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VoiceOfRa comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - Less Wrong
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I think it's a bit of a shame that society seems to funnel our most intelligent, logical people away from social science. I think social science is frequently much more helpful for society than, say, string theory research.
The bigger shame is the kind of BS that passes for humanities/social science these days.
I think there may be a self-reinforcing spiral where highly logical people aren't impressed by social science, leading them to avoid it, leading to social science being unimpressive to highly logical because it's done by people who aren't highly logical. But I could be wrong--maybe highly logical people are misperceiving.
It's not just a self-reinforcing spiral. There is also a driver, namely since social science has more political implications and there is a lot of political control over science funding, social science selects for people willing to reach the "correct" conclusions even if they have to torture logic and the evidence to do so.
Well that's a self-reinforcing spiral of a different type. In general, I see a number of forces pushing newcomers to a group towards being similar to whoever the folks already in the group are:
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, insofar as it's accurate.
Self-segregation. It's less aversive to interact with people who agree with you and are similar to you, which nudges people towards forming social circles of similar others.
Reputation effects. If Google has a reputation for having great programmers, other great programmers will want to work there so they can have great coworkers.
This is why it took someone like Snowden to expose NSA spying. The NSA was the butt of jokes in the crypto community for probably doing illicit spying long before Snowden... which meant people who cared about civil liberties didn't apply for jobs there (who wants to work for the evil empire?) (Note: just my guess as someone outside crypto; could be totally wrong on this one.)
Edit: evaporative cooling should probably be considered related to the bullet points above.
You're assuming that "intelligent" == "logical". That just ain't so and especially ain't so in social sciences.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Is there data about the average IQ of PHD's or professors in the social sciences?
I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there's engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up 'social science' and 'humanities', then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I'm not very confident in any of my Google results, though - they all looked slightly dodgy - so I'm not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don't think it's an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it - not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don't require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor's if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It's clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we're just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn't conclude that social science is worthless - I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don't think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you're trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don't need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one's mind to do good social science, because you're doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly "proving" whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you'd produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society's ability to test for IQ is much better than our society's ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
That might actually have been a problem once. Apparently the Pythagoreans had serious problems with irrational numbers...
And current mathematician have them with infinitesimally small numbers ;)
I don't think modern mathematicians are going to drown someone for using infinitesimally small numbers...
Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.
Non-standard analysis is perfectly fine. Most mathematicians just don't deal with that kind of analysis.
It's not an argument for disregarding social science, but it is an argument to be more sceptical of its claims.
I disagree but let me qualify that. If we define "successful" as "socially successful", that is, e.g., you have your tenure and your papers are accepted in reasonable peer-reviewed journals, then yes, you do not need high IQ to be be successful social scientist.
However if we define "successful" as "actually advancing the state of human knowledge" then I feel fairly confident in thinking that a high IQ is even more of a necessity for a social scientists than it is for someone who does hard sciences.
As you pointed out yourself , hard sciences are easier :-)
Ah, I'm sorry - I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you're replying to.
You're right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn't great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it's just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you've gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It's part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn't that you don't need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you'd expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It's really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you've come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It's really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say "people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)" or "people from lower classes are in the lower class because they're not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they're not smart (so we should do nothing)" or "people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn't teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)". I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you've come up with them... how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There's not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there's a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They're subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
Unfortunately, what is actually happening is that the politicians and beaurocrats decide which policy they prefer for ideological reasons and then fund social scientists willing to produce "science" to justify the desision.
I'm not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting "evidence-led policy" policies, and I'd hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I'm going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it's doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn't by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
Yes; you'll get some politicians who actually want to reduce the crime rate and are willing to look for advice on how to do that effectively.
They're hard to spot, because all politicians want to look like that sort of politician, leaving the genuine ones hidden in a crowd of lookalikes...
There could be solutions to this, I'm sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up "technocracy" if you want to learn more). That's how we got into the mess we are in now.
My understanding is that the technocracy movement were more engineers than social scientists, and were not an influential movement anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn't that scientists are inherently biased, its that if they mention certain hypotheses publicly they will be fired because of journalists.
Incidentally, I know neuro/cognitive scientists at a very left-wing university, and they believed in certain gender/racial cognitive differences, despite ideology.
The mess where we're wealthier, living longer, etc?
Given that teachers who have a masters in education don't do better than teachers who haven't, I think there a good case of scrapping the current professors in that fields from their titles.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like "we should scrap Masters programs in education". But it could also give very good support to "we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education."
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Who's responsible for creating such a program? The current professors. Given that they don't do so, we need different people.
Very true. We should task them with creating a better program, and if they don't produce results, we should fire them and find new professors. Just the same as firing any employee who is incapable of doing their job, really.
The thing I disagree with would be if we scrapped the positions and programs entirely; I am entirely on board with the idea of firing the people currently holding the positions and running the programs, and finding new people to hold the positions and run the programs differently. I think that I now understand your position better and you're advocating the latter, not the former, in which case I entirely agree with you.
Is that a fact? I've seen social scientists complain that social science is trying too hard to emulate the hard science.
Yes, most social science is cargo cult science. That's perfectly consistent with it being BS.
Look, it may very well be that social science is low-quality. But your comments in this thread are not at all up to LW standards. You need to cite evidence for your positions and stop calling people names.