Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

yes, CS is misnamed.

I'll probably get lambasted with all the pedants coming out, but I chuckled when someone pointed out that most majors in college with the word science in them aren't really science i.e. Political Science, Computer Science, Sports Science, contrasted with i.e. Physics, Chemistry, etc.

In Britain "political science" is strictly the process of applying (social) scientific approaches to the study of politics, with the rest of the discipline simply called "politics".

Nobody trusts the political scientists, sadly. There are too many bloody variables and collecting good enough data to build cumulative models is hard. We persevere, though.

What do they do for reproducibility?

I'm pretty sure those types of things, such as social sciences, can be tested and reproduced, but I'd imagine there are ethical concerns.

How do you reproduce Hitler's affect on politics and not end up on the receiving end of a tribunal in Hague?

The same way you reproduce things in astrophysics or epidemiology: natural experiments.

Got a good example I can look up?

CS as practiced today contains elements of math, engineering, and the sciences (though rarely at the same time). I have a bit on this you might find interesting: http://bowaggoner.com/whatiscomputerscience.html#medium

I'm not seeing any "science" in CS. I work at a company based on CS, I have a PhD in a quantitative physical field, and I don't really CS as being science. It's theoretical and applied math that happens to be executed on computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com