Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

The story reminds me of the HR practices of &#x27;measuring&#x27; personality based on questionnaire to judge the competence of people for certain positions and determine their carrier path inside the organization (e.g. at Trimble). Imagine you are a software engineer applying for an engineering role and they ask you a hundred or more questions to compare the importance of aspects such as punctuality, trust, being patient, lawfulness, honesty and several more, 3 at a time, make a strict order of importance. Without specifics on the work context and situation. Then they build a multi dozen component report how good you are in this and that on a 1 to 5 scale. The way you work. Based on answers to strange questions, not actual work. When it is impossible to answer accurately (because it depends, or there is no order like between playing piano or being tall) then the results will be inaccurate, yet they use it to classify workforce like steel by its properties, determining their fate. Assessing work performance before doing any work. And they take it dead seriously like gauge on a pressure tank. It is just so ... well dumb, forcing any kind of oversimplified measurement on complex and fluid things, sounds like measuring friendliness by meter. People change, people adapt, people behave differently in different circumstances, very very differently, and definitely not how they admit it, no one can count how many influential factors there are, these robotic and unified approaches are just distorting for the purpose of appearing fair. It is far from fair, it is just robotic - which is ironic from a department called human resources, feels like robots work there not humans. Measuring fish by how high it can jump before allowing to swim.<p>It is just pretentious not scientific.

This is such a horrible article. Many have already mentioned the conflation of humanities and social sciences. Then by using the example of books (because most would agree books would loose their essence if we just describe them by numbers) it constructs a straw man that somehow we loose something (the beauty?) by using quantitative measures.<p>Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is the alternative that we simply use theories because of their &quot;beauty&quot; (whatever that means)? Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?

Articles and generally ideas like this always seem too dismissive. CPUs are nothing like brains because: intricacies. Algorithms can&#x27;t be applied to literature because: intricacies. It is almost an appeal to emotions to say that rather than saying &quot;ok well we tried to apply these electric constructs and algorithms in order to understand ideas and literature better, we got nowhere and here&#x27;s exactly why&quot;, they are like &quot;it can&#x27;t be applied oh no it can&#x27;t our humanity is so distinct and precious there are some lines not to be crossed and here&#x27;s a million contrived examples as to why&quot;.<p>And to this approach I say, ignorant and cowardly.

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can&#x27;t analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but then we should accept that the conclusions from qualitative analysis are less firm and judge them accordingly.

I would add to this list economics.<p>Oxford Economist Kate Raeworth has made the exact same argument about her own discipline and the allure of the ‘hardness’ of maths and physics. The way early 20th century increasingly turned to Newtonian-like mechanistic descriptions of economic processes, reductionist and absurd ideas about ‘human nature’, and extracting Universal laws from historical and accidental correlations.<p>I do recommend reading the first half of her Doughnut Economics where she makes this case at length, from someone inside the discipline.

My father (a physicist) used to quote Rutherford to me: &quot;all science Is either physics or stamp collecting&quot;. An extreme position perhaps. I now work in a college of humanities and have frequently collaborated with engineers. I have seen first hand how poorly applied scientific thinking has become within the humanities. But I cannot blame them. They are only giving to the uni what has been asked of them.<p>The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as &#x27;social science&#x27; goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.

This is a <i>terrible</i> article.<p>First of all, the introduction which bashes the paper which applying social network techniques to fiction? If the author had bothered to look it up, they would have realized the authors are an applied mathematician and theoretical physicist. <i>Not humanities</i>.<p>Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are <i>social sciences</i>, and only &quot;humanities&quot; in a very broad umbrella term. &quot;Humanities&quot; is more often used to refer to disciplines such as history, art, literature. So a complete mix-up of fields.<p>Third, the assumption that social sciences has a &quot;reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any given point&quot; is simply flat-out wrong. For example, of course political science relies on &quot;big-N&quot; studies which try to find or refute correlations between democracy and various other country indicators. But political science also relies heavily on &quot;comparative politics&quot; which is much closer to literature or history in a classic &quot;compare and contrast&quot; aspects of two countries. Similarly psychology has many different approaches taken in published papers and books, some quantitative and others more qualitative.<p>I could go on and on. But this article is completely ridiculous, arguing against a straw man that simply doesn&#x27;t exist. It&#x27;s like the author isn&#x27;t even familiar with academia. Bizarre.

One of the most valuable courses I took as an undergrad was an anthropology course. In it, we studied the life of JR Oppenheimer and his relationship with the government patrons of his science.<p>The sort of scoundrels naturally attracted to power will always find cynical use for talent of the kind possessed by Oppenheimer. However, every aspect of such a relationship will be thoroughly cynical.<p>If you are a future STEM person, understanding this fact will save you a lot of grief. Learn it early.

