Before the apple
To those with more accrued years of wisdom, or a greater knowledge of intellectual history, what was social science like in the pre-computer era? E. O. Wilson once commented on Charlie Rose’s show that social science hasn’t discovered anything of note (I know Robin Hanson disagrees). Has the introduction of computation changed much?
Labels: Social science
I’d have given Social Science credit for IQ and twin studies but they don’t seem to want that.
Heuristics & biases, if psych is included in social sciences.
It would be easy to hold the social sciences in contempt if you ignored the fact that studying subjects whose behavior self-referentially depends not only on your conclusions but changes if they’re aware they’re being observed is incredibly difficult.
It’s as if Newton started off by trying to grasp quantum mechanics without the physical or conceptual tools we have, instead of picking the low-hanging fruit of human-intuitive classical physics.
Studies of institutions – Down’s Inside Bureaucracy comes to mind, but there are others.
is psychology part of social science?
Game must count as one of the signal triumphs of social science. More important to anthropology than a fleet of Harvard anthropologists.
Game must count as one of the signal triumphs of social science. More important to anthropology than a fleet of Harvard anthropologists.
most humans aren’t social retards, so probably not.
>>Game must count as one of the signal triumphs of social science. More important to anthropology than a fleet of Harvard anthropologists.
>most humans aren’t social retards, so probably not.
Most people understand that people who have severe agoraphobia (for example) are not ‘normal’. But what it is exactly, what causes it, how it can be prevented, and what cures it are very useful things to know.
‘Game’ is like that, except it’s 1,000,000X more important in the grand scheme of things.
‘Game’ is like that, except it’s 1,000,000X more important in the grand scheme of things.
yes, for the social retards who read blogs like half sigma and GNXP. the problem is that these social retards forget that most people don’t really have these issues; which makes sense since they have a deficit in native intuition about other people.
anyway, no more comments about “game” please. there are plenty of places where virgins can regale us with transparently made-up tales about how game helped them get the bitches on the internet :-)
> which makes sense since they have a deficit in native intuition about other people.
*shrug* Autism isn’t any less worthy of study because autistics have deficits in native intuition. Ditto any other similar psychological deficit or problem.
Anyways, you’re right about not letting this turn into a Game thread. Back to the topic at hand….
sn’s question is pretty apt. IMO, there are certain fields or topics in psychology that have made important discovers: in neuroscience, psychiatry, behavior genetics. But these areas all border on natural science in their methods and findings.
If you count these branches of psychology out of social science, then I would have to generally agree with E.O. Wilson. But, I also agree with Caledonian that the main factor has been the difficulty and complexity of the topics. Science has to build, and one day we’ll get to the level of individual humans, and human societies, but we’re not quite there yet. In fact we may never get there because of the built-in limits in our brain’s ability to understand some of these problems. Computer modeling will help in such cases, but in the end it will have to be us who understand and make use of the information.
Parkinson’s Laws were pretty shrewd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law
By the way, have all of you read the essay “The Outsiders” by Grady Towers? Social maladjustment is not just a feature of those on the autism spectrum, but also those with high IQ. Given the census data earlier that many GNXPer’s are highly educated, it would be a fair wager that they are also highly intelligent as a group. Here’s the link to the essay:
ussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html
http://www.promethe
As a member of Mensa myself, I can testify to the problems many members have on social situations, but not often as a result of actual social reasoning deficits. For example, here’s a quote from Leta Hollingworth that is part of the article, talking about the development of the intellectually gifted: “Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone… forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse”
I think some GNXPer’s may be confusing personality, particularly introversion and social anxiety, with the autism spectrum.
I would classify “quantification of sub-conscious attitudes and prejudices” as both interesting and non-obvious. Social sciences have been on it for decades.
In that regard, the implicit association test is pretty neat. Admittedly it post-dates the introduction of computers (though there is nothing in the design that requires computers, you could do it with just paper and photographs).
