April 30, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:So I spent last weekend at a Liberty Fund seminar with some very, very smart people, ranging from the inimitable bloggers Will Wilkinson and Arnold Kling, to an economics professor who runs economics experiments with Vernon Smith of Nobel Prize fame. The subject was The Two Cultures, which is to say, the scientific culture and the literary one.
There is nothing like such a neat split as the book at the center, CP Snow's The Two Cultures, posits. But I think there is sufficient truth to the proposition that it's worth exploring, and I certainly enjoyed the seminar. As someone with a foot firmly in both worlds, I do think there is a discernible difference in worldview. Not that CP Snow seems to understand it; he argues that the main difference is the attitude towards helping the world poor (the book was written in 1960), and he says that the literary folks are unfeeling reactionaries. This based on Eliot, Pound, and another writer with Fascist sympathies, ignoring, in the truest tradition of literary culture, the vast swathe of communist writers who would have disconfirmed this thesis.
What is the difference? I'd argue that it's a mindset. The scientific mindset is about a system of interlocking falsifiable premises that form a falsifiable theory. This system encourages mental habits that go beyond the "critical thinking" facility that liberal arts colleges like to tout. It means knowing your premises, and examining every theory, including your own, for how they conform to your premises, to other theories you have examined and believe to be true, and for possible disconfirming evidence.
Let's take the minimum wage as an example in economics. The calssic model tells me that if I increase hte price of labor by raising the minimum wage, I decrease demand for it, just as I decrease demand for anything else when I increase the price. Now, say you come to me and say "I don't think that increasing the minimum wage decreases the number of jobs (or hours worked)".
As students of economics, we have certain premises we share. I can say "let's go back to first principals: are you arguing that the laws of supply and demand don't work?"
That's probably a little drastic for you. You can argue that the laws work, but don't show much effect here because labor demand is very inelastic, which is to say that changes in price produce very small changes in demand. Cigarettes are a good example of a price-inelastic good. Minimum wage labor is not generally thought to be a good example of a price-inelastic good over the medium-to-long term, but you can argue that small increases don't produce effects that are distinguishable from background noise, and we can look for evidence. We'll both basically agree on what sorts of evidence work. We may argue ferociously about the result, or how good our model is, etc., but we'll both agree that the process for finding truth is to construct a hypothesis by building carefully from basic premises, and then test it as well as we can against the real world. The physical sciences will have even more rigorous tests than economics, which runs up against hte difficulty of getting humans to let themselves be experimented on. Ultimately, perhaps you'll be right: the effect of a small change in the minimum wage doesn't have any measurable effect. But the process will have refined and enhanced both our understanding, for example by establishing that we agree that the laws of supply and demand still apply to labor, and we can't generalize from, say, a study showing no effect on employment from a $0.05 change in the wage, to a conclusion that we can raise the minimum wage by $5.00 and still have no change in employment.
The humanities simply doesn't have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can't, although you can certainly be more rigorous than many of the programs devoted to exposing the obvious truth that Shakespeare and company did not have the same racial and gender sensibilities as 21st century Americans, yawn. In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet. That's why discussions in those courses tend to revolve around the speakers' opinions on human nature, interesting and possibly right but very difficult to either prove or falsify.
A while back, I was interviewed along with some grad students in a Middle Eastern studies program. They presented me at one point with a most extraordinary thesis. The war in Iraq, they said, was about oil. But not in any way that anyone had been arguing (presumably, earlier theories had been refuted.) Rather, the object of the war was to get Iraqi oil so that we could keep it away from Europe and, by impoverishing them, improve our own lot.
There were a number of very strange economic ideas in there, but one is demonstrably incorrect: that you can force oil prices up in one area through embargo. It simply doesn't work in commodity markets. If we took all Iraq's oil ourselves, the oil we otherwise woudl have consumed would simply be purchased by Europe. If we cut production and diverted all the oil here to keep our prices stable, prices would spike in Europe, and people would resell our oil to Europe until the prices balanced. We know commodity boycotts don't work, because they've been tried in various times and places, including by OPEC on us, and they don't work unless you've got a totalitarian police state to enforce them (even then, there's a lot of leakage).
I tried to explain this to them. All three of them reacted as if the very idea of referring to the economics of oil markets to test the validity of their argument were some sort of wacky notion, like trying to disprove it using the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup. It had clearly never occurred to them to think about ways in which they could test their theory -- and in my days as a Lit major, it wouldn't have occurred to me to test my semantically interesting, but economically demonstrably false, theories either. They didn't attempt to refute anything I said, but sat there with a pitying, contemptuous look on their face, about the way I used to look at my parents when I was fourteen and they told me drinking was bad for me. They seemed to believe they had some sort of hidden knowlege that validated their beliefs in such a way as to render any empirical evidence moot.
It was strange. But not that strange. I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.
Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art. It's vital. But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms. You don't need to be able to run a study yourself -- but you should understand the limits of experimental design, how data is used to build a case, and the frameworks of almost-sciences like economics that will let you understand where economists pronouncements are likely to be pretty solid (rent control) and where they're likely to be personal opinions dressed up as facts (tax policy). We can't all be scientists, but we can, most of us, understand the scientific way of thinking. And since the scientific way of thinking is what's building most of the science that's building our world, and should be constructing the economic thought we expect to make us all richer, we'd better be able to follow it or we risk being led around by the nose.
Posted by Jane Galt at April 30, 2003 12:20 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksThis is why I love Jane Galt. She takes one of my deep seated beliefs and writes about it with such beautiful clarity. Thank you.
Posted by: Alan M. Robertson on April 30, 2003 01:19 AMOnce upon a time there was a line in the sand separating so-called hard sciences and easy sciences. While I can't argue that the curriculum of many liberal arts programs are worth the time and effort spent on them, I can say that it's entirely way too simplistic make the distinction that you've made here.
That being said your point about the value of scientific thinking is well taken, particularly from a macro-economic standpoint. Over the next century, America's population will double. Will it also take that long to see a doubling of GDP? If not, where will gains in productivity come from? It'll come from advances in science and technology.
I think part of the reason we aren't still in a tech boom is that there simply weren't enough appropriately skilled workers to fuel the technological demands. As a result, three years later, many are still scratching their heads about what might be next.
I have a liberal arts background. Nonetheless, my personal opinion is for anyone considering a liberal arts degree is to do it on their own time. It's simply career suicide these days not to be scientifically educated.
Posted by: Matt Johnson on April 30, 2003 01:53 AMI think it was George Will who said that modern economies are based on technological application of scientific discovery. (He may not have coined it, but it's something that falls out of his mouth when you push the right button. He (and others) will cite Eli Whitney, etc., etc. and rightly so.)
Before anyone begins to think of scientists as coldly rational, it's certainly true, but not necessarily about their politics. Last month, I spent a good deal of time in my lab trying to unconvince two Ph.D. chemists (both immigrants, one Chinese, one Indian) that the very same scheme Jane mentioned isn't in play. They're good at chemistry, but that doesn't mean their politics are free from nationalism and/or paranoia (justifiable or not.)
Posted by: Klug on April 30, 2003 02:18 AM>>In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet
Might I suggest that this is a wholly inaccurate characterisation of sociology?
Posted by: dsquared on April 30, 2003 02:36 AM"In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet."
Certainly there are segments within sociology and political science that don't pursue social science as a science. But to suggest that those within these fields "don't yet" do their research as science is false. Most political scientists these days follow pretty much the pattern of research that Jane attributes to economists in the post. To be sure there are many who attack this trend within political science but it is rather overwhelming at this point. The major political science journals and most minor ones have adopted guidelines requiring authors to make data and methods available for replication purposes. Mathematical models have become standard fare. And statistical skills are commonplace. Now whether anyone is all that interested in the product of much of this research is another story altogether.
All in all, the central point of the post is dead on. That said, how does one convince people that constructing logically falsifiable arguments and gradually refining them offers a useful method for figuring out how the world works?
Posted by: Ross on April 30, 2003 03:24 AMMatt Johnson: "I think part of the reason we aren't still in a tech boom is that there simply weren't enough appropriately skilled workers to fuel the technological demands."
Please.
Posted by: Orbitron on April 30, 2003 03:36 AMPlease forgive the minor quibble, Jane, but the scientific mindset involves two components, of which falsifiability is one. The other is the insistence on impersonal reproducible prediction -- "If, given these conditions, an unidentified experimenter does X, then Y will infallibly occur" -- which supports falsifiability from the empirical side. When you said that " We know commodity boycotts don't work, because they've been tried in various times and places," and later spoke of experimental design, you were pointing at that condition.
An example might be appropriate. If you were to chop a golf fairway up into individually identified small segments, and ask a huge group of watchers to predict on which of those labeled segments Jack Nicklaus's next drive would land, one of them might well predict it correctly. But could he do so a second time? A third? Okay, let's assume he could. That would satisfy a personal falsifiability criterion. But would he have a causal model for his predictions that others could use to make their own reliable predictions?
Sorcery shades over into science via impersonal reproducibility. A sorcerer, if one existed, might be able to do amazing things reproducibly, but he might not be able to teach anyone else how to do them. If he could teach anyone to replicate his feats -- that is, if they were based on a causal model rather than on his personal qualities -- that would put a sheen of scientific understanding on his knowledge, even if what he knew were only how to secure the assistance of superhuman creatures (e.g., angels, demons) to carry out his wishes.
(Coda: Of course, predictions have to carry deadlines. "It will happen if you wait long enough" won't satisfy most observers. Economics has limited power of prediction, because it has difficulty coping with the time dimension. But it's more rigorous than the other soft disciplines even so, by virtue of the greater mensurability of its phenomena and its capacity for making some predictions, albeit with fuzzy deadlines.)
