Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

People would take anthropology more seriously if it at least aspired to be a science, instead of having explicitly disavowed that aim. From 2010.

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-ass...

> The weekend before Thanksgiving, at the closing of the annual convention held this year in New Orleans, the Executive Board of the AAA discussed a new long-range plan that alters the AAA’s mission statement. The new mission statement deletes the idea that anthropology is a science. It also blurs the intellectual boundaries of the discipline and, ironically, inserts a stronger warrant for using anthropology to engage in public advocacy.

> The proposal has already prompted a strong dissent by, so far, at least one section of the AAA, i.e. the Society for Anthropological Sciences, which is objecting on several grounds. The Society’s listserve, SASci, reflects the widespread distress. One prominent anthropologist observed that the proposal makes the “mission exclusively educational rather than [focusing] on the discovery of knowledge.” Another sees the move as the latest attempt of cultural anthropologists “to rid” the profession of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and perhaps even linguists. Another complains, “Those of us in applied anthropology are hired because of the scientific nature of our work,” a status that the proposed mission statement would undermine. Another anthropologist wonders what will happen to the flow of federal research funds predicated on anthropology’s contributions to science.

In biological anthropology, there is a fair bit more science.

However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis.

The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a dependent and independent variable.

It's the difference between running a/b testing and going out and talking with your customers. Going out to talk with your customers is essentially applied anthropology - the methods are the same.

(source: my husband is a cultural anthropologist and I've been in countless conversations regarding Anthropology and science.)

> The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a dependent and independent variable.

This only holds if you have a really strict and useless definition of science. If I told you I had hardware and simulation software, and you fed it in a lot of historical information, and it then simulated the results that best fit with its best attempt to cross-validate it against more recent and better known events, we might reasonably say "yeah that sounds like a scientific approach, we are using different sets of data, even though lots of it is imperfect, to make inference by exploiting common human processes across time"

But if I tell you that piece of hardware is the human brain, for some reason people change their view, it becomes 'qualitative' and 'non-scientific.' Which only really holds if you have a mystical view of the human brain which puts it in its own class as distinct from any other piece of computational machinery used in scientific inference.

Having purely qualitative variables does not render science impossible, it just means you’re dealing with probabilistic inference, so you need more data points or a more powerful theory. Macroeconomics has a relatively tiny data set, only one world and ~200 economies with at most 2,000 years of data and they know plenty, scientifically.

Either anthropologists are making theories about the world which are in principle testable, in which case they’re doing science, though it can’t possibly measure up to the standards of proof of physics or they’re just story telling.

Consider this argument:

"political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices." -Saba Mahmood

So, that's a lot of jargon, but let's simplify it. As Americans, we all understand secularism as "the separation of church and state." However, Mahmood is saying that doesn't quite cover it. We can look at different countries that all call themselves secular and that there are interesting interrelations with religion. Instead, she argued, that secularism is the government saying where religion can (and cannot) interact with the public sphere. (This is super simplified, mind you.)

Well, that's a testable hypothesis, but how? Well, Mahmood had an original question: when she was doing fieldwork with Coptic Christians in Egypt, she was wondering why it was not cast in terms of minority rights. In Egypt; Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all were proponents of secularism yet questions of Copts and Muslims were considered attacks to nationalist unity. Well, is that a violation of the purity of secularism, or is it that secularism isn't quite what it seemed? We can look at Turkey and secularism as well - They are secular under the French consideration of Laïcité (Laiklik in Turkish) and yet they had a ministry in the government that certified Imams and provided for the upkeep of the mosques.

So they're not Secularist. But then, what of France, which may be considered one of the most strict adherents. but even then, schools follow the Christian liturgical year, including breaks for Christmas and Easter. Yet the government owns most old church buildings in France and pays for its maintenance, and there are clear governmental preferences of Christianity over Islam.

And how about the United states, where it opens with a prayer, most often by a Christian?

So, then, we have a lot of data, but it is data that is talking about the definition of a word. Who cares about a definition? Well, that definition tells us a lot about the cultures of the US, France, Turkey, and Egypt (among others - see India) but it's not exactly a testable hypothesis. It's closer to what a philosopher does than a Sociologist. ____

But even then, what if it was "just story telling?" Anthropologists have helped to elucidate cultures not our own and referencing what makes them common and different. I argue that that is inherently valuable.

> However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis.

You can't evaluate any hypothesis, but you can evaluate a lot of using natural experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment.

Inability to make controlled experiments certainly makes science harder but you can still test scientific hypotheses. Cosmology and astrophysics are very much sciences.

Like social “science” they want the veneer of science to make it easier to peddle their desired public policies.

That is the exact opposite of the problem here. (Cultural) Anthropology doesn’t want to be a science and its professional association doesn’t support people who do. Political Scientists and Economists do their best with very messy data and extremely limited ability to do experiments to do science, and sociology researchers mostly do the same though there is a greater continent of “scholar-activists” and faculty outside research universities have lots of plain activists with Ph.D.s.

Archaeologists, linguists, physical and biological anthropologists and a tiny minority of cultural anthropologists try to develop true, new knowledge about the world. They’re scientists as much as epidemiologists, geologists, cosmologists or anyone else who has lots of data, makes predictions and has a theory that can be falsified.