Social science is operating at a distinct handicap compared to other sciences: there aren’t (or haven’t been until recently) a lot of new tools for doing experiments. Further, the kinds of things that social science is concerned with are of general enough interest that you’re effectively competing against a large portion of humanity in making observations. And some of those observers are highly talented writers. So when you look to say something novel about human behavior all too often you find that Shakespeare or Montesquieu or Nietzsche already noted it with some pithy epigram.
“Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone… forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse”
…and the rest of the highly intellectually gifted children, who are not autistic, carry on playing with other children and developing into balanced human beings with healthy social lives.
Hyperbole, your idea is a flawed one. Autism is generally associated with low IQ, particularly in verbal intelligence. Autistic deficits shows up on tests like Wechsler, for example, but not non-verbal tests like Ravens Progressive Matrices. The highly gifted children mentioned in the Grady essay were specifically those with extremely high measured verbal intelligence. It follows that these individuals would be very unlikely to be autistic (probably much less likely than those with average verbal IQ, at least).
Your comment shows part of the problem outlined in the article. That people generally don’t want to believe that the intellectually gifted have issues stemming from their advanced abilities. It’s that kind of incredulous “what are you complaining about” attitude that stops us from really understanding the issues that face gifted individuals.
Orion – The new DSM may change its definition of autism. Some practitioners believe typical autism combines a non-verbal learning disability with low cognitive ability and that Aspergers is non-verbal learning disability with high intelligence.
Root of autism is a non-verbal communication disorder, not low IQ.
Interesting book on the subject is “non-verbal learning disabilities” by Joseph Palombo.
Computers and technology will no doubt improve our knowledge of the human sciences, but it’s not like were’re totally ignorant now.
Economics gave us a lot, for instance:
comparative advantage: Free trade is almost always good, even when it is hard to see the advantages.
deadweight loss: Wage and price controls are inefficient. They always create a problem worse than the one solved.
Political Science too:
Power corrupts: therefore disperse it as much as possible–democracy is better than monarchy, federalism is better than unitary government, ect.
Plus even more subtle insights: Proportional representation encourages the formation of many small parties, while first-past-the-post electoral systems encourage fewer, larger parties.
Psychology:
People are alike in important ways. For instance we love our own children more than other people’s children. Evolutionary psychology is finally unlocking some of the causes of these similarities.
We are also alike in trivial, but entertaining ways. We are all fooled by optical illusions.
We are also different in many ways, and psychometrics has given us a lot of tools to look at these differences.
Human behavior is too complicated to be able to predict as precisely as planetary orbits, but a lot of wisdom can be gained by listening to the right people in the social sciences.
I think that the whole social science imperative was mistaken. At best, the study of human affairs, society, and human behavior can be factually based, secular, and rational, with a certain amount of input from accurately modeled subcomponents. (Economics is a lot more convincing if you think of it as a lot of partial models which haven’t been united into a good theory). But there will never be a social science equivalent of quantum theory, or relativity, or physiology [etc.]. Nothing in social science has the awe-inspiring exactness and power that the successful sciences have.
If it’s just a slanging match between the powerful sciences and the social sciences, the powerful sciences win hands down. But when you claim that the social sciences can, should or must become “really scientific”, I think you go wrong, and if you go on to claim that you have succeeded or will succeed in that task, you go much further wrong. (This is not to say that components can’t be carved out and powerfully modeled, but only that after a component has been isolated and accurately modeled, the whole system has still not been scientifically described.)
The historian Veyne says that the only “social science” is history, and the other social sciences are tools of history.
The reasons why I don’t think the social sciences are impossible: 1.) chaotic uncertainty, complexity, etc., in large system 2.) historicity, irreversibility, contingency (related to the above) and 3.) a human social system is the very definition of an uncontrolled system. Science progresses by picking the low-lying fruit — by defining bounded, controlled systems susceptible of exact modeling. But that’s not humanity.
And I forgot tomention 4.) social science discoveries are reinserted into human society and transform it.
