Ironic that after all my research, and all my studies, that the most compelling insight likely comes from the ghostbusters.
If I may wax poetic for a moment, the hard sciences are like a rock while the soft sciences are like sand. They are fundamentally composed of the same stuff, but it’s the structure that makes them different. You must find a comfortable spot to rest on the rock but sand conforms around you. An uncomfortable rock must be dealt with, sand can simply be brushed away. Rock climbing requires training and equipment, a walk on the beach does not. I have had the opportunity to do both, and from personal experience, rock climbing is both harder and more fulfilling.
References
1. Bouchard, Thomas J. “Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits. A Survey.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13.4 (2004): 148-51. Print.
2. Inbar, Y., and J. Lammers. “Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7.5 (2012): 496-503. Web.
3. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
Soft science leads to soft logic;
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kerry-if-were-wrong-climate-change-whats-worst-can-happen_793392.html
This was a very common meme in the 60’s-70’s when real carbon tax and regulation was a pipe dream to the “Che”/Earthday crowd. Hardline AGW co2 mitigation supplanted it, now it’s back and part of the organized political retreat and contingency plan for the longer-term. Adaptation is another coded scheme, as long as it leads to central planning and control it can be worked with from a greenshirt point of view.
On the GOP side there is still the national security types, McCain and Graham for example ready to cut deals on nuclear growth and carbon rationing to reduce imports (Thatcher blunder). It’s how social/economic suicide is facilitated by the opposition party.
An acquaintance on Faecebook once proudly forwarded this link, with an implied wink-wink-nudge-nudge:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/10/only-six-percent-of-scien_n_229382.html
Aside from being deliberate “othering,” the SuckingtonPost article completely ignored the very obvious possibility of hiring (and retention) bias, as outlined in Burnett’s hiring bias link in the post.
And Wankerpedia isn’t a source I’d rely on for assessment of hard/soft science distinction.
Doug says:
May 20, 2014 at 10:16 am
I just stated an empirical test that has not failed. The soft sciences have no universal generalizations that are highly confirmed through active or passive experimentation. Produce one and I will withdraw my claim.
All hard sciences use universal generalizations that are highly confirmed (have stood the test of time).
@Theo Goodwin 10:12 am
Seems to me that, of all hard sciences, Geology would be the most fun to teach.
Geology is an interesting example of a hard science. It has frequently been wrong. It has evolved over time. Much of the world is hidden from view, either buried in the subsurface, eroded away, microscopic, or altered by later processes. But it makes predictions. Predictions that can be tested with the gravimeter, magnetometer, seismic shoot, and ultimately the drill bit. Evidence that confirms, refutes, adjusts theories or concepts. (ex. Suppe 1983) The science grows.
To say a field of study is a Hard Science, is not to say it lacks uncertainty. Quantum Mechanics consists of nothing but uncertainty and probability functions. Yet it is perhaps the hardest science capable of astounding testable precision. Hard enough to enough to predict ahead of time the existence of neutrinos and other sub-atomic particles that devices built later capture.
@Theo Goodwin at 10:56 am
The soft sciences have no universal generalizations that are highly confirmed through active or passive experimentation. Produce one and I will withdraw my claim.
Microeconomics: Supply and Demand.
It is a universal generalization in a soft science (economics) that policy makers ignore at their (and our) peril.
Stephen Rasey says:
“To say a field of study is a Hard Science, is not to say it lacks uncertainty. Quantum Mechanics consists of nothing but uncertainty and probability functions. Yet it is perhaps the hardest science capable of astounding testable precision. Hard enough to enough to predict ahead of time the existence of neutrinos and other sub-atomic particles that devices built later capture.”
And yet, almost mystical in nature, as in the collapse of wave functions when observed or entangled particle communication.
It appears to me that this blog essay presents a simplified and not very useful conception of the role of experiments in science. Experiments at the forefront of science are difficult with many unknown confounding factors which can give rise to anomalous results. it is the job of the experimenter to understand his/her experiment and to sort through these results to obtain the one that provide meaningful insight.
Millikan and Ehrenhaft: contended in the 19th century over the nature of teh charge on the electron. Ehrenhaft contended that it was a continuous quantity while Millikan contended that it was finite and quantized. Millikan performed experiments with falling oil drops to determine the charge on the electron. However historical research has shown that he rejected 59% of the drops from consideration. Many of his drops demonstrated fractional charges on the electron. He chose the drops that gave the best result and so is now accepted as the scientist who proved the finite charge on the electron.
A scientist must be able to review his experimental results and identify and eliminate confounding variables. The simple application of Karl Popper’s falsification idea just does not work.
Stephen Rasey says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:03 am
You offer a different standard. I agree that it is perilous to ignore the Law of Supply and Demand.
