Barry_Cotter comments on The Need for Universal Experience Classes - Less Wrong

-8 [deleted] 19 October 2011 12:38PM

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Comment author: Barry_Cotter 19 October 2011 07:04:26PM 1 point [-]

Where isn't math useful?

Literature, most of the humanities, the social sciences except at high levels of abstraction, i.e. those things that we've evolved to deal with or that are products of those subsystems that we encountered all the time in the EEA.

Comment author: Emile 19 October 2011 08:36:42PM 4 points [-]

Where isn't math useful?

Literature, most of the humanities, the social sciences except at high levels of abstraction

Statistics aren't useful in social sciences???

The mains fields listed on Wikipedia are: anthropology, economics, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, political science, psychology and sociology. I'd say statistics are probably useful in around half of those.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2011 11:07:48PM *  1 point [-]

Math? I'm not studying hard science here! I'm studying people/markets/social constructions/events/language/political theory. They're far more complex than your petty mathematics! Life isn't so simple as to be just mere equations.

The response I'd expect from most people studying psychology, history, sociology, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and law if I asked them when they use math in their work.

Comment author: Emile 21 October 2011 07:58:43AM 0 points [-]

That's quite likely, but you may get a more positive response if you ask them about statistics (at least in psychology, sociology and political science); it probably mostly depends of what is implied by "maths".

I would say statistics are useful for many social sciences, and that some maths are needed to understand statistics, though things like theorems and proofs and calculus and category theory are not. Calculus is useful for the (smaller) set of disciplines that can use numerical models (mostly economics). Game Theory is useful in law, economics and political science and also requires a bit of maths.

Comment author: KatieHartman 19 October 2011 07:24:29PM 4 points [-]

I'd like to know of a science - any science, social or otherwise - that can be optimally useful without utilizing mathematical analysis.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 19 October 2011 07:40:13PM 3 points [-]

I suspect this is like demanding a married bachelor. If you understand something well enough to have a theory that explains a lot about something's characteristics or behaviour you can probably model this abstraction mathematically. And math is unreasonably effective at manipulating abstractions.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2011 01:35:43AM 0 points [-]

Math can be a very powerful tool. I don't think anybody is arguing against that possibility here?