Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015

Vaniver

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Social science epistemology, afaict:

Ignore all the interesting and replicable phenomena

Find data sets that can be interpreted in isolation as Cutting Social Commentary

Wonder why your interventions never work, findings never replicate, and you can't predict anything.

How it should be done:

Separate experimental studies from social commentary. Build a corpus of replicated phenomena that need explanation

Find a-priori plausible explanatory hypotheses or laws that explain the replicated phenomena.

Favor hypotheses that predict better, are simpler, and integrate with other theories

Check your work by building working social technology, making novel predictions, or otherwise demonstrating veracity

Note that my recommended social science epistemology is physics epistemology. Soc sci needs more physics envy and fewer linear regressions.

Oops forgot step 0. ASSUME AN UNUPPORTED IMPLAUSIBLE FALSEHOOD (SSSM) AS AXIOMATIC

Nyan Sandwich

"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship." Heinlein

6ChristianKl11y

Economists are something like social scientists with physics envy. They still don't manage to get good at prediction and have a corpus of well replicated phenomena.