My standard is that there is no known factual circumstance that contradicts the law. In the case of the Law of Supply and Demand, there has never existed factual circumstances in which the law was not intentionally thwarted by government. John Locke’s famous example from his Second Treatise on Government is a thought experiment. So, the law has never been tested and it is unclear how such a test could be created.
Perhaps a bigger problem is that the Law of Supply and Demand must be implemented through the outright or tacit agreement of all participants in the community.
The closest I can come to a law in the soft sciences is “The rich live on the high ground.” Today, you might have to revise that to “The rich own the high ground.”
Societies, global developed countries, had to make a decision in late 20’s and through the Depression that followed if they were going to practice “hard” economics along classical rules with a fixed unit of exchange (gold conversion) or if they would go “soft” and fiat. They were at the end of their ropes in the aftermath of WWI and frankly they were at end of a debt cycle before WWI. Colonialism was massively debt driven, unstable and conflicted which is what WWI essentially was about. The war accelerated all “modernization” which can well be considered a vast social and economic decline. When England caved in on gold 31′ the Depression went worldwide and permanent. Why it all went a certain way is obviously complex but the unintended results of the growth of other “soft” cultures, welfare states, academia tied to the hip of government and a general depreciation of actual labor in favor of intellectual capital rights is clear. Academic authority and central planning peaked around WWII and the aftermath and the social rotting ran right next to it in tandem.
It’s the soft government run economy of Keynes that funds soft science and academia. It funds the climate change authority. It’s the original junk science that massively forces paper debts (fiat money) through any economy to maximize short-term production (essentially a war policy regardless of peace or war) results. We romanticize people who “make things” but in reality we produce 45000 new, freshly minted lawyers a year (U.S. alone) and that’s just one of many similar net zero production professions. Thousands of soft scientists are certainly on the list as well. Technology and industrial productivity growth obfuscates the reality to many but the system is dying on its own weight. Zero natural birth rates abound through out many developed countries. Are we going to take away “soft” academic jobs and the entire soft economic culture funded top-down by governments? Return 1/2 of the student population to jobs instead of “education”? Hard jobs instead of “soft” ones?
It seems light-years away. As for soft academics directly;
In practice the solution is the devaluation of past prestige and trust held by words like “scientist” or “academic” etc. especially when they are tied to selling policy based on their conclusions and more importantly their political inclinations that are dove tailed to the fiat Keynesian culture we exist in today. That’s already happened, other than celebrity most professions have sunk massively in terms of social respect and desirability including academics. Still, a reality TV show with Michael Mann digging in a coal mine or working a wheat field would send a corrective message, it remains unlikely near-term. So would ending the social need for reality TV, another product of soft culture decline.
@Theo Goodwin 11:24am
In the case of the Law of Supply and Demand, there has never existed factual circumstances in which the law was not intentionally thwarted by government. ….
Perhaps a bigger problem is that the Law of Supply and Demand must be implemented through the outright or tacit agreement of all participants in the community.
Governments may intentionally thwart the Law of Supply and Demand. That doesn’t mean they can evade or abolish it. The Law of Supply and Demand is a universal generalization that is highly confirmed through active and passive experimentation. (your criteria.) It is a generalization of the soft science Microeconomics, but evident in Macroeconomic experiments such as Nixon Wage Price controls that Ford and Carter were equally unsuccessful. In 1981, when Reagan made the oil price controls go away, so did the gas lines.
must be implemented through the outright or tacit agreement of all participants in the community Must you outright or tacitly agree to the Law of Gravity? The Law and it’s effects work whether or not you agree to it. Your survival is enhanced if you agree with it, however. Likewise with the Law of Supply and Demand. You may not agree with it, but the market place, (even the Black Market place) will go on without your agreement.
Other truths in economics would be Price Elasticity, Net Present Value, Option Value (of an unspecific type). You can even calculate these with a rough precision.
I’m not saying the “miserable science” is a hard science. It is it is no better than “soft serve”. I just close my argument that some Soft Sciences do offer up some Hard Truths.
But a good science always knows its limitations.
What a superb essay (which I have passed along to many of my friends). I have had similar experiences, and can definitely relate to the comments by Jim G.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/20/hard-vs-the-soft-sciences/#comment-1641348
As an undergraduate engineering student in the early 1970’s, I also took two psychology courses in order to fill out my “humanities” electives, hoping that I might find them useful in my future professional life. They were not. In both classes, I was the only student pursuing a technical major. The classes were primarily composed of education and journalism majors, for which psychology was a required subject. Grading was done on “the curve”, and as it turned out, I set the curve for nearly every exam. Several of the other students even approached me and suggested that I purposely answer some test questions incorrectly in order to help them improve their scores. The experience significantly degraded my opinion of those (then) future educators and journalists, and I have found no reason to change my opinion over the intervening years. The classroom situation at that time is well-illustrated by the following two incidents from the first day of class, which have stayed with me for many years:
The first day of class, the instructor stated that all exams would consist solely of multiple choice and true/false questions. An aspiring journalist in the class raised his hand and asked, “Will there be any essay questions on the tests?”