Perhaps the currency of social sciences should be <i>anecdotes</i> with full context (of which you can obviously get only a limited number unless you have unlimited budget) rather than collecting extensive data points on a limited number of variables. While physical systems can be approximated (or some independent variables dropped) without affecting the aspect being studied (think perfectly spherical objects), when it comes to humans, there are no independent variables. Approximation or simplified models are much harder.<p>I think looking for statistical patterns (e.g. in literature) is perfectly good science as long as you are cognizant that patterns merely invite more study an should not be used to reach conclusions, also being aware that patterns might disappear when you expand your data set.<p>Finally, as someone trained in the physical sciences, I used to look down on social scientists. I no longer do this. At least they&#x27;re brave enough to tackle a complex monster with the limited tools at their disposal, stumbling and even enduring ridicule from the hard sciences. We ignore the human mind and collections thereof, because it&#x27;s too complex and prefer the relative comfort of simple, predictable systems. I don&#x27;t believe that&#x27;s good.

Some people submitted nonsense papers (for example: rape culture at dog parks, and an excerpt from Mein Kampf), and they were accepted for publication.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&#x2F;duped-academic-journal-publishes-rewrite-of-mein-kampf-as-feminist-manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&#x2F;duped-academic-journal-publish...</a>

The first paper she studies sounds interesting. Regression analysis on vocabulary has been used to identify authors of work whose authorship had been lost or to find context of where and in what circumstances certain authors grew up.<p>Mathematical analysis of linguistics has pointed to. Irrational patterns later confirmed by genetic analysis.<p>I don’t mind pointing out the vacuity of what often passes for scholarship. But she didn’t start with a good example.

I think one of the points that the article tries to make, is the point that proving something in a soft science using models is often based on many assumptions, be it implicit or explicit, and that this is problematic. To that I agree to some degree.<p>In hard sciences all inputs to a proof are either verifiable theorems known to be absolutely true, conjectures&#x2F;hypotheses (in which case the proof becones a conjecture) and seldomly axioms. In soft sciences on the other hand, it is common to construct models quite arbitrarily, in order to try and match empirical results. If however, we would like these models to have any indication of &quot;absolute&quot; truth, similar to the hard sciences, currently we can&#x27;t or don&#x27;t.<p>To achieve this I believe we could do an input analysis of ALL assumptions and try and quantify the aggregated certainty of the model&#x27;s correctness, even before matching it with empirical data. In this way we could say for example: we have used a model with a predicted input accuracy of 0.82, that matches our empirical results 0.97,p &lt; 0.05. This would then further strengthen and quantify the &quot;standing on the shoulders of a giant&quot; principle.<p>Of course this is easier said than done and I know this is a bit naïve. Currently no techniques exist to do this as far as I know. There is also discussion to be had about how to interpret model outputs (we now have three variables, how do we relate them? How to calculate this model&#x27;s output accuracy?) and how to calculate subsequent model&#x27;s accuracy based on different input accuracies and their inter-relations. This would also require re-building soft sciences all the way from the bottom up (from the most easily verifiable facts first) to be useful and a new science on hypthesized model accuracy calculation.<p>Anyway, enough hypothesizing thought experiments for the day. Any thoughts?

Kinda funny, I guess.<p>This is one of those instances where I might care about the case Konnikova was making if she bothered using any quantitative methods to convince me the humanities were awash in quantitative study while qualitative analysis clearly went the way of the dodo. Or that literature programs were churning out students who think network analysis is the best way to understand a text.<p>In the purely-qualitative realm, it just comes off as pearl-clutching over something I don&#x27;t think anyone actually believes?

I fully agree with the premise that humanities aren&#x27;t a science. In fact I am fairly certain that the current paradigm of science can not work for at least history, though I strongly suspect most of the humanities.<p>One of the problems is computability, when I try to build statistics on a space of human intentions, then I strongly suspect that this is at least as complicated as trying to build a measurable space atop the set of all Turing machines, and there I get immediately the issue of computability. (For example, calculating the average run time of halting Turing machines.) So, then assuming that one can meaningful build a statistic (just the claim that this is possible) will doom any too formal reasoning, by principle of explosion.

I think anything can be a subject to scientific study. Methods are what is essential for a study being scientific, not the subject.

The article is talking, essentially, to the humanities. But the point applies to those of us on the outside as well. We as well need to stop expecting the humanities to be science.

Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences.<p>As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it&#x27;s the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they could very well have a mathematician on hand. What do we do in math if not model real problems of real people?<p>It might be nice for some people to not know an application of their research but for humanities to find novel ways in which to use mathematical tools is great and should be encouraged. Of course they will miss but they will also hit. We need a peer review where those methods are understood within the humanities and social sciences, in order to not draw false conclusions.<p>Of course, qualitative analysis isn&#x27;t going the way of the dodo and the author agrees on that.<p>I just think the occasional misuse of mathematical models for humanities research is well worth the possible gain. Those problems should follow some rules with a mathematical models, right??? Let&#x27;s help those researchers instead of banishing them to qualitative methods.

Science implies the use of the scientific method. Scientific method implies falsifiable hypotheses. Anything that is not falsifiable isn&#x27;t a science.