Posted by: Francis W. Porretto on April 30, 2003 07:31 AMI'm going to beg to differ on both poli sci and sociology. Sociology will assume the science mantle when it stops relying on first person subjective evaluations and surveys, political science when it develops a coherent micro model from which the macro can be derived -- as a friend I spoke to last night said, "In economics you don't have to sit around arguing whether people look to their own self interest, but you have to argue that in political science before you can get anywhere". Economics is the least scientific where it has the most trouble finding testable data, which is to say macroeconomic policy, which is why there's so much truth-shading by politics-minded economists in areas like tax policy; assertions are often arguable, but rarely falsifiable.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 07:45 AMGood post!
I saw this article in Policy Review the other day which addresses a simliar point about measuring the effectiveness of government programs.
Jim
Posted by: scarhill on April 30, 2003 08:04 AMI've got about half a MS in postgraduate mathematics, and I can't make heads or tails of the calculus I've seen economists use.
So, it's possible that economics can be thought of as a "pure" science in some respects, namely that it fails to connect with reality in large areas.
OTOH economic calculus is supposed to describe real-world mechanisms, which in a way falsifies the above sentence. Not totally, because the number of measurable states is fairly low.
Just something pulled out of my rear to instigate mass ridicule. Enjoy. Now, for that second cup of joe...
Posted by: David Perron on April 30, 2003 08:54 AMpolitical science when it develops a coherent micro model from which the macro can be derived -- as a friend I spoke to last night said, "In economics you don't have to sit around arguing whether people look to their own self interest, but you have to argue that in political science before you can get anywhere".
So, your argument is that all economists have the same view of human nature and all agree on the basic premises of macro- and micro- economics?!
While what you say is true of political philosophy/theory, it doesn't apply to much of the rest of the discipline. If all you mean by "economics" is econometric analysis then, yes, it is more scientific than most of political science simply because you can isolate far fewer variables. Further, by the standards of, say, quantum physics, economics is hardly a science, as its predictive value is minimal. The reason isn't so much failure of methodology but, again, because economics is a hell of a lot more complicated than physics--way more variables. I'd argue that political science is more complicated than economics for the same reason. Indeed, economics is, in a sense, a subset of political science since economic variables have to be taken into account in a good deal of political analysis.
Posted by: James Joyner on April 30, 2003 08:55 AMI literally consider anyone with a Liberal Arts doctorate degree an idiot until proven otherwise. Likewise, those with advanced degrees in the hard sciences who (ie. Noam Chomsky) speak about matters outside their area of earned expertise. Am I therefore some sort of red neck buffoon that Richard Hofstadter discussed in his famous work some forty years ago, Anti-Intellectualism in America? Nope, this is merely the very rational--and prudent manner of dealing with these individuals. Regrettably, there is often more than a little truth to the old saying that the Ph.D. means “piled, higher, and deeper.”
The Ph.D. is largely the degree of the intellectual slut. One usually must be a whore who has little self respect and integrity. Do I offend anybody? Tough, that’s just the cold reality of the matter.
Posted by: David Thomson on April 30, 2003 08:58 AMPolitical science has an additional huge problem.
In attempting to make itself a science, it followed the physics model, wherein one of the most valued attributes to theorizing is "parsimony." By which we mean that you should seek the least complicated explanations for an activity (think of it as related to Occam's Razor).
The problem, however, is that whereas in physics you are attempting to explain the behavior of inanimate objects, in political science, you are trying to describe behavior that occurs in the equivalent of a black box (i.e., leaders' heads).
So, you wind up w/ theories that purport to explain international behavior based on single strands, e.g., neorealism---where states respond to "Who has the most power?" or "Who is the biggest threat, defined in specific terms of military, economic, or political power?"
The problem is that:
1. Few decision-makers respond solely to a single stimuli.
2. Few decision-makers have only one reason for an action.
3. Replicability and falsifiability become the judgement of the author, not an outside observer (see previous comment about personal falsifiability).
Worse, you wind up ignoring non-quantifiable, non-replicable factors. For the longest time, international relations theorizing (in the neorealist mode) ignored the role of history, since you can't really measure it, and more importantly, because its role (such as establishing precedent or "reputation") was just murky. For the same reason, cultural explanations have struggled for acceptance.
As for the mathematical models and the like trumpeted previously, "garbage in, garbage out". Some MIT prof, years ago, came up w/ a giant equation to express the Peloponnesian War (iirc). And the purpose of this would be?
Being able to reduce behavior to a 2X2 matrix labeled the "Prisoner's Dilemma" is useful if you're trying to create a REALLY basic explanation. But using that to teach why arms control is good and how we should behave viz. North Korea or Iraq is plain silly.
Posted by: Dean on April 30, 2003 09:05 AMLet me clarify again: I don't think that economics is a science in the same way that physics is. Some of its models have predictive validity; others don't yet. But I'm unaware of any political science models with even partial predictive validity.
There are things that economists argue about, but there are a lot of things they don't. You wouldn't find anyone having serious arguments about, say, the laws of supply and demand, that people attempt to maximize their value as they perceive it, that as interest rates rise the value of bonds falls, or any of a thousand other premises that economists can, when talking to each other, assume are basic premises from which they can attempt to build larger models. I'd venture to say all economists would agree, for example, that all else equal a cut in marginal tax rates is preferable to an increase in tax deductions. I've yet to see similar sorts of agreements among political scientists.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 09:25 AM"The humanities simply doesn't have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can't...."
As you point out, part of the problem here is that testing human behavior has its limits. One is our ethical concerns about human experimentation. Another is the dependence of people to report about themselves. Another is the difficulty of conducting an experiment such that the conditions of the experiment don't alter the behavior. (I'm summarizing these points from your post, but I agree with them all.)
I would add that the humanities also have a different kind of rigor, or at least should have. Modern science is a problem-solving activity. You define your terms and what will count as a solution in advance. The trick then is to determine the model that will appropriately fit these agreed upon elements. The humanities, on the other hand, do not begin from definitions, they work their way towards them. Socrates asking "what is justice?" is a perfect example. A true political science must begin with justice already defined, at least in broad outline; for the classical study of politics, however, the Socratic question is what is most important.
To ask the Socratic question requires you to be attentive to the world, but also to be attentive to what response you have to the world. Nothing is settled in advance, and you end up paying a lot of attention to your own ordinary ways of seeing the world. This is true all along the way; at no point should the inquiry become a fully technical enterprise with its own technical terms and methods.
Is there a rigor that is possible here? I believe so, but it is much more difficult than the rigor of modern science. It requires a painstaking attempt to adequately articulate our ways of thinking that are not entirely on the surface or entirely coherent. We are assisted greatly in this endeavor by dialogue, even though we discover that there are difficult divisions between us and others. If we are confident that even these divisions can be explained, however, we realize that we simply have added another layer to the task: we must come to an understanding of ourselves in the context of our shared world.
This is not abstract navel gazing, although it can devolve into that. It is the very difficult demand to determine what we mean and what we want. Anyone who thinks this line of questioning is unnecessary has simply decided on their own terms as the best, which is a conclusion usually comical for its short-sightedness.
I don't think our humanities programs are really this demanding, and so I agree with the substance of your critique. I also lament the lack of appreciation that humanities students have for the sciences, and economics in particular, since it bears so directly on many of their thoughts about society. At the same time, I don't believe that modern science, including social science, is inherently more rigorous. I believe that it appears more rigorous because its rigor is more easily made manifest, which keeps everyone honest. The humanities suffer fools too gladly, and so demean their own important work.
Posted by: Eddie Thomas on April 30, 2003 09:45 AMOne can absolutely ascertain that 2+2=4. Regretfully, this is not so when dealing with human nature which is intrinsically nebulous. Thus, political scientists and economists are practitioners of the Liberal Arts. I strongly contend, for instance, that it is foolish to ignore the harsh reality of the at least metaphorically reality of Original Sin. Yet, how does one empirically test out this premise?
Posted by: David Thomson on April 30, 2003 10:07 AMI replied to one of Jane's points over at James' blog, but a few other things about this "political science isn't a science" thing bother me:
1. Yes, there is a giant pissing match in our discipline between the empiricists and the non-empiricists. Coupled with that is an internal war among the empiricists between the quals and the quants and the game theorists. But then again political science has really only existed as a separate discipline from history, sociology, psychology, and economics for about 50 years (despite the 100-year pedigree of the APSA), and it's still trying to figure out what to do with those disparate heritages.
2. Not everybody plays with 2x2 contingency tables and single-variable explanations of political phenomena. We have this neat concept called "multiple regression" that can deal with more than one independent variable these days; we use that sometimes.
3. Explanation is more important than prediction in the long run. I'd rather have a wrong prediction than a wrong explanation. If we just wanted predictions, we'd do what insurance companies do: stick a bazillion independent variables in the model and stepwise-regress it. It'll predict great to your original dataset but (a) will blow up if you apply it to anything else and (b) won't make any sense anyway ("hey, it turns out people with purple cars and limps have more accidents than others"; yeah, so?). By contrast, I can tell you why almost 400 members of Congress voted for articles of impeachment and procedural motions leading up to it, and I did it with 9 independent variables - and some of the explanations would be quite surprising even to those who followed the public debate and talking heads.
4. There is no number 4.
5. I can build you a very simple probit model today that will predict how most voters will behave in the next congressional election, based on nothing other than their demographics. Heck, I already have; read this paper. It ain't Galileo dropping stuff off the Tower of Pisa (apocryphal), but it's pretty good for a then-2nd year grad student playing with a Heckman selection model (ok, not so simple) and 50-year-old theories of voter behavior.
