The article complains that certain theories don't generate experiments that can be tested, noting particularly that Freudianism was modified repeatedly to fit new data, without a good reason for hanging on to Freud in the first place. I agree that this does not typify many modern social sciences or their current theories, but the article is really quite quiet on those. (Except noting a fairly unsettling trend in economics towards copying biology... for no reason.) Maybe it's a bad idea to treat all social sciences the same way?
I think this comes down to bad terminology on my part. When I said "thinly-veiled philosophy", I wanted to express that value judgements are a part of the normal discourse in the social sciences, as you quoted directly in your first block. I promise you I labour under no delusions that the natural sciences are unique or separate from philosophy; had I spent more time on that post I might've gone on to say that they are simply "slightly more thickly veiled philosophy," to account for the disregard of dependence you cite from Kuhn. I intended only to highlight the absence of this extra level of abstraction, not to imply that natural science is somehow outside.
I just opened a 718 MB PSD locally. A "Reading Photoshop Format" progress bar popped up. You might be a victim of Microsoft in this case; SMB often tries to transfer the whole file at once if the program asks for it in the wrong way.
Malthus's influence on Darwin led to a model of natural selection that was much more accurate than its predecessors, readily supported by the ecosystem of the Galapagos Islands, and which naturally followed from the subject matter. Two ways are discussed in which theories in the social sciences fail to meet these standards:
First, the article states that Popper felt that important theories in the social sciences (such as Freudian psychology) never reach this level of concreteness, saying of Freudianism that it "did not make well-defined predictions and proved adept at reformulating its explanations to fit observations, changing the details so as to salvage the theory."
Second, the article calls attention to cases where Kuhn himself felt the social sciences borrowed metaphors from other fields without identifying a root cause for why this should be so, only exploiting superficial similarity in the phenomena within those fields:
Many of the early social scientists came to view society in terms of contemporary physics; they adopted the Enlightenment belief in science as the source of progress, and considered physics the archetypical science. They understood society as a mechanism that could be engineered and adjusted.
And:
...and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. In 1991, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was launched with an eye toward advancing a Darwinian understanding of economics, complete with genotypes and phenotypes. The justification for this kind of model is straightforward: one of the biggest difficulties for economists is the dynamism of any given economy. As Joseph Schumpeter rightly pointed out, economies change; they evolve, rather than staying fixed like a Newtonian machine with merely moving parts. Since machines do not change, whereas societies do, it is reasonable to move the study of economics away from the metaphor of systems and toward that of organisms.
This is essentially different from the validation that Darwinian evolution underwent when the mechanism of Mendelian genetics was provided to explain how it worked. Without a comprehensive reason to explain why economics should resemble biological life to this extent, this analogy is only one of convenience. There should be no incentive to hammer a social science into the template of a model from the hard sciences, and the article points out an example noticed by Eric Voegelin, wherein John Fortescue broke from a 'human body' metaphor in his description of a political theory, borrowing concepts from Christianity to improve on it.
Personally, I believe the article's author is a bit hard on the social sciences, and sets a tone implying that all theories in the social sciences necessarily have these faults. I don't think all fundamental theories in the social sciences necessarily involve value judgements, and certainly not all of them are unverifiable. Does that address any of your complaints?
Wow. Fighting words much? The body of your post was most definitely an attack on an incorrect interpretation of what I was saying. You have not refuted the claim that the social sciences are essentially unscientific, which is what the article's author meant by saying they are branches of philosophy. I find it a little disappointing that you missed that cue from the article's text.
Quite honestly I don't understand some of the stumbles in Illustrator's feature history. It's really weird to think that it took them until 2008 to add translucent gradients; Photoshop had them at least five years earlier. I'm not sure about pinning the UI revamp woes on CS6, though; I'm pretty sure CS4 was the start of the big "let's make everything look like a cheap light grey Vista refrigerator magnet" phase.
The "yotto" prefix is almost completely irrelevant to human experience, so you should stop worrying about it. You are already familiar with the useful positive-exponent prefixes from computing (peta = quintillion, tera = quadrillion, giga = billion, mega = million, kilo = thousand), and to be quite honest no one uses "deci" or "deca" or "hecta" much; it's more convenient to say 10 centimetres or 100 metres. The only ones you really need to worry about are "centi", "milli", and "micro", which are a hundredth, a thousandth, and a millionth, respectively. (Nano means a billionth and pico means a trillionth, if you're wondering.)