Also, while describing the grading procedure, the instructor stated that 25% of the final grade would be derived from short weekly quizzes, 25% would be derived from the mid-term exam, and the rest would be determined from the final exam. An eager young education major raised her hand and asked, “What percentage of the final grade will the final exam count for?”
There were some parts that did not make the final cut for the article. I went for a softer less numerical approach than im typically comfortable with but this may help clarify the discrepancy to the couple of holdouts saying there isn’t one.
When I was in my Psych. program we were instructed to use a p value of .05, the fact that Fischer had only suggested this as the level of significance was noted and we were informed to not necessarily rule out significance at a higher p value. We should consider a science experiment to be a box that answers a question with a green (significant) or red (insignificant) light. A p value of .05 means there is a 20 sided die in the box and if it rolls a 20 regardless of the answer the light changes to green. A p value of .10 would change the answer to green on a 19 or a 20.
Now that’s for a single variable controlled study, for a multivariate study add in a 20 sided die for each and every other confounding variable. Every time any die rolls a 20 the light changes to green. That’s for a controlled multivariate study. Now examine an uncontrolled study, such as a survey or the temperature stations with a mix of proper and improper placement. For every location or individual who doesn’t respond the box flips a coin, if tails the box just shuts off. For station, or survey responses if the situation in which the question or siting is inappropriate, the box flips a coin, if the result is tails the box changes the actual result at random. Their personal bias can be represented by red/green colorblindness.
The point is the more variables that could confound the result the lower the p value should be. Unfortunately the issue of confounding variables becomes simply accepted so a p value of .05 or .10 is still considered valid. Essentially some soft scientists use the complexity of their subject as an excuse for poor study design without tightening their standards for proof to compensate. This is a mechanistic way to explain the differences.
There is some great work in soft science fields, but there is also a mountain of crap. If they want to play with the big boys they are gonna have to tighten their standards, grab a shovel and start digging. This is unlikely simply because you would have to depose an inordinate amount of gatekeepers, and then overturn the system. it’s a cultural problem, and it is also why soft science fields simply don’t get it.
Yes it seems to me that soft sciences are very prone to being twisted toward political ends.
“No, the general laws of physical science can be probabilistic; however, the probabilities are objective not subjective and certainly not Bayesian. The soft sciences have no general laws of either variety.” – Theo Goodwin
Misesian praxeology (part of the Austrian school of economics) yields theorems. For example, the Ricardian law of comparative advantage. See (1) http://mises.org/books/humanaction.pdf and (2) http://mises.org/books/ultimate.pdf
Though these theorems are apodictically certain, they are often of the “ceteris paribus” sort and have limited predictive power. Per (1), one way to think about them is: “Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events. Without them we should not be able to see in the course of events anything else than kaleidoscopic change and chaotic muddle”.
Also, such theorems do not depend on an arbitrary choice of axioms. Per (2), “The assumptions of Euclid were once considered as self evidently true. Present-day epistemology looks upon them as freely chosen postulates, the starting point of a hypothetical chain of reasoning. Whatever this may mean, it has no reference at all to the problems of praxeology. The starting point of praxeology is a self-evident truth, the cognition of action, that is, the cognition of the fact that there is such a thing as consciously aiming at ends.”.
Well I have to plead that I was born handicapped, in comparison to Steven Burnett. When I was 13 months old, I looked up in the sky, and asked my mother; “Why the hell are there no condensation trails ?”
No such thing existed; planes simply couldn’t fly high enough.
But I’m partial to # 13, or more specifically B13. That was my number for most of my youth; my older brother was B15. Those numbers adorned everything we owned.
But I also had some memorable revelations. I believe I was six when I discovered that stirring tea, does NOT make it sweet. It takes some chemistry to make tea sweet, and no amount of stirring will render it so, without the proper chemicals. I also discovered that if you don’t spread butter on your bread; the jam just soaks right into the bread.
By far the bigger mystery, is why I still remember making those discoveries.
I have to admit that dropping a book, and doing it twice, is proof of sheer genius.
There’s nothing soft about the science of statistics. It is a rigorous mathematical discipline, performed according to rigid rules, on a set of exact, known numbers. So the results are always exact. They also have no meaning, outside the envelope of statistical mathematics.
Like religious tenets; it is the external extraneous interpretation, that one wants to invoke, in regard to the sterile exact statistical output, of such calculations, wherein lies the mischief.