Elegant conclusions can totally be arrived at in the humanities, it&#x27;s just that statistical methods often aren&#x27;t the best way to go about doing so. The traditional method of logical proof, which is valued just as much as data analysis in science, used to be the standard in the humanities. The human mind would compute the statistics more or less subconsciously, but would then use those empirical results to say something valuable through a process of logical induction. I think that&#x27;s the key point that this article misses—it isn&#x27;t that we don&#x27;t want humanities to provide rational insight, it&#x27;s that we want humanities to reduce its reliance on statistics and refocus on what it&#x27;s historically been great at.<p>There&#x27;s something important to be said here about the duality between logic and math, algebra and statistics, classical AI and modern DL, philosophy and science, rationalism and empiricism.

I would encourage those interested in the intersection of STEM and the Humanities to check out the Digital Humanities Minor&#x2F; Major being offered at a growing number of universities. I earned the minor at UCLA, and found the application of digital tools to historical and modern &quot;humanities&quot; focused types questions to be incredibly relevant.<p>Examples include: 3D modeling of the historic broadway district in Los Angeles, Natural Language Processing of ancient Roman texts, virtual reality&#x27;s impact on human cognition, etc.

Say i agree with the sentiment expressed here, what does the curriculum of a neo-classical humanities look like. Let&#x27;s presume you&#x27;d want to keep the good stuff, things like Arrow&#x27;s impossibilities theorem, Bayesian statistics, Network theory, Language pragmatics, ect. You know the sort of stuff that might aid the organisation of complex systems without repeating the mistakes of the past.<p>Maybe it is unfair to judge the hole field on a silly paper, in all fairness they write about non existing geometries in physics

Can you create a hypothesis and then falsify it? Then it&#x27;s science.<p>Polls are really useful + accurate and are one of my favorite examples of stuff that came from social science research.

Humanities may not be a science, but being human sure is empirical.<p>Experience is all we have.<p>At the bottom of all of these bouts is then “demarcation problem”. What is a science, what isn’t a science?<p>I prefer Paul Fayerabend’s view: if it is useful To somebody somewhere - it is a science.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Epistemological_anarchism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Epistemological_anarchism</a>

Some people do not consider mathematics to be a science. They veiw it as a tool used in science, e.g., statitics.

On the one hand I completely agree that a lot of scientists across disciplines have too much confidence in the predictions of their models of complex systems. For example climate models predicting not only how much global temperature will rise but also on the local level, which seems far harder to predict. And the amount of studies that do not survive a replication attempt. But I don&#x27;t believe that we can justify wasting tax money on people who don&#x27;t try to back up their claims and instead just make up hypothesis after hypothesis, maybe based on a patient they knew, debating and sipping wine with their fellow intellectuals, prescribing morality under the guise of science and just laughing at us plebs. If you want to do that, become a writer or YouTuber, but not a scientist of any kind. If you&#x27;re going to be a scientist at the very least try to back everything up with statistics. I know, It&#x27;s work, it&#x27;s not fun and it might not mean very much but you owe it to society to dig in and crunch those numbers.

I know it&#x27;s just an example in the article, but the study about real-life likeness of social networks in fiction literature seems to miss a point. Wouldn&#x27;t a good writer in many cases abstract away some of the complexity of real-life social networks?

You can analyze a book by saying it has certain number of pages, each one with certain amount of paper and ink, and you can use that to determine the chemical composition of the paper and the ink.<p>That will not tell you what the book is about, though.

One of the dumbest faux-scholarly articles I&#x27;ve read in awhile.

It&#x27;s probably fine for there to be a study of history that is not a science, but there should also be a study of history that does apply scientific methods.

Scientism is the main pillar supporting technocratic management and central planning of society. This is most apparent to me in economics.

Economics-hating HN is the most fascinating HN.

how not to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: conflate it with humanities and claim using data to prove things misses the points<p>how to solve the repeatability crisis in social sciences: throw out bogus research and get rid of quacks

Makes me think of the joke on &quot;Big Bang Theory&quot; (which am almost ashamed to admit enjoying):<p>Caricatured dumb humanities major: &quot;That&#x27;s what I love about math, there&#x27;s no one right answer!&quot;

(2012)

If you can do a double-blind controlled study, it&#x27;s a science.

science = hypothesis; prediction; test prediction; observe. thats it. so a lot of &quot;science&quot; actually isnt science either...

&quot;Psychology is not a natural science.&quot; I used to think this and to a certain extent I still do but the fact is that the feild has changed and become much more reproducible as time passes and it matures.<p>More importantly though this article conflates humanities with social sciences pretty badly. This is quite insulting to sociology and even more so to economics and anthropology. Physical antrho is pretty serious science.<p>There are limitations to social sciences but those are not the same limitations of literary criticism.

I&#x27;m going to sum up half the HN comments here without reading them: &quot;This isn&#x27;t good, humanities are important, not everything can be quantified.&quot;

This reminds me a little bit of the push to add “art” to STEM schools.

I would prefer a university structure where B.S. + M.S. is earned in four years by focusing on core major requirements to then have humanities courses offered at no cost via the alumni association as part of continuing education throughout one&#x27;s twenties.

Why are they even taught in colleges? They&#x27;re more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)