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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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On respect

Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).

Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!

Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.

But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.

In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.

Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.

There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.

They do not respect any science except their own.

Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.

Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc.

When Social Science sends its researchers, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending researchers that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing assumptions. They’re bringing biases. They’re fraudsters. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to reviewers and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

What does respect for a field mean?

Money, or influence. I will respect a field when it allows me to manipulate the world around me, or to explain the world around me. The problem with social sciences is that they do not have this power. Psychology and sociology are crap-shooting at best. Anthropology is not better and even Economics, which promises much when it comes to explanatory power, comes up sorely lacking. This need not be the case, but it is, and it is because of the biases that you've highlighted. It's much easier to maintain your bias in social science than it is in mathematics.

even Economics, which promises much when it comes to explanatory power, comes up sorely lacking

What do you mean by this? What do you want from the field of economics?

Our understanding of economics is enormously better than it was 80 years ago. In my opinion what makes Economics respectable is that, of all the social sciences, they're the ones who bother to create models (or, at least, ones that are more complicated than linear regression), and then go through the work of trying to see if those models match reality. If they fail, it's mostly because systems with many humans are really complicated -- they're hard to model, hard to experiment on, and it's hard to measure what we care about (but it seems really unfair to blame Economists' intelligence/motivation/personal failings for that).

I'd go so far as to say that Economics majors care more about well-defined modeling than most STEM majors.

The problem is that when the models fail, they just shrug and continue on their way. Also, just like in a lot of 'scientific' fields, core premises that are assumed to be correct, have actually been disproved. Yet this is simply ignored.

You should read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen for a good criticism of neoclassical economics.

I have little to add, but I found my experience with the social "sciences" to be similar to yours, and it was discovering this about 10 years ago that made me disillusioned with the social justice/identity politics left. I'm not a scientist, but I did have enough experience with it in college and liked it enough to keep abreast of it after, and the common theme in science, the underlying principle that makes science science, seemed clear to me to be being open to oppositional perspectives. The more I looked into it, and the more rigorous any science got, the more welcoming and actively encouraging of skepticism and attempts to disprove claims it seemed to be. But most social "sciences" do not follow this at all and have, in fact, built up a whole structure of justifications for why basic scientific skepticism is wrong. That's not a science by any meaningful sense of the term, and it can't be expected to land on truth except by complete chance (likely worse than chance, due to how it's not a complete random process but rather follows incentives of its own based around social approval and signalling).

It's a shame, because social science is something that potentially could add immense value to the world through actual production of knowledge. And some of it does seem to happen, just completely drowned out by the monstrosity that wears "social science" like a skinsuit. I think about something the social scientist Jon Haidt (I think) said about biases and belief, that if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?" If social scientists can just try to avoid this fairly obvious pitfall and force themselves to always look for excuses not to believe evidence that reinforces their biases (e.g. that some patterns of behavior must have social/cultural origins rather than biological ones), they might be able to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Sadly, they mostly seem to be committed to the exact opposite.

Jon Haidt (I think) said about biases and belief, that if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?

I think that sentiment goes back to Thucydides, if not earlier.

Now I’m interested. What did Thucydides say?

It might be a different translation that what I remember, but the closest I could find is, "for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy".

I'll try to keep looking, as I preferred the wording I half-remember.

edit: "When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason".

Note that it wouldn't surprise me if this wasnt actually Thucydides, but that someone said it was, like how everything gets attributed to Twain, Lincoln, or Disraeli.

Well, yeah. The vast majority of social scientists are actually just activists who use their profession to push their political agenda forward. This wasn’t always the case, but the trend has always been there and it’s accelerated to the point that these departments are completely taken over, and quite frankly need to be burned to the ground before any real science can once again take place

I’d say “citation needed,” but I can’t tell if there’s a testable claim to support.

Give me an example of one of the “real” scientists from the good ‘ol days, maybe?

