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Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:56 pm
by Jebus
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:36 pm Rosenhan experiment doesn't really tell us about how reliable experiments in psychology are, they tell us about how accurate diagnostic methods are. Big difference here, isn't it?
The psychiatrists in the clinic based their diagnoses on previous experiments and case studies. Regardless, I posted it as an explanation to why many psychology students are skeptical to the accuracy of their own field.

What's your point? Do you believe psychology experiments are as accurate as physics experiments?

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 2:01 pm
by teo123
Jebus wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:56 pm
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:36 pm Rosenhan experiment doesn't really tell us about how reliable experiments in psychology are, they tell us about how accurate diagnostic methods are. Big difference here, isn't it?
The psychiatrists in the clinic based their diagnoses on previous experiments and case studies. Regardless, I posted it as an explanation to why many psychology students are skeptical to the accuracy of their own field.

What's your point? Do you believe psychology experiments are as accurate as physics experiments?
Why wouldn't they be? Many psychological experiments are easily repeatable (optical illusions, false memories, diffusion of responsibility...), while many physics experiments are not. As @brimstoneSalad and I discussed, there is no experiment you and I can do that would unambiguously prove electrons have wave-lengths, yet alone something more about modern physics. Doing the double-slit experiment with electrons couldn't have been done at all in Feynman's time (as Feynman unambiguously said), and it still can't be done without a lot of special education.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 4:45 am
by brimstoneSalad
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:36 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote:Of course she thinks there's something to your work: you're actually trying to be rigorous.
So, do you also think there is something to my work now? And do you agree now that your comments about how I'm doing a "pudding soft science, if it is science at all" were unjustified, insulting and counter-productive?
I don't think I said there wasn't anything to your work (soft science is not nothing). You need to stop putting words in my mouth.
However, trying is not succeeding.
It's possible that even a Flat-Earther is doing good hard science, it's just unlikely.

Given that:
1. The field you're publishing in is soft science (thus making it the default assumption that your work is also)
4. You don't understand the difference between hard and soft science (thus making it implausible that you would be doing harder science by accident)
3. You don't understand advanced mathematics (which makes it nearly impossible for you to do hard science even if you knew what it was)

I think my assumption was a pretty safe one.
Add to that the fact that professional linguists have told you it's very unlikely that you're correct, and well...

Was my rebuke unjustified? I think you need to look at the context.
I believe I made it in response to your very arrogant claim suggesting that because you have published papers in linguistics that you "know something" about science generally, and specifically in reference to hard science knowledge.

It was a silly claim that I'm still waiting for you to realize was silly. Only slightly less silly than a gender studies major saying the same thing.

Was my rebuke counter-productive? Teo, I'm pretty sure every conversation with you is counter-productive.

You're young so it may seem like such a long time ago to you, but to me I schooled you in basic epistemology yesterday when you were a Flat-Earther and thought Occam's razor meant airplanes didn't exist. Then as soon as you got clear of Flat-Earth nonsense you dove head-first into extreme "murder should be legal" anarchism proving you STILL don't understand basic epistemology. The conviction with which you hold every one of these nonsense beliefs is amazing and would make for a great case study in the Dunning Kruger effect.
And today you think you're going to school me on what science is when you haven't even finished school yourself yet? No sir.

Was my rebuke insulting? I imagine so, given what you believe of yourself, but sometimes people need a little sense slapped into them. I'm sorry to see I've failed to do that with you yet again.

teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote:There's a huge difference between something being an established field of hard science, and using "hard sciencey" seeming tools to do something soft and claiming it makes it hard.
Don't you think that's exactly what's going on in economics? That much of economics is even worse than glottochronology, that it just uses advanced mathematics in order make itself harder to understand by laymen, while not even being theoretically falsifiable (Keynesian policies failing again and again didn't take it out of "mainstream" economics)?
I already covered this.
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pmBut how can you be sure of that? How can you be sure that glottochronology is pseudoscience? If you come from natural sciences, that idea will seem rather natural to you, wouldn't it? You need to understand linguistics along with mathematics to understand that.
It wasn't, but one of the core premises was found to be unreliable: languages change at different rates.
It could still be revived if we find ways to predict these rates of change. Seems implausible, though.
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pmParticularly at your claim about how people from hard sciences are somehow justified to speak on the issues of soft sciences without seriously studying them.
Stop straw-manning me Teo, this is your last warning.