Now, granted, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen running around pretending to have all the answers. Some of them (Larry Sabato *cough*) are in my discipline. Some of them (John Lott, Paul Krugman) are in more "respectable" ones. But just because some Ivy grad whose only exposure to The American Voter was that it happened to be on a bookshelf in someone's office in his department can't tell you who'll win a local school board election doesn't mean that nobody can.
(Sorry, y'all struck my "I've got to defend the legacy of Warren Miller" nerve.)
Posted by: Chris Lawrence on April 30, 2003 10:15 AMTelling me what various demographic groups will probably do is good, but not that good, because first of all those demographics change, and second of all, it still won't let you predict an election two years out. The order of magnitude of event required to predict an election (if the president gets caught stealing hte White House silver, having sex with all his interns, selling intelligence secrets to China, ordering hits on prominent members of hte other party, and there's a big ass recession, the other party will win. Otherwise -- I'll tell you in November) is too large to be useful. I on the other hand can predict the outcomes of comparitively trivial changes in wage rages, interest rates, or other prices. Which is not, again, to say that Economics is a science in the way that Physics is. I'd simply argue that economics is further down the road to sciencehood than political science, and that pretty much all of its practicioners agree that the scientific method is the standard to which they should aspire, which is not currently true in poli-sci.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 10:31 AMAnd on the philosophical front:
>>Let me clarify again: I don't think that economics is a science in the same way that physics is. Some of its models have predictive validity; others don't yet. But I'm unaware of any political science models with even partial predictive validity.
"Predictive validity" is a vastly more restrictive standard than "making falsifiable statements" and I don't know of any serious philosopher of science who would use a "predictive validity" standard. I don't think that Stephen Hawking's made a prediction in his life -- or if he has, the making of predictions has been a very small part of his work indeed.
On the "unarguable positions of economists", I think the list fares pretty badly in comparison with sociologists and political scientists (not that I understand how "political science" differs from sociology if indeed it does:
1. You wouldn't find anyone having serious arguments about, say, the laws of supply and demand
Of course you will. The existence of supply and demand curves is a very hot topic indeed; it runs out that for the smooth, monotonic supply and demand schedules that the theory needs, you need very tight and unrealistic mathematical assumptions. The proof of the pudding is that very few existing companies ever try to estimate demand schedules for their products. And, of course, they Marshallian supply-demand analysis is something that only works in principle in partial equilibrium.
What are the "laws of supply and demand" anyway? I've got two economics degrees and I've never seen them written down in the Newtonian formulations that seem to be implied here.
2), that people attempt to maximize their value as they perceive it,
Notoriously either a tautology or an incredibly arguable proposition. This is a useful modelling strategy for particular cases of interest to economists, nothing more, and anyone who is trying to defend it as a proposition about the world has started doing philosophy, not economics.
3. that as interest rates rise the value of bonds falls
This is simply a mathematical tautology. The political science equivalent would be that as one party's share of the vote rises, the other party's share falls.
4.., or any of a thousand other premises that economists can, when talking to each other, assume are basic premises from which they can attempt to build larger models. I'd venture to say all economists would agree, for example, that all else equal a cut in marginal tax rates is preferable to an increase in tax deductions.
I'd bet a very large sum of money that there are economists out there to back all manner of deductions schedules. Industrial policy is not dead yet by any means.
It is one of the things that is very wrong with economics as it is practiced in the Anglosphere that economists have so little knowledge of, and take so little interest in, the work of sociologists. Philip Mirowski has written a number of good books about this physics-envy.
Posted by: dsquared on April 30, 2003 10:44 AMNo argument there, at least. Part of the problem (IMHO) is that undergrads don't get exposed to the empirical side of political science much (much of the curriculum is taught as political history), so they're ill-equipped to understand it when they get to grad school. So we spend a year teaching stuff that they'd have been taught as undergrads in econ or psychology or sociology.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that a sizable chunk of political science rejects (a) empiricism, however loosely defined, and (b) the label "political science." You don't have to crunch logit models to be an empiricist, but at the very least you need to be rigorous.
Posted by: Chris Lawrence on April 30, 2003 10:44 AM>>I on the other hand can predict the outcomes of comparitively trivial changes in wage rages, interest rates, or other prices.
That does not strike me as a terribly rigorous statement.
Posted by: dsquared on April 30, 2003 10:47 AMThe best way to describe professional political science to an outsider is as an amalgam of the following:
Public choice economics (that gets the rat-choicers from the Chicago school and some of the empirical theorists)
Political psychology (that gets the Michigan "psycho-sociological" crowd; probably the bulk of American quantitative work today fits somewhere in here)
Political sociology (that gets the Columbia school, not that there's much of it left; they mostly went to psych. in the 60s)
(These three can be subsumed under "political behavior" and "public opinion".)
Political philosophy/(normative) theory.
Political history (that's, uh, historians; most of the undergrad curriculum comes from here, just to confuse people)
Journalism and communications
International relations (kinda a bizarro world off on its own, with the most in common with rat-choice; that's where your hard-core empirical theorists and game theory people hang out)
Econometrics (and related method-focused parts of other disciplines, like biostatistics etc.)
Plus a few things mostly developed in the discipline (most notably, political institutions, which may owe a lot to Weber, and IR).
Add all that up and it's no surprise that there's no uniform "political science"! To further confuse things, outside the U.S. (even in Canada), political science is much less quantitative (mainly because IR started as a fairly unique phenomenon driven by U.S. government grants during the Cold War) and thus probably is further from contemporary economics than it is in the U.S.
Posted by: Chris Lawrence on April 30, 2003 11:00 AMCP Snow was concerned, as I recall (it's been a long time since I read his book) that we were graduating students who knew *either* Shakespeare's plays, *or* the Second Law of Thermodynamics--and that these were two entirely separate groups of people with little or no overlap.
But, today, we've solved that problem. A high proportion of today's graduates know *neither* Shakespeare's plays *nor* the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What they do know is some postmodernist metatheory which convinces them that they have no need to learn anything substantive--either in the sciences or in the humanities.
Posted by: David Foster on April 30, 2003 11:22 AMI believe there may be some confusion here about what "economics" studies. A lot of people think that it studies money. That's not correct.
Economics is the study of collective decision making, which is why Arrow's work is properly considered a work of economics even though he proved that an ideal democratic system was impossible.
Likewise, Von Neumann's work on things like the Prisoner's Dilemma is properly considered economics.
In these kinds of areas, economics goes beyond science and embraces the crystal clarity of mathematics.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste on April 30, 2003 11:39 AMI agree with you Jane, and I'll take it a step further. Fields like economics and psychology are often attacked by scientists and nonscientists alike as being pseudosciences, not amendable to theorizing and testing hypothesis as someone else has stated. I, however, don't necessarilly take this as a flaw. It is simply the nature of the fields combined with our lack of insight into quantifying chaotic systems. But, at least these fields establish 'premises' which nearly everyone can agree on which can establish a chain of logic. The problem with political science is that (especially in our universities), this concept is twisted and corrupt. Indeed, hypothesis that have overwhelmingly been rejected by reality are taught as gospel in many universities (read Socialism). How can parties have rational, productive discourse when essentially no basic premisis are agreed on? I believe that that is why society has become so polarized. We continue to have to fight the same battles over and over again because we do not come to a consensus on any starting points. History is ignored, sneered at, or spun. Sadly, many of the most heralded 'intellectuals' (mainly in the far left in my opinion) seem to take the stance that their theories are definitive, while reality is frequently inacurrate. How does one engage that sort of thinking?
Posted by: Mark Buehner on April 30, 2003 11:43 AM“I, however, don't necessarilly take this as a flaw. It is simply the nature of the fields combined with our lack of insight into quantifying chaotic systems.”
That’s right, there is no logical reason why a Liberal Arts practitioner should suffer from an inferiority complex just because they are engaged in intrinsically nebulous work. The so-called hard and soft sciences simply have different chores to perform.
Posted by: David Thomson on April 30, 2003 12:23 PM>I don't think that Stephen Hawking's made a >prediction in his life -- or if he has, the making >of predictions has been a very small part of his >work indeed.
You're saying that Hawking Radiation was not a significant prediction?
D, those arguments are trivial. We may argue about the shape of the supply curve -- surely it's not a blinding insight that it's not a nice continuous curve like we drew in our notebooks -- but I'm unaware of any serious economist who would argue that, all else equal, people supply more stuff when the price goes up, and less when the price goes down; and that conversely, people generally demand more stuff when the price goes down, and less when the price goes up (I've yet to see an example of geffen goods, and luxury goods perform a signalling function that has intrinsic utility -- these are special cases that inform our understanding, but don't overthrow the basic concept, which is what you seem to be arguing).
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 01:04 PMGreat thread. I particualrly enjoyed Jane's comments regarding the differing kinds of disputes pertaining to economics. Economists do their profession's reputation no favors when they yammer on like T.V. weathermen, minus the humility and sense of humor.
Posted by: Will Allen on April 30, 2003 01:07 PMA number of comments:
1. Jon von Neumann did very little work on the Prisoner's Dilemma; Stephen is thinking of John Nash.
2. The statements that "a high proportion of today's graduates have only learned postmodern metatheories which convince them that they don't need to learn anything substantive" and that "a significant percentage of universities teach Socialism as if it were Gospel" are hilariously unrigorous.
3. I retract any and all statements about Stephen Hawking, and happily substitute David Deutsch.
And finally, Jane wrote:
>>but I'm unaware of any serious economist who would argue that, all else equal, people supply more stuff when the price goes up, and less when the price goes down; and that conversely, people generally demand more stuff when the price goes down
We've already established that neither of us are on the cutting edge of economic theory, but this just won't do if you're trying to defend economics as against sociology and political theory.