But again, the only units with prefixes you'll experience outside of the sciences are centimetres, kilometres, millimetres, millilitres, and kilograms. Maybe milliseconds from time to time (this is not a pun). No messy interplay between yards and feet. A litre is about a quarter of a gallon. No teaspoons, cups, tablespoons, fluid ounces, or any of that crap.
As for temperatures—yes, cooking is the one holdout where Fahrenheit is more common than Celsius. But that's trivial to work around, because 200 C is about 400 F. And it's really not that hard to get used to measuring everyday temperatures in Celsius: 20 is comfortable, 0 is freezing, everything else sucks.
Think of it this way: do you want your kids to put up with shitty inconsistent units because you were too lazy to change?
One's perspective on the world involves more than a metaphysical understanding of how it functions. It also involves how those functional elements are structured and relate to one another. By developing a ubiquitous communications medium, we were able to communicate with each other rapidly and rearrange social structures, (and that affected how we perceived the world, often oversimplified to "making it smaller") but nothing about our understanding of any mechanisms changed. It was just a convenience.
Tsk. You're straw-manning; I have no shortage of respect for philosophy. The key point is that the social sciences aren't applied epistemology. Core theories do not revolve around testable premises, and hence they cannot properly be called science, only philosophy.
This kind of gross behaviourism can be found in physiology and psychology when they interface with modern biology. Physiologists, for example, like to describe humans as "behavioural homeostatic regulators" (at least, my second-year professors did), implying that there is some direct stimulatory link between feeling hot and removing one's sweater. (And certain kinds of psychologists make much more grievous reductionisms regarding evolution.)
In the former case, the researchers themselves are making rather outdated (and suspiciously Hobbesian...) philosophical statements that derive from their own experiences as clinicians and the traditions of their mentors, whereas in the latter case, I feel the article's interpretation of social sciences pursuing in-vogue theories applies rather neatly.
For the record, biologists tend to subscribe to a kind of emulated dualism: the mind is a black box that contains its own arrangement of notions which, while they may not be as real as physical matter, should be treated as real. It's only when you stray near psychology that you start seeing stupid shit like this. I suspect this more reveals the limits of the author's experience.
A term is not a buzzword until it's taken out of its original context. Kuhn didn't do that; he named the actual phenomenon of a shift in scientific paradigms, and then other, more derivative authors abused it. Hate the meme, not the thought.
Don't choke on that Flavor-Aid too quickly, now. Slashdot is most definitely extremely positivist, and Pollack has been independently confirmed to some extent, and those confirmations are peer-reviewed. I'm not going to touch the constructivist stuff directly, but it's certainly true that minds both great and small throughout history have gotten stuck on old paradigms and could not bring themselves to accept new findings.
The milestone breakthroughs are the paradigm shifts. Kuhn didn't argue that these shifts were the only things that mattered, only that they obsolete the past and need to be acknowledged. And you'll have to put up with the phrase "paradigm shift"—this is the original and only place the phrase should be used. It's not a buzzword in this context.
No, the Internet is not a paradigm shift. It was a dramatic shift in worldview, but it did not directly cause people to re-evaluate how the world works. All of that work was done by telephones, trains, traditional mail, and radio.
That's exactly right. In fact the article complains at great length that the social sciences are a mistake: they're really veiled branches of philosophy, trying to fit a complicated universe to a set of paradigms stolen from other fields (including physics and biology) simply because those fields and models are in vogue. When Kuhn described the process of paradigm change, the social scientists interpreted it as a validation of their methodology, which ran directly against his wishes.
The summary is hence very dishonest about the book and article; Kuhn explicitly considered his theories inappropriate for the social sciences, and the article never casts any doubt on the applicability of his model to biology; it merely points out that it was an oversight. (And as a biologist, I feel pretty strongly that paradigm shifting applies equally to physics and biology.)
Aha, but now you have fallen into the devious trap! For it is forbidden to inform physicists that the rest of the world does not work the same way they do. The Gods decreed several thousand years ago that no man, woman, or child should ever do such a thing, lest physicists become aware of the other sciences and try to interfere. There can only be one punishment for a crime this grievous: death by total protonic reversal!
