You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

fubarobfusco comments on What math is essential to the art of rationality? - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: Capla 15 October 2014 02:44AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (62)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 15 October 2014 05:26:47AM 7 points [-]

Pretty much every field uses some math except maybe social science, political science, history, languages and literature.

Statistics was invented for social science, especially political and demographic studies; hence the name.

Comment author: hyporational 15 October 2014 09:16:44AM *  6 points [-]

Oops. Thanks for catching my blunder in this safe environment :)

I'm not sure what it is about the internet that incentivises talking out of your ass.

Comment author: garabik 15 October 2014 12:08:29PM 2 points [-]

And "languages " (I think you mean linguistics) are now heavily using (applied) statistics, especially since corpus linguistics became mainstream. The other issue is that "traditional" linguists usually "somewhat" lack their statistics background and thus the methods are creeping in very slowly, and often there is a tension between traditional and computational linguists.

Literature (if you mean literary theory) is much slower on the uptake, but even there some people admit that these new ideas about calculating number of words and their distribution can help sometimes.

Comment author: hyporational 15 October 2014 12:55:51PM 0 points [-]

By languages I had in mind university programs that produce language teachers, translators and interpreters. I'm not sure if such programs exists in the US, nor if they can be properly called a "field".