As for Psychology, it was the choice of University study by the member of my high school graduating class, who would have been voted hands down, least likely to succeed. He’s now retired after a long career in that field. By any reasonable measure of intrinsic value, his contribution to the human race greatly exceeds that of the rest of that graduating class, all combined. (including me)
It’s not so much, what one chooses to learn, as it is what one chooses to do with what one learns, wherein lies any value. What he and his equally contributing life mate did, will give normal healthy educational opportunities, to tens of thousands of otherwise discarded (figuratively) children, previously doomed from birth.
Plenty of “hard” scientists, can be worthless drones too.
“Inevitably, the ignorance of logical fallacies and degradation
of the sciences begs the question why.”
======================================================
In a word: Money. When politics manages the purse, intellectual rigour
departs.
Theo Goodwin says:
May 20, 2014 at 10:56 am
No, you misunderstand. The only way that you can empirically and reliably distinguish between hard science is by comparing the amount of journal space devoted to scientific graphs. The distinction between hard and soft science is a soft science distinction (and has been since the sociologist Auguste Comte came up with it), if soft science is useless, then so is the distinction.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Another thing: If you don’t know about consistent and reliable results in “soft” sciences you don’t know soft sciences well-enough. If there is a difference then it is only in that the focus of attention is not on the reliable and consistent results, it is a question of subject matter. Physics underpins everything in the end.
“Physics underpins everything in the end.” – Doug
Does it? I thought mathematics underpins physics.
Also, “[materialism] wipes out any difference between what is true and what is untrue and thus deprives all mental acts of any meaning. If there stands between the “real things” of the external world and the mental acts nothing that could be looked upon as essentially different from the operation of the forces described by the traditional natural sciences, then we must put up with these mental phenomena in the same way as we respond to natural events. For a doctrine asserting that thoughts are in the same relation to the brain in which gall is to the liver, it is not more permissible to distinguish between true and untrue ideas than between true and untrue gall.” – Ludwig von Mises
Wow, I didn’t know what I was getting into for the first part of the essay, but it turned into a fine comparison of the hard and soft sciences. Nice work Steven. We all know that when the word ‘Democratic’ is part of a country’s name, the advertisement is definitely a sign that this characteristic is going to be hard to find in this country. Likewise, inclusion of the word ‘Science’ and ‘Sciences’ as a part of the name of the discipline is there as a form of insurance and assurance because it otherwise may not be obvious when you delve into it. I was very unhappy when they neutered the fine discipline of ‘Geology’ by adding the diminutive ‘Sciences’ to ‘Geo’ or Geological (note the commanding ‘Geology’ was reduced to an adjective prefixing ‘Science(s)’). Not content with that they felt the need to remove ‘Geo’ altogether and soften it more to ‘Earth’.
A look at the titles of the journals in your biblio reinforces the softness of the science. E.g.:
1. Bouchard, Thomas J. (‘Current Directions in Psych…)
2. Inbar, Y., and J. Lammers. (‘Perspectives on Psychological Science’)
3. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: (‘A Cultural Approach’)
Brilliant post. My favourite line is this one: “The soft sciences spend the first two weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method.” I nearly spilled my coffee. I wish that line could be repeated in every classroom everywhere.
“After all, more students means more professors.”
The wisdom of pushing so many not-obviously-academic young people into university is often questioned: but the negative impact of all this expansion on the quality of the faculty is ignored. It strikes me that Phil Jones (say) would perhaps have made an admirable high school geography teacher, back in the day: and his working life would certainly have been more useful if he had.
Stephen Rasey says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:58 am
Read John Locke and then Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The Law of S and D exists in the state of nature but is violated by bandits whose only remedy is police or mafia. The Law has never operated in an actual social order.
Seattle says:
May 20, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Yes. Von Neumann’s Game Theory too. Being non-empirical, I do not classify them as science, though that is not to say that they are run of the mill soft science.
“The Law of S and D exists in the state of nature but is violated by bandits” – Theo Goodwin
How is it violated? In my area, possession of marijuana may be illegal, but there are still voluntary exchanges and the higgling of buyers and sellers still fixes a price (e.g. $300 / oz).
If I don a jet pack, does that mean I’m violating Einstein’s field equations?
“Von Neumann’s Game Theory too. Being non-empirical, I do not classify them as science” – Theo Goodwin
Is mathematics a science? Its theorems are tautologies, i.e. restatements of axioms.
Is geology a science? What about its a priori axioms, such as the cross-cutting relationships? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_cross-cutting_relationships
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_lateral_continuity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_superposition
“The question whether the term “science” ought to be applied only to the natural sciences… is merely linguistic and its solution differs with the usages of various languages. In English the term science for many people refers only to the natural sciences. In German it is customary to speak of a Geschichtswissenschaft and to call various branches of history Wissenschaft, such as Literaturwissenschaft, Sprachwissenschaft, Kunstwissenschaft, Kriegswissenschaft. One can dismiss the problem as merely verbal, an inane quibbling about words.” – Ludwig von Mises