You might notice that you couldn't bring yourself to write that sentence without putting in the qualification "all else being equal", which immediately alters it from a statement about the world to a proposition of pure metaphysics which is no longer falsifiable.
Second, your characterisation of these "laws" is actually inconsistent; if people "tend to supply more" when the price goes up, but also "tend to demand less", then what happens to the excess production which isn't demanded?
[This is not a trivial point at all, by the way; it's at the heart of my earlier objection that these "universally accepted laws" are actually principles of Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis, a way of doing economics which is pretty much universally *rejected* in the profession for purposes of practical application. Prices and quantities are determined jointly between many separate markets across an economy by agents acting with imperfect information and in conditions of irreducible uncertainty.]
In any case, I can come up with numerous counterexamples; a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls, and the supply of paper is notoriously dependent on capacity decisions made three years ago rather than today's price. You might object that in these cases "all things are not equal"; but at this point you either accept that not all economists agree on how they're not equal, or retire from doing science.
Stephen den Beste is closest to being right, though I disagree with the attempt to unify economics under any particular theme of "collective decision making". The Soviet Academy made a useful distinction between:
1) "Economic cybernetics", which is a branch of mathematics (specifically, it is the branch of applied mathematics which deals with the constrained optimisation of certain kinds of complex system). This is where game theory, general equilibrium analysis, production functions, trade theory, etc go.
2) "Political economy", which is the study of how social arrangements of various kinds affect the control of the means of production and the distribution of consumption goods.
The first of these is not a science (unless somebody's going to claim that engineering is a science, in which case this is simply a disagreement about dictionaries). The second is a science if and only if sociology is a science, because sociologists study exactly the same phenomena using most of the same methodology.
Ooops. Above response was regarding what happens to excess production that isnt demanded. Answer is you get mothballed planes rotting on tarmacs in Texas.
Posted by: Mark Buehner on April 30, 2003 02:19 PMhttp://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/index.html
John Brockman's "Third Culture" ideas might fit with this discussion.
Posted by: back40 on April 30, 2003 02:27 PM"Minimum wage labor is not generally thought to be a good example of a price-inelastic good over the medium-to-long term, but you can argue that small increases don't produce effects that are distinguishable from background noise, and we can look for evidence."
Would it be crass of me to bring up the Card study on minimum wage increases in PA here? Or to mention how Reich, when he was labor sec, got crucified in Congress when he cited it in his arguments for an increase in the minimum wage.
I'd argue that being a good scholar in the social sciences or humanities is vastly more difficult than being in the "hard" sciences or technology. If you don't think clearly in engineering, your bridge falls down, you have cost overruns, or your plant blows up; to make an allusion to Dr. Johnson, the rock refutes your foot.
But you can be imprisoned by outdated or sloppy theories in the humanities for decades or centuries.
Posted by: Tom on April 30, 2003 02:28 PM"Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art."
Um, really? Why not?
As far as I can see, you are arguing that a sound foundation in scientific thought is necessary for a person to get on in the world - exactly how not specified, but presumably by being a responsible voter (else why discuss rent control), and so that you are not exploited personally by others ("risk being led around by the nose"). Since literature and art do not need the scientific method, and it is in this way important - then doesn't that diminish the importance of literature and art?
Posted by: Leonard on April 30, 2003 02:36 PMI remember debating in college with the fruity majors (English, etc.), one thing that struck me was how amazingly ill informed they were about the basic facts of things they had very strong opinions on. Their arguments were weak, backed by paper thin reasoning and even less substantial facts. For example, in discussions about WWII and the use of nuclear weapons to end the war with Japan almost without fail the anti-nuke folks would not have even a basic understanding of the events of WWII other than that it happened. To some degree that wasn't unusual, because they were just "kids", just undergraduate college students. What has really astounded me though is that this situation does not change. No matter how old they get and no matter how much more education and experience they get in 'em they by and large do not gain more facts, more perspective, or more reasoning ability. There are a very few exceptions which are notable precisely because they are exceptions, otherwise the landscape is the same. It's rather amazing really.
Posted by: Robin Goodfellow on April 30, 2003 02:40 PM>>Ooops. Above response was regarding what happens to excess production that isnt demanded. Answer is you get mothballed planes rotting on tarmacs in Texas.
Precisely! This excess supply was not brought about by any "price signals"; it was brought about because the decision to build airline capacity is taken years in advance of any knowledge of what the demand might be.
There is nothing intrinsically "leftist" about this critique of the "standard" supply-demand model, by the way; it is usually identified with the Austrian School.
Posted by: dsquared on April 30, 2003 03:03 PMThe question of why so many liberally educated people have a hard time dealing with rigorous, fact-based argument is interesting indeed, though I strongly suspect that it has much more to do with the specific character of college and university degree programs than it does with the inherent nature of "humanistic" vs. "scientific" approaches to problems.
The fact is that in the U.S. these days "liberal arts" is a de facto synonym for "humanities" and for "easy," neither of which ought to be the case. The classical definition of a liberal education included not only the study of literature, the arts, speculative philosophy and rhetoric, but also mathematics and the natural sciences. Until recently it was assumed that an educated person would be at least somewhat familiar with the basic tools of quantitative and experimental thinking that shape the practice of the natural (and to a lesser extent the social)sciences. But in the last two or three decades, undergraduate programs in the liberal arts have de-emphasized course requirements in general, and in the sciences and math in particular.
Whose fault is this? Before you start pointing fingers at those mushy-headed English professors, ask yourself if perhaps the science faculties of our universities have been all too happy to be relieved of the burden of teaching non-specialized courses to undergraduates who have no intention of going on the advanced study in the sciences.
Not that they ever put much effort into it in the first place. Most colleges and universities offer special courses in the sciences for non-science majors. In theory, this is a good idea. In the case of say, U.S. History, a single course can probably serve the needs of freshmen intending to major in history, and sophmores and juniors majoring in the sciences who need to fulfill a requirement (or satisfy their desire to learn for learning's sake) in history. But in the case of Chemistry, its very difficult to construct a course that will serve the freshmen chemistry major and the junior history major equally well. But the sciences-for-non-science-majors courses at our universities tend to be just dreadful - long on the wrote memorization of facts that are only of use to a specialist, and short on real scientific thinking. At my alma mater, Biology majors taking the intro biology course for majors learned about how to form hypotheses, conduct controlled experiements, and interpret experiemental data. Non-biology majors taking the the intro biology course for non-majors memorized the latin names of human bone groups. No wonder non-science majors recoil from science. In many ways these courses are the exact opposite of what they need to be, and its not the English faculty that's designing them.
It also needn't be the case that a liberal arts education is synonymous with "easy." Let's face it: the kids majoring in mechanical engineering work harder (on average) than the kids majoring in English lit. But that has nothing to do with the inherent nature of the two subjects. One could easily design a tremendously challenging and rigorous undergraduate program in English lit., just as one could design an easy, watered down program in mechanical engineering. The academic cultures of the two discipline make this unlikely to happen, but there's nothing about the material itself, or, neccesarily, the students, that make this impossible.
Don't believe me? Consider this: every year, thousands of humanities majors graduate from college and go on to law school, where they absolutely work their posteriors off. And the study of law is a helluva lot more like the study of literature than it is the study of physics. On average, I suspect that law students work harder than engineering students (not an apples to apples comparison, I know, since the former are graduate level while the latter are undergraduate, but close enough). Certainly among my circle of friends nobody has worked harder in an academic setting than the folks who enrolled at good law schools. That's because law faculties DEMAND that their students master a vast body of factual information about the law AND master a rigorous, disciplined method of deploying that information in legal reasoning. English lit. faculties could do the same thing - demand that their students be exceptionally well read in the canon of English and non-English literature and that they be able to do complex analyses of literary works backed up by close critical readings of texts - they just don't. I knew English majors in college (I kid you not) who bragged that they had gotten by with completely finishing less than a half dozen novels in their four years of college. Chemistry majors with similar work ethics would be drummed out of the department.
Full disclosure: I myself double majored in Biology (with a heavy emphasis on molecular biology and genetics) and Religion (a little bit of theology, history, literary criticism, anthropology, and philosophy - a hodge-podge of humanities disciplines if there ever was one) in college, and am now finishing up an MBA (concentrating in finance). Of these three disciplines, the biology was the "hardest," the finance was the "most useful," and the religion was the most fulfilling.
sd - It's true the universities could have hard English, but that would mean fewer students would apply, cause who wants to work? They don't really need to be experts to do whatever it is English majors do anyway.
It's also true they could conceivably have easy engineering programs, but then they'd have a hard time selling their graduates to employers, what with their bridges falling down and all. And if you can't sell your grads, once again fewer will apply.
So if we assume the universities want to maximize enrollment, and hence $$$, the current system of "sciences hard, humanities easy" serves them pretty well, no?
Posted by: Brian on April 30, 2003 03:34 PMYes, D, that's still completely off point, and refuting a view of economics held by no one whose completed Micro 101. I cited the basic idea of supply and demand, on which all economists agree; that doesn't mean anyone thinks markets clear instantly, but it does mean that they have a general agreement about how they clear. General agreement on the rate at which objects fall in a vacuum does not preclude building a special case for objects in an atmosphere, or a pool of water, or other variables which change the initial "pure" case. but it's helpful to start with the vacuum so we all know to what we're applying our modifiers.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 03:43 PMsd, there may be other reasons why liberal arts curricula tend to be less demanding that those in other fields aside from differing expectations of the faculty.
