tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post1286914734890621760..comments2023-10-30T12:26:15.822+01:00Comments on Research as a Second Language: The Liberal Arts of Being RuledThomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-87230993463439516672016-12-10T09:53:05.774+01:002016-12-10T09:53:05.774+01:00I appreciate that view, Ben, which I take as a ver...I appreciate that view, Ben, which I take as a version of "we don't need <i>less</i> science but <i>better</i> science." There are a lot of reasons that I don't hold that view any longer. One of them is that placing the "burden of connecting their fields of study to the preexisting network of scientific knowledge" on scholars in the humanities often implies something like what Dawkins said in the <i>Selfish Gene</i>:<br /><br />"Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"<br /><br />Notice that he is suggesting that we <i>ignore</i> Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Kierkegaard <i>completely</i> in favor of what you call "the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior". I suppose you're not advocating that we outright ignore them, but merely using evolutionary theory to explain their works as "evolved" human behaviors. I've got to say that that seems like a highly impoverished way of reading, say, <i>Hamlet</i>.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-37783509179832701512016-12-09T19:23:47.090+01:002016-12-09T19:23:47.090+01:00I am in 100% agreement with you that ideologues in...I am in 100% agreement with you that ideologues in academia and journalism have been hamstringing our society's ability to accurately perceive itself. However, I think it is ludicrous to suggest that any type of epistemology other than the scientific can pierce the fogs of ideologies.<br /><br />I partly agree with your sentiments about the humanities needing to play a larger role in our efforts to understand our society, but I sincerely hope that not many people are persuaded by your arguments that, to my ear, are anti-scientific. Instead of asking the moneyed people to "return" to funding the humanities, I think it is time for academics in the humanities to take on the intellectual burden of connecting their fields of study to the preexisting network of scientific knowledge already out there. In my opinion, the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior--behavior which includes the creation of great works of art studied by the humanities--would be the place to start.Ben Bradshawhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12868539229063670670noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-75987387928328231832016-12-09T15:51:19.397+01:002016-12-09T15:51:19.397+01:00I think we mostly agree, Russ. My view is that bad...I think we mostly agree, Russ. My view is that bad economics and bad statistics, imbued with the authority of "science", have provided ideological cover for a lot bad policy. If we had kept our economics Austrian and our statistics Bayesian, much human suffering could have been avoided. If you start the clock in 1913, you can even imagine the avoidance of two world wars.<br /><br />But this would also mean <i>limiting</i> the social sciences to some pretty formal analyses of rather broad phenomena. On the policy side, there would likewise be some serious limitations on the role of the state in what you call "the real lived experiences of citizens".<br /><br />The articulation of those experiences, I am trying to say, should be left to the arts, and the study of the arts should be left to the rigorously unscientific attention of the humanities. Where we disagree on your idea (as I understand it) that the solution lies in funding more "qualitative" social science. There is no such thing. It's either art or science—"qualitative science" is nonsense. Interestingly, even the Austrian economists would admit that they aren't doing science so much as philosophy.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-10078002795714502042016-12-09T15:31:37.081+01:002016-12-09T15:31:37.081+01:00As an anthropologist, I think blaming 'the soc...As an anthropologist, I think blaming 'the social sciences' is a bit too broad of a brush, not least because they're hardly all in the ascendant. Within social science, certain statistically-dominated subjects have thrived (sociology and economics); these two subjects are the ones which have led us astray even as they have asserted their dominance over the rest of the disciplines. <br />Economics proved false in 2007-8, having become so lost in a sea of numbers that they no longer understood the economy as a whole. Sociology arguably fell adrift even earlier - it was obsessed over by left-wing governments from Clinton and Blair onward, a trend which continued under Obama, yet the data it was producing was increasingly divorced from the real lived experiences of citizens.<br />I suspect that, unless and until the power imbalance within social science is corrected so that the scientism-riddled 'statistics' subjects cease to hold extra-ordinary clout while qualitative disciplines are sidelined, we shall continue to see academia's approach to social commentary drifting away from genuine explorations of the real world. This is, of course, ultimately a political choice - for nearly three decades, economics and sociology have dominated grant awards, and it's well known that if an economist, a historian and an anthropologist compete for the same money, the economist always wins. It didn't used to be this way. Neoliberalism brought willful blindness to the social sciences, since no ideology can bear critical scrutiny, and now we need to catch up on decades of lost work and missed talent if we are to correct our lopsided understanding of the social.Russ Odoninoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-45250774150650122432016-11-18T21:05:09.435+01:002016-11-18T21:05:09.435+01:00I agree with you about this, Andrew. In my defense...I agree with you about this, Andrew. In my defense, I have been somewhat critical of the social sciences and the humanities since before 2010. And you say the Democrats lost control of Congress in 2010? Maybe it's a small point, but <a href="http://pangrammaticon.blogspot.dk/2009/07/birth-of-empire.html" rel="nofollow">I did suggest</a> that the little stunt they pulled back in 2009 probably didn't do much to improve their relationship with "the real America".Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-55594286148988431762016-11-18T19:48:51.972+01:002016-11-18T19:48:51.972+01:00Thomas:
This is all fine. But you could've w...Thomas:<br /><br />This is all fine. But you could've written it a few days before the election. Had the election gone as predicted, with Clinton getting the expected 52% of the two-party vote rather than the awkwardly-distributed 51% which was not enough for her to win in the electoral college, it still would've been true that half of Americans would've refused to vote for her etc. So I don't disagree with much of what you write, but there's something a bit off, to me, in tying it to the particular election outcome. Maybe you could've said this back in 2010 when the Democrats lost control of Congress.Andrew Gelmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02715992780769751789noreply@blogger.com