= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (125)
This is a silly discussion, but, briefly, try to look at the situation from the inside point of view. Carey is a professor at a university, he gets grants from NSF, he publishes books and papers in peer-reviewed journals. A "scientist" is a high-status label and refusing to call himself a scientist would banish him to the bottom of the totem pole in his social circles.
You probably think of science as "hard sciences". But there are also soft sciences, aka social sciences and I believe historians, sociologists, etc. would not take kindly to being told that what they do is not science. Their internal perspective is that they engage in science, not in diddling with pot shards in their navels.
Look at yourself :-) and avoid the typical mind fallacy.
Here's an interview with Carey. His initial description of himself is as a "historian of science and environmental historian", but later on he does refer to "social scientists like myself".
So, you were right and I was wrong (in, at least, a way I predicted I might be): he does, at least in some contexts, call himself a scientist.
(Is there something about my style of posting that encourages people on LW to bulverize me so much?)
Anyway, you could simply have answered yes to my question "Is it, e.g., just out of a sense that science is high-status and therefore people doing anything with any connection to science will tend to call themselves scientists?".
I'd try actually asking Carey, but right at the moment I think it would be tactless. (The story of the feminist glaciology paper is doing the rounds and I wouldn't be surprised if he's deluged by people asking "do you consider yourself a scientist?" with hostile intent.)