In fields like mechanical engineering or law there would be, I would think, a certain minimal level of knowledge that is necessary to impart in order to make the degrees at all meaningful. It may be very difficult to make an engineering program significantly easier without making it significantly longer while still maintaining a reasonable level of confidence that graduates would be able to function competently in the fields for which they are being trained. In the liberal arts, similar objective requirements may not exist. In the absence of these measures, any outside pressures to water down the curriculum would be more difficult to resist.
I agree that liberal arts programs don't have to be less rigorous than more scientifically-oriented ones, but I think there are reasons why they tend to be, beyond things like student/faculty laziness (my apologies if I'm mischaracterizing your comments).
Posted by: Sean E on April 30, 2003 03:44 PMThey do have hard English courses; try to really master Shakespeare, Swift, or Chaucer to the point where you find them laugh-out-loud funny and you'll find you have to put in a lot of bone-crushingly boring work, reading enough of their work, and their contemporaries, to accumulate the vocabulary and cultural knowlege to make their work truly accessible. Once you're there, it's incredibly rich, but it's a hell of a lot of work, and the commenter's right -- if most humanities majors wanted to work hard, they'd be in a different major. It's also nearly impossible to communicate to someone who hasn't put in the work why they'll be glad they did once they've had that 'click' experience where Chaucer et. al. suddenly spring to life. I doubt math majors are all that much more motivated, but it's a lot harder to skate in a calculus class, because the culture doesn't like it, and because it's blindingly obvious when you're wrong.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 03:53 PMBrian:
While people tend to like to work less rather than more, people also tend to be willing to work hard if there's value in it for them. In the case of undergraduate English programs, I would argue that making the track harder for students would make them more marketable at the end.
Consider an example I know a little bit about: corporate strategy consulting. The big strategy consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group) hire MBAs out of business school, but they also hire quite a few people directly out of undergrad for 2-4 year gigs (generally the understanding is that you'll go back to get an MBA after that time). Relatively few of the undergrads that get hired are "business" majors. Partly this is because the most prestigious universities tend not to offer undergraduate business programs, and partly because the general consensus is that you don't learn a lot about business in undergrad business programs anyway, so who cares what your undergrad major is.
So what kinds of majors do the big consulting firms hire? Well, the most common major is economics, which I suppose is to be expected. But firms also hire engineering majors and humanities majors. But of these two categories, they tend to hire a lot more engineering majors than humanities majors. Now why is this the case?
Well, its not because the engineers have learned specific skills in college that are immediately useful. Spending four years learning how to do process control on chemical fermentations has little more to do with how to run a business than spending four years studying English poetry. It may be more "practical" in the context of the chemicals industry, but its not more "practical" in the context of business strategy consulting. And its not really because the engineers have better quant skills either. True, business is all about numbers, but the level of quant sophistication in most business applications is quite low, barely above high school algebra.
Rather, consulting firms hire more engineers than humanities majors because consultants work very, very hard, and the firms trust that engineering majors will be able to work long hours without complaint. The humanities majors who do get hired by the strategy consulting firms tend to be from only the very "best" universities, the assumption being that they must have a good work ethic because even if they slacked off for four years in college they would have needed to work very hard to get in in the first place.
And its not just consulting. The fact is, engineering majors can pursue lots of different business opportunities coming out of college because surviving an undergard engineering program shows that you're reasonably bright and very hard-working. If an English degree signified the same thing, then English majors would enjoy higher salaries coming out of college. And that's something students will work harder for.
Posted by: sd on April 30, 2003 03:59 PMI don't know, Janester. I laugh at Chaucer - especially the fart jokes - and understand him simply through reading in my spare time. OBEV at bedtime and so on. (Quiller-Couch edition, natch.)
Anyway, no one's saying English CAN'T be hard, simply that it usually isn't. It may be different for those intending to go into the academy, but lots of English undergrads can and do coast.
I majored in Econ if that matters to anyone.
Posted by: Brian on April 30, 2003 04:07 PMI think it would be difficult to argue that humanities studies are anywhere near as rigorous as engineering and hard sciences generally. I have no problem with this, per say. A wimpy English program produces a generation of bad poets while a wimpy engineering program produces collapsing bridges. But when it comes to the domain of ideas, be it economics or political science, we still have a strange tribute of respect for the opinions of the 'inteligencia' who tend not to respect the scientific principles of logic and evidence that are pounded into scientists and lawyers. This mindset of people appeal more to the beauty of theory than respect empirical evidence. I've always found that conservative thinkers are more likely to link theory to evidence (ie Kaynes theories compared to the Regan boom) while liberal thinkers rely soly on the beauty of the theory (yes but Chomsky says..). To those of scientific bent, this is alarming. It is analogous to arguing that Copernicus' model of the solar system is correct because it is more symetrically beautiful than Kepler's observations. This is arrogant because it assumes the evidence is wrong without supposing that they may simply be missing more fundamental hidden symmetries. This in turn leads to very bad policy.
Posted by: Mark Buehner on April 30, 2003 04:07 PMIt's not exactly crass; in fact, it's what I was talkign about. The result of the Card study, even if it's true (a much disputed topic) is to refine our knowlege of the elasticity of demand for minimum wage labor; if its results are not a statistical artifact or a result of poor survey design, as many have argued, what they tell us is that small changes don't produce a measurable effect in the fairly short (months, as I recall) time frame they studied. This cannot be generalized, as many, including I believe Robert Reich, did, to proclaim that if we ratchet up the minimum wage a couple of bucks no one will lose their jobs. This is exactly why I think people need training in scientific and statistical methodology -- otherwise, you can't understand the limits of what those in authority tell you.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 04:19 PMhi all,
i have been following the conversation. i found this an interesting claim:
"In these kinds of areas, economics goes beyond science and embraces the crystal clarity of mathematics."
yes steve, it can, but the question i ask would be for what purpose? it can really work in many areas, but consider different possibilities. i am thinking of models of aggregating individual microeconomic agent preference structures into a coherent macro model to derive an aggregate demand function. when i was wading through this stuff, the state of the art was to assume that all agents had cobb-douglas preference functions, and then aggregate. i don't know about you, but i don't work according to a c-d-p-f. it also required a giant set of "simplifying" assumptions to make it all tractable and completely unrealistic. great. i have a model that is elegant, abstract, and divorced from the real world. i have "clarity" and not much else to show for it. admittedly that was approx. 15 years ago, and much may have changed in that regard. i think it unlikely given the love that economists have for mathematical models that are tractable--a consequence of the "ceteris parabis" condition that holds the world at bay (but please correct me on this). one ray of hope in all this, especially in trying to model economic behaviour is looking at experimental work and seeing what we actually get.
what about those rock solid supply and demand curves/preferences? i would like to add my querilous voice the wonderful theoretical possibility of the giffen good, kinked demand curves, regret, transitivity violations, the optimization vs. limited rationality debate, etc. and why do we buy into the assumption that human beings have monolithic preference functions, based on an idea of a unified psyche?
dsquared pointed to an interesting author-mirowski--whose central thesis is that economics is consciously modelled, analogously, to classical physics and shares its limitations brought on by a too close adherence to it (at least the stuff we did when we were undergraduates). i'll also point to another: jack amariglio, an economics academic interested in post modern thought.
gotta go to a dental appointment. i'll catch up with the rest of it later...
Posted by: cas on April 30, 2003 04:26 PM"I've always found that conservative thinkers are more likely to link theory to evidence ... while liberal thinkers rely soly on the beauty of the theory ..."
This is our old friend the correspondence/coherence dichotomy. Do we judge a theory because it's logically coherent with itself, or because it corresponds to the evidence? It'd be nice to have both, but if we can't have both, which should we pick?
Marxism, for instance, is neatly coherent. All wars are capitalists fighting each other for natural rescources or whatever. No correspondence at all though.
Classical liberalism doesn't quite cohere. Attempts have been made for the one big theory that explains it all - natural rights, se;f ownership, Bentham's "greatest happiness" principle - but a lot of the time we play it by ear in the great common law tradition.
I'd rather correspond than cohere any day.
(And speaking of bad poets.)
sd:
"If an English degree signified [a good work ethic], then English majors would enjoy higher salaries coming out of college. And that's something students will work harder for."
Maybe. Suppose we look at universities like a business, sort of a scholastic factory, with their graduates as their product. Students want to be turned into a desirable product, but desirable is determined by the "buyer". Who is buying all these English majors and what do they want out of them? A work ethic? Prestige? Taste in literature? I don't know.
But whatever they want is likely what they will get.
Posted by: Brian on April 30, 2003 04:39 PMHi D!
"In any case, I can come up with numerous counterexamples; a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls"
Interesting discussion going on here - just one quibble:
Erm, usually the Insulin case is splashed out in Micro 101 litterature under the heading "inelastic demand'...
Regards / GulGnu
-Stabil som fan!
Posted by: GulGmi on April 30, 2003 04:43 PMOne difference I've noticed between hard science programs and humanities programs in general is that in order to achieve the common goal of more funding for each department, the criteria seem fundamentally different. Engineering, chemistry, and physics schools place tremendous emphasis on putting hard-working intelligent majors into industry and grad school. Reputation is everything, they grow by attracting good students to a good program. Communications and english departments get more money by making their departments a revolving door, "we graduated x% more people than last year, we need more money!" So there is no incentive for humanities departments to have rigorous programs, in fact, there is disincentive. Except for the very few at the very top that do value reputation. Disclosure: MS in physics, wife is MS in chemistry, mother-in-law is chair of a communications department. Hearing her talk about her department really brings this difference home. My wife helped her grade some essays and could not believe these college students were writing at an 8th grade level. But push them through, and more money will be forthcoming.