And precisely like Microsoft entering China, they would rather lock in pirates with old products than let other suites build brand loyalty. Gets to be a problem once said opponents' customers start businesses or run university courses.
Actually, the Office formats have been changing in ways not entirely different from the Adobe formats. 2007 introduced a lot of style features for objects like transparency, shadows, and blurring, which are rendered on the fly like Photoshop layer effects, and those have undergone enhancements in 2010 and 2013. There's very little appreciation for how powerful Office is as a composition engine. (And despite how awful OOXML is as a format, at least it's in XML and not a cruddy binary any more, so as a matter of software engineering, that was a piece of technical debt work that very much needed to happen.)
Valid point. I've seen evidence that some new versions of SecuROM in EA games will actually block access to the Pirate Bay when installed. That kind of reasoning makes it incredibly difficult to trust and support game makers who accept such malicious publishers.
That's a pretty solid point too, and one I considered making. Adobe views the typical small-time private user as (more or less) a loss; that's why they have Photoshop Elements as a whole separate product. Corporate-scale piracy has never been a very good idea.
I think it was CS4 (or maybe CS5?) when Adobe added progress bars for every possible operation. That was pretty welcome from my perspective when it comes to working with really large or complex documents, although CS4 also stamped out any semblance of a standard UI and replaced everything with its weird hybrid iTunes-menu-titlebar/Vista nonsense. CS6 has finally made this new UI at least usable (you can adjust its brightness), although bizarrely Illustrator CS5 supported that, too, revealing how fractured the Adobe development teams really are when you get under the hood.
This is more of a problem with Illustrator than Photoshop, admittedly. There were at least two versions in a row (CS3 and CS4) that would smash object groups into clipping areas simply because the document's version number was newer. Although I've also seen Photoshop do some weedy things with text layers.
Slashdot Mirror
The article complains that certain theories don't generate experiments that can be tested, noting particularly that Freudianism was modified repeatedly to fit new data, without a good reason for hanging on to Freud in the first place. I agree that this does not typify many modern social sciences or their current theories, but the article is really quite quiet on those. (Except noting a fairly unsettling trend in economics towards copying biology... for no reason.) Maybe it's a bad idea to treat all social sciences the same way?
I think this comes down to bad terminology on my part. When I said "thinly-veiled philosophy", I wanted to express that value judgements are a part of the normal discourse in the social sciences, as you quoted directly in your first block. I promise you I labour under no delusions that the natural sciences are unique or separate from philosophy; had I spent more time on that post I might've gone on to say that they are simply "slightly more thickly veiled philosophy," to account for the disregard of dependence you cite from Kuhn. I intended only to highlight the absence of this extra level of abstraction, not to imply that natural science is somehow outside.
I just opened a 718 MB PSD locally. A "Reading Photoshop Format" progress bar popped up. You might be a victim of Microsoft in this case; SMB often tries to transfer the whole file at once if the program asks for it in the wrong way.
Malthus's influence on Darwin led to a model of natural selection that was much more accurate than its predecessors, readily supported by the ecosystem of the Galapagos Islands, and which naturally followed from the subject matter. Two ways are discussed in which theories in the social sciences fail to meet these standards:
First, the article states that Popper felt that important theories in the social sciences (such as Freudian psychology) never reach this level of concreteness, saying of Freudianism that it "did not make well-defined predictions and proved adept at reformulating its explanations to fit observations, changing the details so as to salvage the theory."
Second, the article calls attention to cases where Kuhn himself felt the social sciences borrowed metaphors from other fields without identifying a root cause for why this should be so, only exploiting superficial similarity in the phenomena within those fields:
Many of the early social scientists came to view society in terms of contemporary physics; they adopted the Enlightenment belief in science as the source of progress, and considered physics the archetypical science. They understood society as a mechanism that could be engineered and adjusted.
And:
...and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. In 1991, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was launched with an eye toward advancing a Darwinian understanding of economics, complete with genotypes and phenotypes. The justification for this kind of model is straightforward: one of the biggest difficulties for economists is the dynamism of any given economy. As Joseph Schumpeter rightly pointed out, economies change; they evolve, rather than staying fixed like a Newtonian machine with merely moving parts. Since machines do not change, whereas societies do, it is reasonable to move the study of economics away from the metaphor of systems and toward that of organisms.
