Who argues the most from authority?
Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following:
Chemistry: 317,000
Physics: 415,000
Medicine: 467,000
Economics: 484,000
Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Dividing the number of Google results by the number of winners gives these per capita rates:
Chemistry: 2032
Physics: 2231
Medicine: 2395
Economics: 7446
If the intellectual merit of a body of ideas is not so well established, you’re more likely to deflect attention by reassuring everyone that, hey, it can’t be that crazy — after all, the guy is a Nobel laureate. Perhaps that’s why physics ranks above chemistry here, what with string theory etc. taking it further into speculation compared to more grounded chemistry.
Andy’s right. Every newspaper has a business section, only some have a science section and none have a physics section. Also, the academic blogosphere, up until a few years ago, was massively dominated by economists.
The medicine prize (over physics and chemistry) has the advantage of being more directly applicable to people’s lives. People with no intrinsic interest in science sometimes care about medical news because they are worried that they or someone they know will get sick.
Physics, or at least particle physics and cosmology, had the advantage over chemistry that these fields deal with Big Questions like “where did the universe come from?”
Chemistry has a lot of practical use, but the uses tend to make our lives better (Better Living through Chemistry), but tends not to deal with the big questions or directly save lives. People who aren’t interested in science aren’t going to follow what’s going on in chemistry. You can see this in any bookstore.
As a side note, we really need a Nobel Prize in biology. In the last few years, biologists have been stealing the chemistry prize.
Sounds silly to think it would make *that* big of a difference, since what I was clearly getting at was how econ (a social science) jumps out from the harder sciences. But OK, let’s treat the # of google hits for “nobel laureate” and the field as being directly proportional to the # of winners in the field, the # of webpages about that field overall, and the propensity toward arguing from authority.
(And that’s certainly what the title “Nobel laureate” is doing — it’s not some neutral mention of there being a Nobel Prize. It’s dignifying a particular person with the honorific “Nobel laureate.”)
So taking the # of hits with “nobel laureate” and the field / (# of winners in field * # of hits for the field overall), we get the following authority-arguing propensities (would make a great German word):
Medicine: 8.9 E-6
Chemistry: 1.6 E-5
Physics: 2.0 E-5
Economics: 5.6 E-5
Point remains: the insecure social sciences are much more inclined to argue from authority than the harder sciences.
i have heard economists and lawyers described as “whip smart” and other stuff a lot. rarely do you hear embellishments of the same form among physicists. i think that’s cuz there’s no confusion as to whether a given physicist is smart, <b>if someone becomes a physicist they are as gods among men.</b> just how it is. no need to pose, signal and assert.
addendum: checking google it looks like for the term “whip smart” lawyers are the outlier. look to be a factor of 3 or 4 between them and everyone else.
But, but, but .. the “Nobel Prize” for Economics is no such thing – just a low attempt by the Swedish Central Bank to hijack the prestige of the real Nobel prizes.
There’s also a time decay factor which could be expected to overrate economists even with agnostic’s normalization: a far greater fraction of the total economics winners have done their work recently than the fraction of winners in any of the other fields (since the economics prize is so new in comparison). On the plausible-but-unverified assumption that citations to “Nobel Laureate X” are greatly biased toward somewhat more recent prizes (e.g. very strong bias to those laureates still alive, although the higher average age of economics versus hard science laureates partly compensates), we should expect economics to be overrepresented.
(BTW I suspect that even if we could compensate for the temporal distribution, we’d probably still see economics overrepresented, for the obvious reason that emotional stakes are far higher where money / political power are concerned).
agnostic, your argument implies physicists argue from authority more often then medical researchers. Does that seem reasonable?
Also, you need to normalize for the size of the field (the number of researchers). Important research (i.e. research more likely to be cited on its own merits) is more likely to be done by a laureate in a smaller field. Adding the qualifier “research done by Nobel Laureate x” is not argument from authority if you were going to mention the research anyway.
APS has 47,000 members while AEA has 18,000 members. A quick round of googling suggests the AEA is by far the largest association of economists in the world while the APS is only the second largest association of physicists in the world. I don’t know what medical research society I should compare these too as there’s so many.