Posted by: scott on April 30, 2003 04:45 PM"An Indian-born econmist once explained his personal theory of reincarnation to his graduate economics class. 'If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist,' he said, 'you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.'
A sociologist might say that this quote shows what is wrong with economists: they want a subject that is fundamentally about human beings to have the mathematical certainty of the hard sciences. And without doubt there is too much mathematics in the economics journals, because mathematical elaboration is a time-honored way of dressing up a banal idea.
But good economists know that the speaker was talking about something else entirely: the sheer difficulty of the subject. Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology."
- Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
Posted by: Jason McCullough on April 30, 2003 04:48 PM"A wimpy English program produces a generation of bad poets while a wimpy engineering program produces collapsing bridges."
You push your argument a little bit too far. A wimpy English program may also produce a generation of idiots unable to think and follow a logical argument. This leaves them unable to adequately respond to the seductive siren call of the ideological monsters ready to take advantage of them. Evil ideas turned into action can result in a lot of bridges and societies being destroyed!
Am I being nitpicky? After all, I agree with the rest of the post. No, probably not. The deconstructionists and other English department jerks are not benign and merely silly. On the contrary, they are highly destructive creatures.
Oregon State University (which I attended and from which I dropped out when about 30 hours short of a degree) only had two requirements university-wide. Every freshman had to take "Writing 121", and everyone was required to take three PE courses. All the requirements more specific than that came from the various colleges within the university.
The College of Science required us to take something like 45 hours of humanities, plus we had to take a 3-term physical science sequence (I took Physics) and a 3-term biological science sequence (I took Zoology). The College of Engineering at the time required all its students to take Statics and Dynamics. (And because of that I was really glad I was in the College of Science.) Other colleges had similar substantial requirements.
I myself did extremely poorly in "Writing 121". It was a pass/fail course and I did pass it, but not without struggle. (I only really learned to write well much later.)
What I would suggest is that maybe there should be some sort of universal requirement for every freshman to take a one term course called "Critical Thinking" which would be taught by the Philosophy Department. Such a course would go into things like basic logic and construction of valid arguments, deduction and induction and why induction is both more powerful and more prone to error, the difference between theories, evidence and axioms and how they interrelate, fallacies of argument and reasoning (most especially post hoc fallacy, but also talking about things like "reference to authority", begging the question [taking as axiomatic what you're trying to prove], argumentum ad misercordiam, Argumentum ad ignorantiam, and in particular Argumentum ad logicam though not under those names), an introduction to probability and a discussion of coincidence, a discussion of why unfalsifiable theories are both true and useless as well as other basic concepts from epistemology, a discussion of the flaws of eyewitness testimony, and so on. I could see such a course also venturing into things like basic game theory as well as visiting the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons and the Free Rider problem.
The ultimate point of the course would be to try to instill an understanding of what I think of as rigor in arguments, analysis and thought processes. A different way to look at it is that it would teach students how to be skeptical.
Being exposed to these kinds of ideas would make a big difference later, though it might take years to bloom (just as I only really began to be able to write well when I was in my late 20's). None of this stuff is difficult to comprehend; it can be made accessible to a general audience, and in fact much of it can be made really interesting. The problem now is that most people never really encounter much of it.
Of course, certain departments in the University would fight tooth and nail against this because it would drastically reduce the susceptibility of students to their cults, which don't survive exposure to rigorous analysis.
(By the way, I have another comment about Jane's post up on my site. Basically, the modern world has mostly been created by engineers rather than scientists, but this supports Jane's basic point even better because the engineering sensibility is even more committed to pragmatism and objectively verifiable results than the science sensibility.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste on April 30, 2003 05:02 PMdsquared wrote:
>You might notice that you couldn't bring yourself to write that sentence without
>putting in the qualification "all else being equal", which immediately alters it
>from a statement about the world to a proposition of pure metaphysics which is no
>longer falsifiable.
The concept of “all else being equal” is at the very heart of the scientific method. That is, the assumption in any experiment is that only one variable is changing from one test run to the next. If you’re going to deny that this is possible then you’re reverting to the “how can anyone really know anything” type of argument.
A better way to describe the “falsifiable statement” is “a method of prediction which will not fail due to unknown reasons”. There won’t be some mystical unknown force that makes producers sell less stuff because its price went up--if this occurs, it will be for a discernible and unique reason.
>>a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls,
See above. Diabetics don’t buy more insulin as the price falls for the reason that their demand for insulin is fixed independently of economics. You’ll note that they don’t buy _less_ as price _increases_, either. This is because of something known as inelastic demand which is covered in basic economic studies.
Posted by: DensityDuck on April 30, 2003 05:50 PMOrbitron, wrt to your please comment...are you suggesting that the skillset of the labor force had nothing at all to do with the fact that we're no longer in a tech boom?
Clearly you didn't have to hire anyone in a technical capacity between 97-01. Furthermore, how many companies spent untold billions trying to work around people who weren't in the right industry much less the right job?
Posted by: Matt Johnson on April 30, 2003 06:04 PM"I cited the basic idea of supply and demand, on which all economists agree"
For the benefit of those who came in late, could you say exactly what this "law" is?
Posted by: Jimbo on April 30, 2003 06:05 PM"By the way, I have another comment about Jane's post up on my site. Basically, the modern world has mostly been created by engineers rather than scientists, but this supports Jane's basic point even better because the engineering sensibility is even more committed to pragmatism and objectively verifiable results than the science sensibility."
The modern world may have been created by scientists & engineers.
But an *acceptable* modern world was created by lawyers, philosophers, economists, & artists other students of the "soft subjects".
The Soviet Union had some great engineers & scientists; but worship of technology isn't sufficient for a civilized society.
And I say this as an engineer. Our job, as Herbert Hoover said, is to make for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck. We leave the harder question of what to do with our hard-won cost savings to others.
Posted by: Tom on April 30, 2003 06:38 PMOn the issue of which is harder, humanities or science, my experience is that they have quite different curves of hardness. To get along, to get a passing grade or do just good enough work, is easier in the humanities than in the sciences, but to do extremely well is harder.
To get along in the humanities you need to have a rough outline of a few good ideas, to get along in the sciences you need to grasp quite a fair bit. Once you're getting along it's easier in the sciences to lift your game and be really good than it is in the humanities because sciences (or at least physics, chemistry and economics) is more about grasping principles and applying them, and the humanities are more about knowing heaps and heaps of facts and being able to pull them together.
Also when you make a mistake in the sciences it's a lot more easier to find out you have than in the humanities. Often the universe forces it on your attention.
Which ties in with two other things of my experience, the average quality of scientists should be higher than the average quality of humanities not because science teachers are ideologically inclined to being tougher, but just because you need to be better to stay in the game. And that the sciences have made more progress than the humanities, the top people may be equally as good but in the humanities they're struggling with far less tractable problems, and the universe delivers worse feedback.
Oh, and as for why engineers and scientists get hired for jobs where the maths is much simpler than anything they learned at uni? Because now I've struggled through vector calculus, I know what a second differential is as unthinkingly as I know my own name. Once you've done a lot of advanced maths most basic maths is like second nature, you know it well enough that when you're working with it you can focus on the problem you're solving rather than the tools you're using. It's like climbing Mt Victoria after climbing Mt Everest as opposed to climbing Mt Victoria after a life on the Canterbury plains.
Posted by: Tracy on April 30, 2003 06:38 PMI might point out, Tom, that it's generally the humanities folks, not the engineers, who are advocates for socialism and its lookalikes.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 07:12 PMJane, oh now there's a wild-assed generalization if I ever saw one. What evidence gives you even the slightest amount of confidence that humanities folks are more open to socialism than their engineering counterparts?
How ironic it is that it had to be you that proved your own point. :) hahahah
Posted by: Matt Johnson on April 30, 2003 07:51 PMIt's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 08:01 PM>Furthermore, how many companies spent untold
>billions trying to work around people who
>weren't in the right industry much less the
>right job?
See, Dilbert is funny, but it is funny for its exaggeration of the truth and not its exact depiction.
Posted by: DensityDuck on April 30, 2003 08:12 PM"It's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?"
Texeira & Judis's quote a 52-to-40 Democrat v. Republican amongst professionals in 2000. IIRC, Democrats also had the edge amongst folks with graduate degrees, but lagged amongst those with Bachelor degrees only. I'd say the %age of graduate degrees that are scientific/technical or vocational is higher than than for bachelor's level.
(That having said, native-born Merkins studying science & engineering at the graduate level are usually a minority in their departments.)
Also, Santa Clara valley voted 2-for-1 Gore in the 2000 elections. If there's a geekier part of the world than San Jose/Santa Clara, I'd like to know.
(C'mon Megan. Come up with some quant data. We know you can do it.)
Posted by: Tom on April 30, 2003 08:25 PMhi density duck,
"See above. Diabetics don’t buy more insulin as the price falls for the reason that their demand for insulin is fixed independently of economics. You’ll note that they don’t buy _less_ as price _increases_, either. This is because of something known as inelastic demand which is covered in basic economic studies."
i want to disagree with this example offered. the bottom line is that insulin is not a perfectly inelastically demanded good. demand here is effective demand--i want it and i can pay for it. at some point as price goes higher and higher, people will stop being able to effectively demand insulin, and they will turn to a subsitute--called prayer. as far as i can tell, there is no purely inelastic good. just ask ethiopians who dies of starvation in earlier days. they may have demanded grain, but they did not have effective demand...
Posted by: cas on April 30, 2003 08:30 PMalso, while i am at it, i just have to tell you that i am "shocked, simply shocked i tell you!" by the "prejudices" that i am seeing on offer here.