Social science is science, and anthropology can be too. Not everything is physics or chemistry.

Social science is science in the same way that bald is a hair color.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Come on. I have a B.A. in linguistics, which is a social science and, to be honest, is more empirically rigorous than some highly theoretical subfields of computer science. Skim through a syntax or phonology textbook if you ever get the chance. It's about as close to pure Karl Popper "philosophy of science" as you can get. And it's studying something very concrete: the human brain and its unique (as far as we know) capacity for language.

I’m thinking more of most of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_social_science

Most of those—e.g. psychology, a field which has led to significant improvements in well-being worldwide—have no political bent. If you want to criticize anthropology, say "anthropology", not "social science".

Meh. Economics is far more guilty of that than any of the other social sciences.

I'm not sure. Economics draws a lot of fire because it is more quantitative. Things that are measured are easier to track when something changes.

The more qualitative social sciences advocate for their policies using critiques of mores expressed in natural language, and this triggers behavioral change in a more subtle way. There is less of a "paper trail" to look back on, so it's hard to know how much something changed and how fast, or what caused the change.

Academically it would be very interesting to quantify the "memetic rate of change" triggered by introducing an argument into a population.

There haven’t been any “scholar-activist” heads of the AEA, have there, because there have been of the ASA.

Umm Milton Friedman in 1967?

Is it possible for anthropology to be a science the way we look at physics or chemistry? I'm not trying to bash anthropology, but I think we should be honest with what the "social sciences" really are. I personally don't think economics is a science, despite that being my field of focus. In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading.

But maybe we just have different definitions of science?

In my view, a discipline can embrace scientific methodology without reaching a maturity where it is capable of producing a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Then it's a science, albeit not a particularly successful one. Scientific methodology does not guarantee success. Even in physics, some research programs fail to produce results.

Now of course that leaves open the question of how to classify a discipline that has gone on for 50-100 years, happily filling the journals with results, while producing no such knowledge base.

If we look at anthropology the same way we look at physics or chemistry, then the challenge to scientific pursuit becomes clear: complexity.

What I mean is, if we consider a human society from a strictly physical perspective, the number of fundamental particle interactions that make up that society are far too high to analyze or simulate numerically.

Same with chemistry: the number and variety of chemical reactions that occur within all of the human bodies of, say, Tahiti, is way beyond our ability to directly analyze or simulate computationally.

Heck, just going from quantum mechanics to chemistry exceeds our abilities in many cases. What we call chemistry strictly emerges from quantum mechanics, but we can only use QM to directly analyze only the most simple chemical reactions.

Then animal biology emerges from chemistry, then anthropology is one discipline that attempts to study the interactions of a particular set of a particular type of animals within an environment.

At each step along this ladder we have had to develop new techniques to analyze systems that are too complex to directly analyze with techniques from the previous step.

So from this perspective, the issue is not that anthropology is not a science, the issue is that the scientific challenge is so huge that we don't have many useful results yet. It's so huge we might never have results that are as clear and easy to understand as physics and chemistry.

> In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading.

Science does not require the ability to run controlled experiments; observing existing natural processes can provide evidence to support or refute hypotheses.

If epidemiology, geology or cosmology is a science so is economics.

Geology and cosmology don't change because you talk about how you think they work. Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. It's not the same.

> Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared.

Mercantilism didn't disappear, it just became less dominant. It's still around, and still sometimes ends up being the philosophy that drives policy, though we tend to call it by other names. “Protectionism” is a manifestation of mercantilism, as is worry over trade deficits.

Mercantilism isn't a predictive theory of how economics works, it's a public (economic) policy framework. Smith talking about how he thought that economy worked didn't make mercantilism less dominant, him proposing alternative policy based on that description did, though.

As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.

But there are elements, molecules and chemical reactions that may not have existed or occurred until chemistry determined it was possible.

> As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.

But there's a whole lot of how people react to what they see in rocks that did. Predictive economics (the science) produces change in economic policy, in the same way that all science effects how people react to events in the domain of that science.

Humanities are just different from other sciences because the study of humanities causes humans as a mass to behave differently. In other sciences, we are the agents who cause things to happen and observe the results. In humanities, we are both the agents and the patients and we react based on what we learn.

Put it this way, if economics was a regular science, you could make a theory of the stock market and predict prices with the same accuracy as a rocket's trajectory or a chemical reaction or the weather. Because it's not a regular science, what happens when you predict stock prices is that the prices change to factor in the predictions!

Does that speak poorly of anthropologists or of "science"?

Lately I've been thinking that economists tend towards libertarianism because their discipline leads them to understand the beauty of the free market etc. whereas anthropologists tend towards anarchism because any serious study of human organization reveals there's no one right way to do it.

The difference between "anthropology" and "sociology" is not easy to defend except as a historical accident, and anthropology was certainly used as a tool for colonial control, but I do think it has developed a certain liberatory power. The only way to find a more just way to organize the world is to look at the different ways it has been done by groups before and see if we can bring any of those into practice today.

Feynman speaks of "Cargo Cult Science" in 1974:

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com