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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:

This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. [emphasis mine]

In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”

Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.

I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).

There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.

I disagree, mostly because the social “sciences” are more or less pseudoscience at this point. Very little science in done in those fields and what little is done rarely replicates. And of course there are topics that nobody will touch because it’s heresy and might lead to a career exterminatus. The entire system is too corrupt to give anything useful, and as such shouldn’t be funded by the government. Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo. To fund social “science” is to pay a guy n a lab coat to find a way to give cathedral propaganda the veneer of science.

If the government is to fund science, it must fund real science. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, biology, medicine, etc. are real sciences that use the scientific method to determine what reality is. They don’t start from their agenda and work to sane wash it.

I’m not sure that social sciences were ever dispassionate inquiry to begin with. I’m pretty sure that very few in those fields have ever done real science and wouldn’t know where to begin. As such I’m inclined to burn it down and ignore it until it can be rebuilt in the mold of harder sciences where the goal is to find truth and to test ideas rigorously. As they sit now, I don’t think they’re so much signal as anti signal— having someone cite sociology or psychology makes me less inclined to believe the claim than one made by anyone else.

History, economics, and political science are real sciences even if they are not as rigorous as physics and it is difficult or impossible to run experiments in them. Sure, there is a lot of ideological bullshit in all three of those fields, but there is also a lot of rational analysis. The typical kind of academic history writing that I have seen isn't some barely disguised attempt to push a political ideology, it is more like a lawyer's arguments in a legal case that revolves around whether something happened on a certain date. It is true that there are taboos that prevent some topics from being widely brought up, but that does not mean that these entire fields are worthless.

Anything that has to include the word “science” in its name is not a science

"Computer science"?

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology—the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is". Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to".

Harold "Hal" Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Or then there's this piece (from one B. Jacobs) back in 2005: ""Computer Science" is Not Science and "Software Engineering" is Not Engineering"

If the software discipline is "science", then the scientific process should be available to settle arguments. But it seems to fail. Some suggest that instead it is "engineering", not "science". But engineering is nothing more than applied science. For example, in engineering, bridge designs are tested against reality in the longer run. Even in the short run, bridge models can be tested in environments that simulate reality. Simulations are a short-cut to reality, but still bound to reality if we want them to be useful. If a bridge eventually fails, and the failure is not a construction or materials flaw, then what is left is the engineering of the bridge to blame. An engineer's model must be tightly bound to the laws of physics and chemistry. The engineer is married to the laws whether he/she wants to be or not.

But we don't have this in software designs for the most part. We have the requirements, such as what the input and output looks like and the run-time constraints which dictate the maximum time a given operation is allowed to take. But there is much in-between these that is elusive to objective metrics.

…

So, if physical engineering is really science ("applied science" to be more exact), but software design does not follow the same pattern, then what is software design? Perhaps it is math. Math is not inherently bound to the physical world. Some do contentiously argue that it is bound because it may not necessarily be valid in hypothetical or real alternative universe(s) that have rules stranger than we can envision, but for practical purposes we can generally consider it independent of the known laws of physics, nature, biology, etc.

I thought it was common knowledge that computer science is a branch of mathematics. As a computer science major this wasn't really controversial. Although a find that definition of engineering lacking. Engineers build things and study how best to build things, software engineering fits this mold pretty centrally.

Math is where the inverse of "the" logarithm function is eˣ, computer science is where it's 2ˣ, engineering and science are where it's 10ˣ.

More seriously, your definition of engineering is way better than theirs. Half of engineering is figuring out where it is and isn't safe to not bound your model to the laws of physics and chemistry too tightly. E.g. atoms are a pretty big deal, but if your elasticity model is atomistic and you're building something that's not nanometer-scale then you're doing it wrong.

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