I should have said:
“The reasons why I think that ‘social science’ is impossible, when the standard of science is any hard science:…..”
I might add that history is much more like evolution (“natural history”) than it is like physics or chemistry. The distinction between historical sciences like evolution and history and non-historical sciences like physics is a major and underestimated distinction.
Um, computation preceded computers, you know. In fact, the word was once a job description:
The computer who aims at rapidity should train himself to do all he safely can mentally. He should early acquire the habit of remembering a number of six or seven figures long enough to transcribe it. He should perform his interpolations mentally. He should add and subtract two numbers from left to right. Other devices will come to him with practice. The most important habit to be acquired is that of being constantly on the watch for errors and of constantly checking results. The computer who makes no mistakes can hardly be said to exist. Such a one would be a marvel.
The main advantage of (silicon) computers is that they permit the construction of models so complex that no one could ever find the fudge. For instance, I’m actually rather surprised that the algebraic macroeconomic models popular in the era of human computers have not been entirely replaced by simulations. Nothing is easier to tweak than a simulation. (Perhaps the problem is that it’s easier to write a simulation than a partial differential equation – removing the IQ-test factor.)
High fudgeability is highly useful to the “social scientist,” righteous and wrongtious alike. For the righteous, fudge makes all your truths seem even truer – for the same reason that Scarlett Johansson is seldom filmed without makeup. For the wrongtious, of course, it is essential.
People have been lying, often quite convincingly, with statistics since Mark Twain’s age. But in the silicon age, their lies are more than just convincing – they are damn near irrefutable. Q: how do you falsify a general circulation model? A: you don’t.
Props to Emerson for citing Paul Veyne – though Carlyle, as usual, said it even before Mark Twain. But reality needs no inventor.
“Social science” was invented to apply the authority of science to the problem of public policy. Frankly, in retrospect I think the 20th century might have done better with the Oracle of Delphi, the astrologers of Akbar the Great or the haruspicating augurs of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It could hardly have done much worse. And at least there would be some ox-livers left over.
Your comment shows part of the problem outlined in the article. That people generally don’t want to believe that the intellectually gifted have issues stemming from their advanced abilities. It’s that kind of incredulous “what are you complaining about” attitude that stops us from really understanding the issues that face gifted individuals.
Well, I seem to remember being intellectually gifted as a child. In fact, I remember going on to a highschool for the intellectually gifted. It’s kind of famous… maybe you’ve heard of it. I’m writing from experience.
I was friends with or knew many people who were in the top fraction of a percent of the population in terms of intelligence, including several intel science talent search finalists, a 17 year old chess master, runners-up on the US math olympiad, a bunch of people with 1600 SAT scores, etc etc.
Most of those people were not tormented souls who were too smart. Some people were kooky and neurotic weirdos who were really smart, and probably had some atypical neural profile or whatever, but plenty of people were more or less well-adjusted kids who liked to do normal teenager stuff, even if they were far beyond normal intelligence. At most people were a little thirsty for intellectual stimulation before highschool.
Computation: according to a book I read (possibly Koestler’s “The Sleepwalkers”) Kepler’s work required him to do hundreds and hundreds of pages of small-print mathematical computations by hand. As I remember his notebooks still exist and can be seen. It was an early version of brute force science. Without someone willing to do tremendous amounts of routine work, those discoveries would have been delayed.
My apologies to others trying to follow the main thread, but I would like to respond again to Hyperbole.
There’s no doubt that a significant proportion of gifted kids and adults are what we would call well adjusted, but what longitudinal studies of the gifted have shown repeatedly is that “there is a definite connection between measured intelligence and mental and social maladjustment”, as the article puts it. Increasingly so towards the higher end of the IQ scale, but also depending on the gap between the person and their intellectual environment.
Near the end, Towers describes three outcomes or adaptations of the gifted: committed, marginal and droupout. The high school experience you described seems to be based mainly on that subset of the gifted population who are able to adopt the first strategy:
“These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.”