Nobody can speak on any specific issue without some study, my point was entirely about methodology. I made that very clear. It's a question of the tools these fields use. Somebody from a soft science may have a poor understanding of how experimentation works when the field is primarily observation and establishing correlations in data sets.
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pm There are other ways of establishing rigour, like, in this case, not proposing etymologies that contradict the laws of grammar (primarily sound laws).
:lol: I'm sure Flat-Earthers are rigorous too when they try not to contradict themselves with their ad hoc hypotheses. Attempting only not to contradict yourself is the crudest form of rigor: that is, not rigorous in any scientifically meaningful sense.
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pm Sometimes, yes, that rigour is unjustified and counter-productive, and you perhaps need to understand some mathematics along with linguistics to understand exactly why, but that's not to say one who doesn't understand math can't make scientific claims.
I didn't say that, somebody who doesn't understand much math can make *soft science* claims.
The degree of rigor there is a major point of distinction. If you don't understand mathematics, you can't make any serious new claims in a hard science.
teo123 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:23 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote:As such, somebody studied in a hard science is qualified to understand soft science, but somebody studied in soft science is not qualified to understand hard science.
See, to everyone outside of that cult here, this is an insane assertion. And you will have a very hard time finding a scientist to agree with it.
You clearly have no idea what the words I used there mean. I'm obviously speaking in terms of the generalized fields and their methodologies, not specific empirical facts or theories being intuited magically without study. This is even more clear given the context and what I have been explaining to you repeatedly.

It's much the same as somebody who works in calculus being capable of understanding mere algebra, even if the person is unfamiliar with a certain proof the basic functions there are familiar and it's fairly straight forward to be introduced to specific work. Somebody who works with and has only learned algebra is not remotely qualified to understand proofs involving calculus.

This is the situation you find yourself in with hard sciences, and your arrogant claim about knowing something about them is as if somebody were referencing calculus and you replied that you "know something about math" generally because you took an algebra class.

I can't explain any more clearly how silly you're being, and yet you're incapable of understanding it because you don't even know what you don't know.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 5:44 am
by Red
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 4:45 am Then as soon as you got clear of Flat-Earth nonsense you dove head-first into extreme "murder should be legal" anarchism proving you STILL don't understand basic epistemology.
I don't think he's dropped that yet.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 5:58 am
by brimstoneSalad
Red wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 5:44 am
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 4:45 am Then as soon as you got clear of Flat-Earth nonsense you dove head-first into extreme "murder should be legal" anarchism proving you STILL don't understand basic epistemology.
I don't think he's dropped that yet.
I don't think he has either, which is what makes this all so silly.

And now he's confused on reproducibility too. I don't know what kind of lengthy discussion he thinks he and I had on quantum mechanics that he's telling Jebus about.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am
by teo123
brimstoneSalad wrote:You don't understand advanced mathematics
The core of the mathematical part of my argument is available on my web-page (click the "click here" link in the "Birthday Paradox" paragraph). Who cares about whether I understand calculus or not, when there are arguments there that can be analyzed (and even more such arguments in the paper I am trying to publish in the Pozega Ethnological Journal)? Appealing to me not fully understanding calculus is just an ad-hominem attack, unless I made a mistake specifically because of my lack of understanding of calculus (which you didn't show).
brimstoneSalad wrote:Add to that the fact that professional linguists have told you it's very unlikely that you're correct
...back when I presented my theory in a way that can't really be evaluated. My understanding of linguistics has improved drastically since then.
brimstoneSalad wrote:I'm sure Flat-Earthers are rigorous too when they try not to contradict themselves with their ad hoc hypotheses. Attempting only not to contradict yourself is the crudest form of rigor: that is, not rigorous in any scientifically meaningful sense.
"The English word 'day' shares the same Indo-European root as the Latin word 'dies'."
THAT is proposing etymologies that contradict the sound laws (in this case, the Grimm's law).
Clearly you don't understand the basics of methodology of linguistics.
The question is whether that same rigour should be applied to the proposed etymologies for ancient toponyms coming from long-extinct and unattested or almost-unattested languages (since the sound laws we think applied there are far less certain than the sound laws we think applied to Latin), or whether we should use (as I think we should) a different methodology there.
And the certainty of some well-known sound laws that apply to the attested and distantly related Indo-European languages, as I've calculated in the paper I am trying to publish, using the data from Wiktionary, ranges between 95% and 99%.
brimstoneSalad wrote:but sometimes people need a little sense slapped into them
What was slapped into my face is the fact that, as they say, everyone (including you) behaves inexplicably stupid sooner or later.
brimstoneSalad wrote:I'm obviously speaking in terms of the generalized fields and their methodologies
So am I. You clearly don't understand what "proposing etymologies that contradict the sound laws" means. That's not hard to understand (Some parts of the English grammar are a lot harder to understand than that is.), but most of the people outside of linguistics, including those in hard sciences, don't understand that.
brimstoneSalad wrote: I don't think he has either, which is what makes this all so silly.
And you are so convinced you are right about politics, when you clearly don't understand social sciences.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:31 am
by brimstoneSalad
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am The core of the mathematical part of my argument[...]
I'm not going to peer review your paper, and I highly doubt anybody is going to read it here.
The fact that you are having so much trouble with advanced mathematics makes it very unlikely that you correctly understand something like statistics.