This is essentially different from the validation that Darwinian evolution underwent when the mechanism of Mendelian genetics was provided to explain how it worked. Without a comprehensive reason to explain why economics should resemble biological life to this extent, this analogy is only one of convenience. There should be no incentive to hammer a social science into the template of a model from the hard sciences, and the article points out an example noticed by Eric Voegelin, wherein John Fortescue broke from a 'human body' metaphor in his description of a political theory, borrowing concepts from Christianity to improve on it.
Personally, I believe the article's author is a bit hard on the social sciences, and sets a tone implying that all theories in the social sciences necessarily have these faults. I don't think all fundamental theories in the social sciences necessarily involve value judgements, and certainly not all of them are unverifiable. Does that address any of your complaints?
Wow. Fighting words much? The body of your post was most definitely an attack on an incorrect interpretation of what I was saying. You have not refuted the claim that the social sciences are essentially unscientific, which is what the article's author meant by saying they are branches of philosophy. I find it a little disappointing that you missed that cue from the article's text.
Putting my money on RGB sliders. Nothing makes Illustrator more usable than hot pink widgets.
(Woah, wait a... what an honour.)
Quite honestly I don't understand some of the stumbles in Illustrator's feature history. It's really weird to think that it took them until 2008 to add translucent gradients; Photoshop had them at least five years earlier. I'm not sure about pinning the UI revamp woes on CS6, though; I'm pretty sure CS4 was the start of the big "let's make everything look like a cheap light grey Vista refrigerator magnet" phase.
The "yotto" prefix is almost completely irrelevant to human experience, so you should stop worrying about it. You are already familiar with the useful positive-exponent prefixes from computing (peta = quintillion, tera = quadrillion, giga = billion, mega = million, kilo = thousand), and to be quite honest no one uses "deci" or "deca" or "hecta" much; it's more convenient to say 10 centimetres or 100 metres. The only ones you really need to worry about are "centi", "milli", and "micro", which are a hundredth, a thousandth, and a millionth, respectively. (Nano means a billionth and pico means a trillionth, if you're wondering.)
But again, the only units with prefixes you'll experience outside of the sciences are centimetres, kilometres, millimetres, millilitres, and kilograms. Maybe milliseconds from time to time (this is not a pun). No messy interplay between yards and feet. A litre is about a quarter of a gallon. No teaspoons, cups, tablespoons, fluid ounces, or any of that crap.
As for temperatures—yes, cooking is the one holdout where Fahrenheit is more common than Celsius. But that's trivial to work around, because 200 C is about 400 F. And it's really not that hard to get used to measuring everyday temperatures in Celsius: 20 is comfortable, 0 is freezing, everything else sucks.
Think of it this way: do you want your kids to put up with shitty inconsistent units because you were too lazy to change?
Dictionary troll powers, activate!
One's perspective on the world involves more than a metaphysical understanding of how it functions. It also involves how those functional elements are structured and relate to one another. By developing a ubiquitous communications medium, we were able to communicate with each other rapidly and rearrange social structures, (and that affected how we perceived the world, often oversimplified to "making it smaller") but nothing about our understanding of any mechanisms changed. It was just a convenience.
Tsk. You're straw-manning; I have no shortage of respect for philosophy. The key point is that the social sciences aren't applied epistemology. Core theories do not revolve around testable premises, and hence they cannot properly be called science, only philosophy.
Einstein still claims...
Wait, what?
This is very disturbing.
This kind of gross behaviourism can be found in physiology and psychology when they interface with modern biology. Physiologists, for example, like to describe humans as "behavioural homeostatic regulators" (at least, my second-year professors did), implying that there is some direct stimulatory link between feeling hot and removing one's sweater. (And certain kinds of psychologists make much more grievous reductionisms regarding evolution.)
In the former case, the researchers themselves are making rather outdated (and suspiciously Hobbesian...) philosophical statements that derive from their own experiences as clinicians and the traditions of their mentors, whereas in the latter case, I feel the article's interpretation of social sciences pursuing in-vogue theories applies rather neatly.