If you can’t see what’s blindingly obvious I see this “umm source please?” as nothing more than rhetorical

It’s not.

I don’t believe you can give me any statistics about “the vast majority of social scientists,” which is why you set up a nice motte and bailey. Rather than lay siege, I asked you to back up your other point: that “this wasn’t always the case.” So tell me, when was the last “real” social scientist?

You clearly don’t read Scott’s own writings I guess

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism

Take a look at what the best and brightest of psychiatrists conference write about for their conferences. Endless woke activist slop. And it’s like this at every single social sciencey conference too, including economics.

I don’t feel like doing research for someone who isn’t interested in asking honest questions though so go ahead and find your own sources

It is true, however, that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. But what this experience should tell you is that even the respect they have is probably too high. For instance, it is likely scientists should not try to control for "risk factors" identified only by social science -- in doing so they are likely at best adding noise and at worst controlling out real effects or controlling in false ones.

But what this experience should tell you is that even the respect they have is probably too high.

For more systematic evidence of this claim:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#There-Are-No-Journals-With-Strict-Quality-Standards

There are a few areas of social science that have a good sense of how to test causal hypotheses. Almost everything else is actively (though perhaps inadvertently) misleading, and large parts of the academy should probably be defunded entirely.

There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists.

I am inclined to say that this idea is true, but that most scientists don't actually go far enough. For quite some time, I've insisted to friends that social sciences are simply not science at all, that they're all just descriptive commentary. This can be incredibly interesting, it might even occasionally find something that's true about the world (although I'm skeptical of social psychology providing a net positive for truth), but it simply isn't science and would be better if it stopped trying to dress up in a lab coat to gain unwarranted authority. I am assured that there are hypothesis-driven experiments, so it's kind of like science, but every time I go look into it, absolutely none of it rises to a standard that would be acceptable in fields where the truth of falsity of a conclusion are expected to bear some sort of fruit.

What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.

This is certainly my stance on things. People should study psychology and sociology, carefully examining how people behave and forming ideas about why they do what they do, but they should knock it off with "studies" that try to look like biochemistry or fluid dynamics and stick to treating their work as philosophy and commentary loosely based on observation. The approach of pretending to be science has led quite a bit of the work done to being so much worse than mere commentary, convincing people to publish studies that are pretty obviously outright stupid, like the idiotic priming literature with its absurd effect sizes or the persistence of social "scientists" controlling away the effect. There are entire subfields that just appear to be outright fake, adding absolutely nothing to understanding the world or even subtracting from it.

I suspect that the unwillingness among other scientists to say that a lot of research is completely worthless stems from a circle-the-wagons effect in academia - if I say that the racial resentment scale is obviously nonsense, I'm impugning very serious researchers, giving credence to science-deniers, and I'm definitely not going to look cool at the cocktail party. If I nod sagely about how important the problem they've discovered is, I build bridges with academics, feel superior to the chuds, and look pretty cool at the cocktail party.

Isn’t all science, even good science, descriptive commentary? It’s certainly not supposed to be prescriptive.

I’d agree with an argument that social sciences are less interested in empiricism and more likely to navel-gaze on grand unified theories. “Descriptive” just doesn’t seem like the right word for that.

While anyone that's done the work knows that the construction of scientific papers is more than a little post hoc, I think you can get the idea for what I think science should look like from reading a typical paper in the Journal of Biochemistry or Journal of Immunology with a focus on the results sections. Yes, there is something that can be described as descriptive commentary, but the work typically follows the flow of hypothesis->experiment->result, which subsequent figures building on the previous result. Of course, people can and do draw incorrect inferences, run pointless experiments that don't test what they think they're testing, make statistical mistakes, and so on, but there really is an effort to get at the base physical reality of what's going on. I do not see similar patterns of genuinely hypothesis-driven work in the vast majority of social "science" papers, with the worst of it coming in major sociology journals that read more like fancy editorials than actual science.