(best yorkshire miner accent: "literature' awww, that's nuthin! when i was a lad, we had to do 525 calculus problems befor' breakfast, un then go to 30 hours of lectures and labs a day!!!"
apologies to monty python. could we not find examples of folks who did work in eco and in history. and found them both difficult. i smell a whiff of mathematico-phallic-centrism.
motto: it all depends--on you, your desires and willingness to work, the institution, the teacher, etc. why are you taking a ceteris parabis approach to something with so many variables? ok, a guess--its because we are trained to do that.
another observation:
why are some of you so happy to see economics as "a pristine" fountain of mathematical clarity, divorced from the "chaotic inebriation" of the humanities? i am sorry, much of this mathematical theorizing is not very helpful in economics. what is helpful is an imagination, and dare i call it, a poetic sense (one of the things that economics could in fact take on board in greater amounts). i know we all owe samuelson a great debt for helping to mathematize eco, along with debreu and arrow, but do any of you feel that maybe, just maybe the baby got thrown out with the bath water? in the process of increasing rigour, we ended up squashing the ability to "think outside our box"? in other words, progress in economics will not come from more and more of this incremental mathematical modelling that economists currently favour (experimental eco is an attempt to do this. i'll be interested to see where it goes). ultimately, i suggest that it will come from the impetus of a sensibility that marries the rigour we have found in eco today with the untidy intuitions and poetic imaginations of those "untouchable" and "lazy" disciplines that many folks here disdain.
example of a problem: economics of risk assessment/management (for i cannot bear to call it the economics of uncertainty--which would seem to suggest, erroneously, that we have an economics of accurately modelling uncertainty). it is ironic that keyenes, a mathematician, ended up saying:
"we are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on struict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance."
maybe you think keynes is wrong (my guess is many of you will disagree with his sentiment). if so, good luck on getting a science out of "uncertainty"...
Posted by: cas on April 30, 2003 09:01 PMI have now posted the classic Kling essay on the two cultures topic: http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst5/klingm.html
Posted by: Arnold Kling on April 30, 2003 09:47 PMI think that one of the basic problems that is inherent in the social sciences like economics and sociology is that these soft sciences are more prone to being affected by a sociological equivalent of the Heisenberg principle in psychics. In essence, the very fact of observing a phenomenon changes what you are trying to observe.
An economic model which exhibits predictive qualities which are demonstrated by objective results gives the "players" a rule book which
they can use to modify their behavior so as to take best advantage of the rules to their benefit. As more and more of the players change their strategies to take advantage of these rules, the underlying dynamic which was described as the "rules" of the model will change, and the validity (predictive power) of the model could vanish.
To use a simplistic example to illustrate the point, consider an ancient sage sitting with his friends along the bank of a river watching a strange tribe float past on a group of rafts. The sage, knowing that the river will shortly go over a very steep waterfall, confidently predicts in a loud voice to his companions that all or most of the raft people will die, because of the waterfall. But, one or more of the raft people hear this prediction, and soon the knowledge is spread amongst them. They then decide to head for shore before they come upon the waterfall. The end result is that none of the raft people die, and the sage's prediction turns out to be false. The plain fact is however that his prediction only became false because he enunciated it and the knowledge spread to those who would be affected by it. If he had kept his prediction to himself then it would have come true.
Despite certain rules, such as the law of supply and demand, most economic models are actually descriptions of mass behavior. Unlike atoms and photons, people's behavior can and does change in response to how they perceive they should act in order to acheive their own best interests. A model which describes behavior at any given point in time can become invalid at a later point for this very reason. Although I am not a marxist (far from it) it may well be that any economic model may indeed contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Posted by: tcobb on April 30, 2003 10:02 PMMy sweet, you seem to have mistaken this for a paid endeavor. I do not crunch numbers for this blog, except at my own discretion. I've been working all day, I'm crystal clear that I've seen the figures saying what I asserted, and now I'm going to bed.
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 30, 2003 10:03 PMDaniel Davies writes: "Predictive validity" is a vastly more restrictive standard than "making falsifiable statements" and I don't know of any serious philosopher of science who would use a "predictive validity" standard.
I couldn't say what philosophers of science think (and I'm not sure I really care, either), but I tend to take any given field of science seriously by evaluating the extent to which it has spawned engineering. That's not just because I'm an engineer; it's because engineering is by its nature inherently a process of using science to generate predictions, and testing those predictions empirically. If the device an engineer creates doesn't end up working the way he expects, and he can show that it's not a result of a design problem, then he's found a problem in the theory itself. (And that has actually happened, and scientists were forced to revisit the theory.) But if a given field of science is mature enough then this won't happen; the engineer will use the science in his engineering and the results will actually be what was expected because the science is actually right.
So this actually is what Davies objects to: an evaluation of a field of science primarily based on its predictive validity. If it doesn't permit prediction at all, it can't be used in engineering. If it makes predictions and they are wrong, engineers won't use it. If engineers are using it routinely, it's a major reason to believe that it is right.
It's obvious that this concept applies to such scientific fields as physics and chemistry. If Quantum Mechanics were badly wrong, polymer chemistry and solid state physics wouldn't work, and we would not have plastics or computers. Every time you turn your computer on you're testing Quantum Mechanics, and it keeps passing the test. That's a very powerful form of confirmation.
But it also applies to some of what we think of as the "soft sciences". For example, I don't consider the field of psychology to be as mature as modern physics, but I also don't consider it to be total pseudoscience. Much has been learned in psychology which has practical application.
One reason is that much of modern advertising and marketing are based on psychology, and whether we like it or not they're more effective because of it. (We don't often see cases where advertising is created without that background but such cases do pop up now and again and they are usually laughable.)
I make no claim that anyone besides me uses this means of evaluation, but I do suggest that it's a good heuristic for determining the reliability of any given field of science. On that scale, economics rates above psychology but below physics.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste on April 30, 2003 10:05 PM'cas' asks me, yes steve, it can, but the question i ask would be for what purpose?
There's more to economics than just making predictions about the economy. I accept Daniel's statement that Von Neumann wasn't primarily responsible for initial analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma. However, I do know that Von Neumann used his knowledge of some of these issues and his general knowledge of game theory in order to help construct the political justification behind what we all came to know as "the principle of mutually assured destruction" during the Cold War, which had the effect of preventing a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. It performed exactly as Von Neumann said it would based on his knowledge of economics. His goal was to prevent the US being devastated by a nuclear attack, and this was the way he found to do it.
And it worked. That's pretty important.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste on April 30, 2003 10:12 PMI work at one of the largest research libraries in the world. I speak with faculty and students in many fields every day. I know a lot more engineers who can read Balzac in French than I know English professors who can solve a second order equation (or even know what one is!). However, the English professors have opinions about lots of subject where the knowledge of math is essential;they refuse to acknowledge this. After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!
Posted by: David A. Fauman on April 30, 2003 10:36 PMi smell a whiff of mathematico-phallic-centrism.
When in doubt, bring fruedian penises into the discussion. Its not an argument, but at least it's distracting.
Right, Cas?
Posted by: Ryan Waxx on April 30, 2003 10:45 PMIt's obvious that this concept applies to such scientific fields as physics and chemistry. If Quantum Mechanics were badly wrong, polymer chemistry and solid state physics wouldn't work, and we would not have plastics or computers. Every time you turn your computer on you're testing Quantum Mechanics, and it keeps passing the test. That's a very powerful form of confirmation.
And its also why people who loudly jeer the "theory" of evolution while eating bioengineered foods and most ESPECIALLY when using modern medicine are frickin idiots.
Drug manufacturers are engineers for the medical sciences, and if evolution in geometric progression fast-forward didn't actually happen in viruses and bacteria, they would have found out by now.
Note that the underlying science doesn't have to be perfect yet, it just has to be close enough. Engineers built just fine using newtonian physics, but they do even better nowadays.
Posted by: Ryan Waxx on April 30, 2003 10:54 PMHowdy,
very interesting comments and they all answer one question, if you put 30 economists in a room and ask a question you will get 32 answers.
all of the medical doctors i know, believe that the practice of medicine is an art and not a science. this simply reflects while science underlies the practice, dealing with the human condition makes each patient relationship materially different.
i view all of the social sciences in a similar manner, in that the building blocks are not constant but migrate over time as the dynamics of the community changes. and economics as a measure of the those dynamics is most atuned to applied mathematics.
thus, if you ask 30 astrogeophysicist about dark matter and i would expect 32 different answers.
Posted by: murph the serf on April 30, 2003 11:11 PMMatt Johnson: "Orbitron, wrt to your please comment...are you suggesting that the skillset of the labor force had nothing at all to do with the fact that we're no longer in a tech boom?"
"Nothing at all" is a bit extreme, but it's not far off the mark. During the boom a large part of the "demand" for tech labor was phony. The people running the dot cons only needed programmers, sysadmins and the like so that the companies they worked for looked like real businesses instead of schemes for fleecing VCs and small investors.
At present there is a glut of tech labor on the market. Given the importance you seem to be assigning to its availability, we should be in the middle of a boom right now.
Posted by: Orbitron on May 1, 2003 01:05 AMJane said, It's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?
Nice way to perpetuate your position without offering any evidence other than "surveys after surveys." You didn't think I'd fall for the banana in the tailpipe trick did you?
The fact is the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed over 55,000 faculty and found that liberalism was on the increase in higher education (34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal).
Furthermore, when entering freshman were asked about their political views. Their responses showed that political views were not related to ACT score or parent income.
You can see more of these studies here: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html
Need more?
Who said this about the war in Iraq?
"I think we've run out of people's butts to kick and that we essentially want to keep the butt-kicking going."