For the record, biologists tend to subscribe to a kind of emulated dualism: the mind is a black box that contains its own arrangement of notions which, while they may not be as real as physical matter, should be treated as real. It's only when you stray near psychology that you start seeing stupid shit like this. I suspect this more reveals the limits of the author's experience.
A term is not a buzzword until it's taken out of its original context. Kuhn didn't do that; he named the actual phenomenon of a shift in scientific paradigms, and then other, more derivative authors abused it. Hate the meme, not the thought.
Don't choke on that Flavor-Aid too quickly, now. Slashdot is most definitely extremely positivist, and Pollack has been independently confirmed to some extent, and those confirmations are peer-reviewed. I'm not going to touch the constructivist stuff directly, but it's certainly true that minds both great and small throughout history have gotten stuck on old paradigms and could not bring themselves to accept new findings.
The milestone breakthroughs are the paradigm shifts. Kuhn didn't argue that these shifts were the only things that mattered, only that they obsolete the past and need to be acknowledged. And you'll have to put up with the phrase "paradigm shift"—this is the original and only place the phrase should be used. It's not a buzzword in this context.
...arguably it could be a social paradigm shift, but not a Kuhnian one, so you may want to save that thought for later.
No, the Internet is not a paradigm shift. It was a dramatic shift in worldview, but it did not directly cause people to re-evaluate how the world works. All of that work was done by telephones, trains, traditional mail, and radio.
That's exactly right. In fact the article complains at great length that the social sciences are a mistake: they're really veiled branches of philosophy, trying to fit a complicated universe to a set of paradigms stolen from other fields (including physics and biology) simply because those fields and models are in vogue. When Kuhn described the process of paradigm change, the social scientists interpreted it as a validation of their methodology, which ran directly against his wishes.
The summary is hence very dishonest about the book and article; Kuhn explicitly considered his theories inappropriate for the social sciences, and the article never casts any doubt on the applicability of his model to biology; it merely points out that it was an oversight. (And as a biologist, I feel pretty strongly that paradigm shifting applies equally to physics and biology.)
Aha, but now you have fallen into the devious trap! For it is forbidden to inform physicists that the rest of the world does not work the same way they do. The Gods decreed several thousand years ago that no man, woman, or child should ever do such a thing, lest physicists become aware of the other sciences and try to interfere. There can only be one punishment for a crime this grievous: death by total protonic reversal!
And precisely like Microsoft entering China, they would rather lock in pirates with old products than let other suites build brand loyalty. Gets to be a problem once said opponents' customers start businesses or run university courses.
Actually, the Office formats have been changing in ways not entirely different from the Adobe formats. 2007 introduced a lot of style features for objects like transparency, shadows, and blurring, which are rendered on the fly like Photoshop layer effects, and those have undergone enhancements in 2010 and 2013. There's very little appreciation for how powerful Office is as a composition engine. (And despite how awful OOXML is as a format, at least it's in XML and not a cruddy binary any more, so as a matter of software engineering, that was a piece of technical debt work that very much needed to happen.)
Valid point. I've seen evidence that some new versions of SecuROM in EA games will actually block access to the Pirate Bay when installed. That kind of reasoning makes it incredibly difficult to trust and support game makers who accept such malicious publishers.
That's a pretty solid point too, and one I considered making. Adobe views the typical small-time private user as (more or less) a loss; that's why they have Photoshop Elements as a whole separate product. Corporate-scale piracy has never been a very good idea.
I think it was CS4 (or maybe CS5?) when Adobe added progress bars for every possible operation. That was pretty welcome from my perspective when it comes to working with really large or complex documents, although CS4 also stamped out any semblance of a standard UI and replaced everything with its weird hybrid iTunes-menu-titlebar/Vista nonsense. CS6 has finally made this new UI at least usable (you can adjust its brightness), although bizarrely Illustrator CS5 supported that, too, revealing how fractured the Adobe development teams really are when you get under the hood.
This is more of a problem with Illustrator than Photoshop, admittedly. There were at least two versions in a row (CS3 and CS4) that would smash object groups into clipping areas simply because the document's version number was newer. Although I've also seen Photoshop do some weedy things with text layers.