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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7871 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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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.

Psychology is absolutely "real science", at least potentially. That these fields are filled with 110-IQ women with left-wing biases, who wish not to arrive at any conclusions which contradicts modern morality or politics, is an unfortunate fact unrelated to the potential of psychology as a field.

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature. We also tend to compare what's "rational, logical or scientific" to ourselves, and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are flawed and wrong, and that they should change to become more rational, logical and scientific. This is a fallacy in that it tells the territory to approximate the map, rather than building maps which seek to approximate the territory.

The Tao Te Ching is still ahead of the consensus of today in multiple areas. "The prince" likely still holds up today (admittedly I haven't read this one). Buddhist meditation and enlightenment still hold research value today. And this is just older Psychology. There's also value in religion, values, wisdom, culture, rituals, etc.

No science, mathematics, nor logic can deal well with these areas at all. They're mere tools. You need to put humanity in the center in order to benefit humanity.

I almost agree with "The social science is so corrupt that it's almost worthless", but that's the fault of academia, politics and well, corruption. Self-help books are still popular today despite them not being hard science, and the lies society create about gender and sexuality has spawned "red pill" groups online which are closer to the truth than the consensus (thought they aren't perfect). In fact, I love psychology because it can explain why this problem happened in the first place (denial/repression of unpleasant parts of reality)

By the way, you don't need the scientific method to approximate truth in the first place. We're starting to forget this as the scientific method is so popular.

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature.

I think the problem here is that since science has historically provided many obviously good things, a lot of people think that the word 'science' just means 'good things', so if you say that something is not science, to a lot of people it sounds like you are saying that it is not good. However, you don't need science to decide that you want your society to have public parks, sports stadiums, museums or hospitals. This is also probably the issue with social sciences. As long as people can claim that what social sciences are doing is science, it will sound to a lot of people that what they are doing is good. If you start asking what is it actually good for, people might stop to think and realize that the answer is "not much".

I’m not suggesting there’s no wisdom in these sources, but I don’t think they should be regarded as factual until actually verified. There’s a lot of wisdom in older practices, I’ll agree with that. But I think funding such a thing through government grants to a university to produce papers that will be treated as factual creates a problem as, again, social sciences as they occur in university are not dispassionate inquiries into the reality of how human beings behave or think or the like. It’s agenda driven, and more often than not the studies are poorly done leading to a crisis of replication.

And furthermore, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it actually works, it doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Outside of CBT, DBT, and modern Stoic approaches to solving problems in your life, most of it frankly is nonsense. It tells people basically what they want to hear — that they’re already awesome, and that if they just reach for whatever they’re wanting, the universe will give the success. Selling people something that they want to be true and that life is easy and they’re destined to succeed is an easy way to print money. However, just as an observation, the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health. It doesn’t seem to actually wrk. In many cases, talk therapy seems to be no better than a long talk with anyone else. I’ll admit to not keeping up with Redpilll, though I think I’m personally politically Yarvin-pilled. I think it similar, though Yarvin Pilling is much more about political science and political philosophy than psychology.

I think some wisdom is of the type which can't be verified. I can rewrite sections of the Tao Te Ching such that it says a lot of things that we consider impressive today. For instance "acting without interest" is wise in that it avoids Goodhart's law and "One who loves the self as the world can be entrusted with the world" makes sense from the point of alignment, at least in humans (recreating human love in AIs might prove difficult, after all).

I agree that agenda driven universities can't be trusted with ancient wisdom. The only reason they can be trusted with math is that the rules are verifiable and because they're symbols which cannot be connected to anything that people have strong feelings about.

Selling people something that they want to be true

This seems to be modern self-help and not something that I brought up. But you're not exactly wrong, for there's a line in the alchemist which says something like "When you want something enough, the whole universe conspires in helping you attain it". But I don't think these statements are supposed to be true. Like "Believe in yourself", it's telling people to have a bias which, on average, works out better than not having said bias. Our belief influences our reality, even though they do not influence objective reality. So quotes like "Whether you think you can or not, you're right" are some degree of true. But most people have a hard time believing in themselves, so they just say "the universe" or ask "god" in their prayers, for they can still believe in something greater than themselves. These things are not intuitive at all unless you're told them.

But newer self-help books are made to make money, and therefore to make you feel good and to feel like you like the book that you paid money for. The claims of these books aren't impossible to achieve, but one does not get there without actual effort, be it conscious or unconscious (tricking your brain into heading towards your goal through visualization techniques and such)

the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health

I don't think that's a fair argument, though it's true. I even like the snakiness. But you could also argue that the more medicine somebody has in their home, the less healthy they tend to be. This does not dismiss the value of medicine, right?

By "Red pill" I was most referring to the dating aspects. Men get burned when they follow advice that they're given, especially by girls. Red pill takes are more honest about human nature and about what girls want. But the best dating books focus on "inner game" which is another way of saying "self-improvement", so for a largely unregultated response to men being mislead by society (and women) there's surprisingly little negativity. Of course, there's still some spiteful incels and superficial pick-up artists, but I find that they're a minority.

Yarvin is said to be part of the "Intellectual dark web", and while this is a very loosely defined cluster, I find that anything from there is like a breath of fresh air, no matter the subject in question or the speaker. By the way, since most of what I dislike is modern, I simply just consume older material. I regard the Erhard Seminars Training (1971-1984) books and Og Mandinos "The university of success" (1980) as high quality. Newer self-help is too kind for me, I want to be called out like when I'm reading thelastpsychiatrist

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human.

Your complaint seems orthogonal to whether we define science as only including the objective. I personally think that the true issue is not how we define science, but the almost-religious fervor people have for science. I quite agree that science is not some final arbiter of truth, and that many important things are completely outside the purview of science. I also think it's fair to say that anything which is not objective isn't real science, though. The two aren't in conflict.

I agree, I dislike the statement "anything not objective is not real science" only because it's used to dismiss anything outside of science as "pseudo-science" or "woo", which is to overestimate the utility of science and to create a false dichotomy. Perhaps it's laziness on my part, one just puts themselves in a difficult position if they attempt defending or even explaining the value of unscientific knowledge

Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo.

Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.

Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).

Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.

Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.

Maybe we have different definitions of social sciences. I don't think that history, for example, is a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. You can't do experiments with history, but you can certainly use logic to figure out that some theories about what happened in the past are more likely to be accurate than others, you can search for additional primary evidence, and so on.

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

Materials science

"Computer science"?

Famously neither a science, nor about computers.

Correct. Computer science is strictly speaking a branch of mathematics.

i like this paper (Computer Science: Not about Computers, Not Science) https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/krebsbak/Research/Publications/pdf/fecs15.pdf

Huh. Never thought I would see my alma mater in the wild. The world is small, I guess.

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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