Maybe somehow you've mastered statistics while calculus confuses you, which sounds a lot of being able to to cook a mean pad thai but not being able to figure out how to use a toaster.

I'm going with the "you have no idea what you're doing" theory, particularly given your inability to understand the difference between hard and soft science on top of your mathematical incompetence.
If you can get an expert to attest that in fact you've made no mistakes I'll be a bit surprised.
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am Appealing to me not fully understanding calculus is just an ad-hominem attack, unless I made a mistake specifically because of my lack of understanding of calculus (which you didn't show).
It's induction. Much like a Flat-Earther can not be expected to be any good at physics... as we established in the Flat-Earth thread despite your insistence that you were top in your class. You thought you possessed a competence that in fact you woefully lacked.
The same is probably the case here. Is it certain? No. But it's an overwhelming probability to the point that it's not really worth anybody's time to investigate further. Kind of like claims about ghosts. Do we know for sure they don't exist? No, but we know enough to know going after those claims is a waste of time.
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am ...back when I presented my theory in a way that can't really be evaluated. My understanding of linguistics has improved drastically since then.
Then try again.
If professional linguists weigh in and agree with you now, then you'll have changed my mind on the probability of your work being nonsense.

So put up or shut up, OK?
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am Clearly you don't understand the basics of methodology of linguistics.
I do, which is one of the main points of my argument that it is a soft science. You still don't understand my arguments. Can not understand them, it seems, because you lack the knowledge of hard science methodology.
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am What was slapped into my face is the fact that, as they say, everyone (including you) behaves inexplicably stupid sooner or later.
If I am mistaken you are welcome to prove it by inviting some professional linguists to endorse your work.
If I am mistaken, then it's a rare exception to the rule of my being very careful about the positions I take. For you, being persistently mistaken IS the rule: you are so commonly the precise opposite of right that it's entirely fair for us to assume as much. Always, and with no need to shoulder any burden of proof.
From Flat-Earth to your persistent advocacy of "murder should be legal" anarchism, of course nobody is going to take your academic work seriously here. Particularly when thus far there's no evidence that other linguists do either (if we can even call you a linguist).
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am You clearly don't understand what "proposing etymologies that contradict the sound laws" means.
No, I got it. And no, it wasn't hard to understand. I understand why you say your original work was rejected too. But that was a superficial mistake that lacking may reveal a plethora of others. Of course they're only going to go as deep as they need to in order to reject your work.
Attempting to fix the most obvious omission isn't any guarantee that the rest of your work is stellar, or that you even did that properly.
teo123 wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:48 am And you are so convinced you are right about politics, when you clearly don't understand social sciences.
That's where you're mistaken. I don't make the kind of claims you make. I merely reject your wild claims.
I've talked before about being mostly apolitical because most political claims aren't supported by much evidence -- but increasingly, some of them are. I'm in favor of scientific methodology in politics.
I've discussed this at length, and you've either filtered it out as disagreeing with your dogma or failed entirely to comprehend it.

I've said repeatedly that being agnostic to or skeptical of government can be reasonable. Asserting that government is bad and all laws should be abolished is not a well reasoned position, it's dogmatic lunacy.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2019 8:35 am
by brimstoneSalad
Teo made another post full of strawman arguments, it's been split off into the off-topic claim he made in the post here:
viewtopic.php?f=7&p=42695#p42695
I don't intend to address the claims he made because they're pretty silly (eg. comparing himself to Einstein).

@teo123 That's enough straw men for now. This is clearly going nowhere but circles and try as I might you aren't following my argument or the point I'm making.
You are welcome to re-read some of my arguments here, but I think it's time for you to give this topic a rest for a while until you've had time to study more hard sciences and learn more about scientific methodology (and mathematics). Maybe you'll have some new arguments next year.

If it's OK with @Red and @Jebus teo is banned from this particular thread for one year.
Come back in one year, having re-read the thread, with better arguments and less straw man. Don't attempt to broach the same issue elsewhere.

Let's give other people a chance to comment on all of this if anybody is interested in the topic. I doubt anybody will be, though, because it's pretty uncontroversial that some sciences are softer than others, and the epistemology of *why* is in concordance with multiple lines of evidence.

That doesn't make soft sciences unimportant. Quite the contrary, they are arguably more important to society today due to our political situation and since physics is nowhere near giving us some revolutionary form of free energy.
It does mean that just understanding a soft science doesn't necessarily equip you to understand hard sciences better since the methodology involved in hard sciences is different.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2019 12:39 pm
by Jebus
@brimstoneSalad I haven't followed this thread closely, although I trust your judgement.

Re: Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2019 8:39 pm
by Red
I agree with the move, though I doubt it will help Teo learn his lesson.