Good science is predictive commentary.

It was part of a list of things that didn't change in VR and as such not elaborated on in particular. I guess we could have challenged her, but didn't.

If you want me to steelman it, some people essentially consider their public behaviour a (gendered) performance they put on because it is necessary. Once they are either with the right people or in an "anonymous" environment like VR, they just let the mask fall off so to speak and show their true self, which includes mannerisms and body language. Think closeted gay who is trying to act tough in conservative circles and is flamboyant in progressive, but it's a popular enough perspective in some social circles that this applies to essentially everyone.

some people essentially consider their public behaviour a (gendered) performance they put on because it is necessary.

I can't help feeling that this is yet another example of people too in the autism spectrum thinking their own general weirdness applies to the wider population and not realizing or refusing to admit it. This is pretty blatant when it comes to the trans issue where a lot of the time the people complaining about being "forced into gender typical box" turn out to also have obvious asperger symptoms.

There is no innately gay body language, it's all "gender performance". Even when they don't know they are doing it (rarely) it's still a learned thing.

This doesn't gel with my experience at all. Social scientists that I am familiar with only resort to social explanations if evidence is overwhelming. If anything they err on the side of assuming any disparity between groups is the consequence of innate differences.

Also in my experience, they are much more rigorous thinkers than people in STEM. While the latter is prone to groupthink in ignoring and even criticizing perspectives which go against the current consensus (see how Cantor or Lemaître were treated), the former are much more open minded. This is shown by seeing the reception the book The Bell Curve received: despite it going against the then grain, APA published a response titled Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, admitting the book was largely, and consensus shifted accordingly.

I don't know if your description of the esteem in which Charles Murray is held in the social science community was true at one time, but I don't think it is true anymore, when he now has legitimate cause to fear being physically assaulted when speaking at universities.

https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professor-injured-students-sanctioned-at-middlebury-college-in-vermont-after-conservative-speaker-is-protested/

Hilarious!

So low effort, in this case I literally am not even sure what you think is hilarious.

I think it was a genuine response to (what was seen as) a well-done parody.

The very idea of using the response to the bell curve to demonstrate the scientific rigour of social sciences I suspect.

Appreciate the contrary perspective! What are the fields/subfields of those social scientists you're familiar with, and what group differences do they think are innate?

That's quite some time ago. Even mentioning The Bell Curve with anything but disdain is asking for trouble nowadays.

Always was, and you don't even need an astronaut meme for that. The Bell Curve was "controversial" when it first came out.

It seems I fell for something, though I'm not sure what. FWIW, the linked "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" report does read more even-handed than what is acceptable nowadays, and is even mentioned as such in the wikipedia article (while the report is just using the weasely "no support for a genetic explanation of the differences between groups" as usual, the wiki article is almost falling over itself to repeatedly mention that any genetic basis of group differences is thoroughly discredited nowadays).

Is this parody?

I interpreted it that way

I assume it must be. Wasn’t the 90s when the science wars took place?

Is this parody?

I think this is out of date. The Great Awokening has changed a lot about the way Big Academia interacts with people who are inside the system but heterodox in their political views. In the period I was in academia (after the 1990's PC wave had peaked, but before the Great Awokening got going around 2011) the majority view among left-wing social scientists was that tolerating a few tame conservatives was a net-positive for the credibility of the left-wing majority in the discipline.

I've seen your comment btw. I agree that this is a thing, but it's disingenuous to act like such narrow compartmentalized object-level admissions have impact on the broader research program. Social scientists will often nod to «genes affect X» and go back to studying the effect of algorithmic bias on brain development. And of course Murray's book is only endorsed by other psychometrists; social scientists will at most recognize through gritted teeth they don't really have rebuttals.

UK may be more HBD-friendly than the US. You have Biobank. Americans have bona fide prohibition on relevant research.

Yeah, the bit about the Bell Curve gives it away.

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