A Chemistry professor at Swathmore.
Who said the war on Iraq was created by, "Israeli apologists and [U.S.] government officials" who share a "tribal affiliation" (in other words, are Jewish). The only purpose of war would be to provide cover for Israel to commit what he calls "even higher atrocities"
A Genetics professor at Yale.
See more at http://www.campuswatch.org
You're welcome to your views, but saying that because engineers are more scientific they must by definition be more conservative is like saying females are against the war in Iraq because females aren't naturally aggressive. I know you don't agree with the former, so why suggest the latter?
Sorry Matt, but that just doesn't cut it. Saying there are a couple left-wing science professors does not prove the sciences aren't overwhelmingly conservative relative to the humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences). Ms. Galt probably never said ALL science profs were conservative (I haven't read this whole thread, but I doubt she would claim something so stupid).
"The fact is the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed over 55,000 faculty and found that liberalism was on the increase in higher education (34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal)."
I don't know if you're being deliberately dishonest just to make people mad at you (trolling) or if you're just ignorant, but your quote is irrelevant to the question of whether people in the hard sciences TEND to be more conservative than people in the English department.
You obviously belong to the literary side of the debate because you don't think facts have any meaning outside of whatever you construct for them. If you say a fact refutes one of Galt's arguments, in your fantasy world, it automatically does. You obviously don't have a very strong grasp on logic. I won't accuse you of being drunk because I doubt you are old enough to purchase alcohol.
Posted by: Michael Levy on May 1, 2003 01:47 AMInterestingly enough, in the Soviet Union, the engineering faculties were more reliably Communist that the arts faculties, who were notorious for incubating capitalist counterrevolutionary dissidents ...
I think Stephen's measure of the "worth" of a science is somewhat on track (I owe a rather nice living to the fact that economics has spawned at least one form of engineering, albeit that there is nothing in what I do that wasn't in Ricardo and Hume). But it's probably more of a measure of the maturity of a science than a measure of whether something is a science at all. I don't find myself wanting to claim out of hand that some subjects are "unscientific" just because they happen to be attacking very difficult problems with an insufficiently developed mathematical toolkit.
On the subject of what "all economists" think, I make the following three points:
1. "All other things being equal" is a vastly more demanding criterion when one stops dealing with repeatable experiments and starts dealing with events occuring in unrepeatable historical time.
2. All social sciences subjects have platitudinous overgeneralised statements that "everybody agrees on"; economics is not special in this regard. All social sciences also have to admit that these generalisations are not relevant whatever to the real world unless they have been embedded in a far more complicated model on which there is no consensus; economics is also not special in this regard.
3. "Objects falling in a vacuum" is a limiting case to which actual falling objects can be shown to tend. A Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis of a single market is not a limiting case of anything.
Posted by: dsquared on May 1, 2003 02:12 AMTom said:
>(That having said, native-born Merkins studying
>science & engineering at the graduate level are
>usually a minority in their departments.)
That's a bold statement. Please back it up. (I realize that counterexamples prove little, but my Aero Engineering class had thirty members of which two weren't WASPs, and one was a third-generation New Yorker and the other a Ukranian immigrant.)
Since the majority of the world refers to us as "Americans", I think it's about time you started doing the same.
cas said:
>the bottom line is that insulin is not
>a perfectly inelastically demanded good.
>...at some point as price goes higher and
>higher, people will stop being able to
>effectively demand insulin,
Except that you're positing astronomically high prices at this point, prices so high that they break the model. Or, rather, you're assuming that there is some factor external to the analysis that limits people's buying power--some arbitrary "maximum price" that people can't exceed. This condition isn't part of the very basic model we use to explain the concept of inelastic demand. Insulin is a convenient good which is _almost_ perfectly inelastic, enough so that it's not a huge mental leap to understand what a perfectly inelastic good might look like.
>just ask ethiopians who dies of starvation in
>earlier days. they may have demanded grain, but
>they did not have effective demand...
There was a price, but it was too high for many of them to pay. I never...well, actually I _did_ say that the demand for insulin was perfectly inelastic, and I didn't qualify my statement with "like" or "analogous" or anything of that sort. Yes, it is possible for one not to be able to buy insulin because of that maximum-price thing I mentioned earlier. But even so, that isn't a supply/demand curve issue--the demand curve for insulin is still a flat line, it's just at different levels of demand as the price exceeds people's ability to pay. Not so much a demand curve as a demand stepladder.
Posted by: DensityDuck on May 1, 2003 02:17 AMMatt,
Your quotes are completely ancedotal, I could likely dig up competing quotes at a ratio of 5 mine to 1 of yours. In any case, its less than proof.
And read your own statistic:
34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal.
Now, see if you can figure out the common thread here. I could hit you with several reasons why you don't take what a person says is their political alignment as gospel, but a bright boy like you should be able to figure out some on his own.
And the political makeup of entering freshman means nothing at all as to how their departments lean or behave. Be serious!
Posted by: Ryan Waxx on May 1, 2003 02:31 AMMatt, I've seen surveys showing that the engineering departments run to the right of the humanities department. You're proving strong cases I've never made: "all engineers are conservative"; "all humanities people are liberal". Furthermore, you're doing it by wildly abusing the data. None of it is relevent to the question of whether faculty in engineering departments are more conservative than humanities; your numbers either apply to the whole; to a different, irrelevent group; or they're anecdotal. It's also survey data, which is crappy -- the surveys I saw at least asked people for party/group affiliation, which although it's subject to lying, at least is not subject to the wildly subjective views on where the middle of the road is. (All my high-liberal New York Democrat friends think they're smack-dab in the political center even though they'd cut their arm off before they voted Republican.)
There are limits to the usefulness of numbers. They're often all we have -- but that's precisely why people should understand statistics and the scientific method, so that they don't get impressed by a pile of shiny numbers, or conversely, decide that data is irrelevent. Your comment seems to me to be a good example of how humanities people fail to understand the limits and uses of statistics -- unless you're deliberately waving around irrelevent numbers in the hopes of fooling people, which I doubt.
I'm aware of the limits of my knowlege. I've seen surveys showing that engineers are more likely to vote Republican than any other faculty, which jibes with my experience having known and worked with hundreds of engineers. It's possible, of course, that I'm wrong. The sample of engineers I know, and that of all the other people I've talked to who've known hundreds of other engineers, could be skewed in some way. The surveys could manifestly be poorly designed, and survey data is inherently unreliable. I wouldn't claim that this data is irrefutable. But it is not, as you claimed, a "wild assed guess". One of the things we humanities people have to learn to appreciate is that it is not possible to apply the scientific method to every single thought that ever passes through our head, but nonetheless we must make assertions, predictions, and decisions based on imperfect information. That's supposed to inform our understanding, not hobble it.
Posted by: Jane Galt on May 1, 2003 07:58 AM"After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!"
Gosh, what was I saying earlier? On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as an idiot until proven otherwise. Their degrees are often fraudulent and we should not hesitate in stating the obvious.
"On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as an idiot until proven otherwise."
I need to have another cup of coffee this morning. This sentence needs to be revised to read:
"On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as idiots until proven otherwise."
Oh well, perhaps I should add a few more insights. Do you really wish to know why these liberal academics normally vote Democrat? The answer is patently obvious: the Democrat Party protects incompetents! These clowns know which side of their bread is buttered. Republicans would tell them to go out and earn what they get. There’s no reason to overcomplicate everything. It’s just that simple. Democrats are generally stupid people.
Posted by: David Thomson on May 1, 2003 08:38 AM"After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!"
Everybody knows deep in their guts that Democrats are usually stupid people. However, the moronic “womens studies prof” can probably successfully sue for slander if you rightfully declare her degree to be fraudulent! Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a few court case dealing with the accusation of academic fraud? It would almost certainly do wonders for our nation.
Posted by: David Thomson on May 1, 2003 09:29 AMDon't make the mistake of automatically mixing Democrat with liberal (or conservative with republic to a lesser extent). Most lawyers are democrats, for instance, yet many lawyers tend toward conservatism. The Democratic Party simply supports the interests of lawyers to a greater extent. The same applies to union members. Never mistake naked self interest for idiology.
Posted by: Mark Buehner on May 1, 2003 10:01 AMMark is exactly right; college lecturers vote Democrat for the same reason farmers vote Republican; because they (correctly) believe that this is the party that will do most for their incomes.
Posted by: dsquared on May 1, 2003 10:28 AMI'm not sure that case holds, D2. I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between farm state Democratic and Republican support for farm subsidies -- in fact, I haven't noticed any difference between the parties on the topic, as "screw the farmers" doesn't seem to be a campaign theme anywhere. The farmers I know vote Republican because they're fiscally and socially conservative, not because they think the Republicans do better on farm subsidies. As far as they're concerned, Hillary is doing a more than adequate job hauling home the pork, it's just that they hate everything else she stands for.
Posted by: Jane Galt on May 1, 2003 10:36 AM"You obviously belong to the literary side of the debate because you don't think facts have any meaning outside of whatever you construct for them. "
You know, the constant juvenile sense of superiority on these threads never ceases to amaze me. It's not possible for people with different world views to both be smart. Liberals disagree with conservatives because the former are illogical or stupid or fuzzy-headed. No exceptions. Maybe we can start a thread about how conservatives are better looking, better athletes, or better at sex?
Do those knowledgeable about the humanities have nothing to offer the world, because they can't build a toaster or a microchip? Does no one recognize that the Western culture you all have been so bravely defending (on the internet) against the threat of Islamic terror is largely a culture resulting form it's philosophy and poetry and literature? There are plenty of Arabs trained in computer engineering. That's not the problem with Middle East