Personally, I would classify myself as somewhere between committed and marginal, and I know there are many gifted people who are in similar circumstances, who have not channeled their abilities along the recognized pathways of social achievement. These are the people that are least recognized and who also have the most problems with social adjustment (although not as extreme as the droupouts). Not to proselytize any more, but I think we should understand the particular social problems that face the gifted, and not just assume that most of them are fine within the system that already exists.
“Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone… forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse”.
An excellent reason why the highly gifted should have as many children as they can support. Siblings share each others interests and activities more seamlessly than non-siblings and it is much easier to change one’s contemporaries as a group, than as an individual.
“These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.”
My last comment as well.
First, I actually did drop out of highschool, but still went to college the same year as my cohorts.
Second, that’s a massive overgeneralization. The rich kids were indeed mostly well-adjusted, but most of the school consisted of asian immigrants and eastern-european jewish immigrants.
Smart kids only have problems when they are surrounded by people who are actively hostile towards intelligence. Maybe it’s different in different regions. I’d still say that plenty of people, even really dumb people, have a lot of respect for intelligence.
Interesting book for parents and teachers of gifted kids, When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers. Basically gifted kids need emotional support and parents need to realize that clever kids may not always be able to use their talents to their benefit in social situations. Gifted kids sometimes are almost treated like peers by adults. That is adults’ expectations of emotional maturity are sometimes too high.
I agree with you Hyperbole that these are overgeneralizations, but they serve the point of illustrating the differences between the more continuous spectrum of outcomes for the gifted. The fact that many of the well adjusted kids at your school were immigrants does not matter so much as whether or not they got the kind of intellectual and emotional support they needed to develop relatively normal social lives, including, importantly, going to school with peers they could relate to. Besides, Jewish families are famous for their encouragement of intellectual talent (although this is a chicken or the egg problem), as are Asian families due to their traditionalist valuing of school performance.
Intelligence does garner respect, but mainly when it falls within the bounds of socially valued activity (e.g. school achievement, job prestige). Gifted students with social adjustment problems may not perform up to standard in these areas, else they will fall short in areas that garner even more social respect, such as popularity and conformity. And in any case, it’s not just about respect, it’s about having peers with whom genuine communication, understanding and friendship are possible. That’s what’s most needed, in my opinion, to get the gifted on the track towards social adjustment, and why many do not quite make it. It’s also one of the big reasons, as Towers points out as well, for the existence of high IQ societies.
The Taylor Rule (1992) is an important contribution to practical social science. More like a breakthrough drug discovery than a grand theory or empirical result. It’s tough to overstate how central the Rule is in central banking circles today. And it’s rooted in ‘basic science’–it reflects Taylor’s immersion in the rational expectations and New Keynesian debates of the previous decades.
The intellectual history of the Taylor Rule remains to be written, perhaps in the style of Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
Central banking! Now there’s a social-science success story for ya. Tell me, Garett, does the phrase Great Moderation mean anything to you? Popper would be so proud.
After central banking, the rest of 20th-century social science smells like a rose. Public housing? “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived?” Bring it on. The intellectual history of this “breakthrough” indeed remains to be written. Perhaps in the same book with phlogiston, N-rays and “intelligent design.”
According to Mirowski “Effortless Economy of Science”), Mandelbrot first use fractals in a work on economics discussing the fluctuations of cotton prices in Egypt. Mirowski notes that this may have been the first social-science tool every adopted by physical science — but economics froze Mandelbrot out.
IIRC, Mandelbrot’s early observations are not so much about “Fractals” (geometric objects with a non-integer dimension), but rather about power laws, their scale-invariant structure (if I give you a variation graph, you won’t be able to determine whether it describes daily, monthly, or yearly variation), and their consequences (mostly: large events are much more likely to occur as under a nomal law, essentially making any kind of forecasting useless in the long run).
Essentially, it’s statistics. Do statistics count as a “social science”? Certainly Mandelbrot and Paul Levy (his mentor) saw themselves as mathematicians rather than social scientists, or even economists.