Even though individuals display strong correlations between their verbal/writing and quantitive GRE scores, Razib Khan observes that the average GRE scores by intended major show little correlation. Khan also notes:
I think you guys are in the minority. Some years ago I visited an old friend in Amherst for her fiftieth birthday, and she took me on a tour of used bookstores, knowing my tastes. I was really struck by one of them that had an entire wall of literary criticism—because about a third were Marxist and another third were psychoanalytic, at a ballpark guess. I remember feeling a moment of nausea, and thinking, "Don't you people realize that neither of those theories has had the slightest claim to be valid description of human beings or human societies for at least half a century?"
It would be more useful if we had a chart that treated at least economics separately from the other social sciences, which share its statistical methods but don't seem to have converged as strongly on theoretical models; and that treated philosophy and linguistics separately from the other "humanities" fields.
I'm not seeing how you define the two orthogonal axes. The first is philosophy/economics/computer science/mathematics/physics versus what? And what are the opposite poles of the second? I'm not sure how to interpret "living vs. dead."
Hey, what about us humanities folk who use evolutionary biology? Yes, we typically go through evolutionary psychology to get there, but some of us use biology. More, those who look for patterns in texts have to use computer science. Where's the link there? And there a few of us who use fractal geometry too. I know there are only a few of us, but shouldn't that get us at least a dim line?
I think there's only one main dimension. Simple vs. Complex. tracked by Near vs. Far respectively. Since simple is amenable to logic chopping, and complex best handled by feature detection. Note that this is wrt. methodology, not subject matter. Dead vs. living also correlates because the dead tends to be simple, and the living complex.
BTW It seems obvious to me that the social sciences and humanities are not marginalized.
Could you elaborate?
Due to the nature of funding, the experimental sciences get much more public money and, therefore, attention from the university. Graduate students in the hard science generally get their education for free (either through fellowships or greatly subsidized TA-ships) but the humanities students pay tens of thousands of dollars, which doubtlessly lowers the quality of both the graduates and the research students conduct on behalf of their professors.
-economics of information-user experience-law and privacy-information and organizations-concept modeling, knowledge management (also Semantic Web / linked data)-information systems architectures, design
All of these have much more "two-way" collaborative flows than simply social scientists leaching off of computer sciences. In these issues social science methods and perspectives are equally important.
Simple model. Every field is dominated by people about 2 standard deviations smarter than its least intelligent members. Anyone beyond that is likely to have standards for work high enough to antagonize its median member. The fields where the highest levels of intelligence are required to participate at all will therefore be dominated by smarter people (even if in absolute numbers there are more people of any given level of intelligence in larger fields like biology and psychology). The dominant figures in a field determine what that field's participants spend their time reading and what experiments they do, and thus the attractiveness of the field to smart people.
All of academia is far mode. History is about as near-mode as academia gets and about as far mode as normal people get.
BTW It seems obvious to me that the social sciences and humanities are not marginalized.
The most interesting fields will have the highest number of applicants, and will thus be able to be more selective. So it makes sense that the most interesting fields will have people with higher GRE scores.
You'll see the same thing in the military. IIRC, infantry is the highest demand (!) in army, so for the slots that are awarded purely on merit, you'll have the highest IQ members in infantry.
The CS-SS link is mostly a one way link of SS people needing CS people to do their work, but CS people don't really need SS people much, other than a few areas like social networking.
...I know many journals in Econ that probably have never cited anything in another SS let alone the Humanities. Citations of mathematics and statistics are far more common than of cultural anthropology, X studies, etc.
I suspect you'd see a similar lack of cross-citation if you looked at a journal of X studies.
Same topic, more funny version ...
http://xkcd.com/793/
Perhaps the center of the ring is the all-encompassing "science of everything" that we are too stupid to wrap our minds around.
I think you guys are in the minority. Some years ago I visited an old friend in Amherst for her fiftieth birthday, and she took me on a tour of used bookstores, knowing my tastes. I was really struck by one of them that had an entire wall of literary criticism—because about a third were Marxist and another third were psychoanalytic, at a ballpark guess. I remember feeling a moment of nausea, and thinking, "Don't you people realize that neither of those theories has had the slightest claim to be valid description of human beings or human societies for at least half a century?"
It would be more useful if we had a chart that treated at least economics separately from the other social sciences, which share its statistical methods but don't seem to have converged as strongly on theoretical models; and that treated philosophy and linguistics separately from the other "humanities" fields.
I'm not seeing how you define the two orthogonal axes. The first is philosophy/economics/computer science/mathematics/physics versus what? And what are the opposite poles of the second? I'm not sure how to interpret "living vs. dead."
I too was thinking that this graph was missing some nodes between math and infectious disease epidemiology and ecology.
Hey, what about us humanities folk who use evolutionary biology? Yes, we typically go through evolutionary psychology to get there, but some of us use biology. More, those who look for patterns in texts have to use computer science. Where's the link there? And there a few of us who use fractal geometry too. I know there are only a few of us, but shouldn't that get us at least a dim line?
Reminds me of the hierarchy of the sciences, whose position predicts the frequency with which negative results are published.
I think there's only one main dimension. Simple vs. Complex. tracked by Near vs. Far respectively. Since simple is amenable to logic chopping, and complex best handled by feature detection. Note that this is wrt. methodology, not subject matter. Dead vs. living also correlates because the dead tends to be simple, and the living complex.
BTW It seems obvious to me that the social sciences and humanities are not marginalized.
Could you elaborate?
Due to the nature of funding, the experimental sciences get much more public money and, therefore, attention from the university. Graduate students in the hard science generally get their education for free (either through fellowships or greatly subsidized TA-ships) but the humanities students pay tens of thousands of dollars, which doubtlessly lowers the quality of both the graduates and the research students conduct on behalf of their professors.
Humanities are now seeing rapidly increasing links with Computer Science. The field of "digital humanities" is growing fast.
Well, there are issues like:
-economics of information-user experience-law and privacy-information and organizations-concept modeling, knowledge management (also Semantic Web / linked data)-information systems architectures, design
All of these have much more "two-way" collaborative flows than simply social scientists leaching off of computer sciences. In these issues social science methods and perspectives are equally important.
Simple model. Every field is dominated by people about 2 standard deviations smarter than its least intelligent members. Anyone beyond that is likely to have standards for work high enough to antagonize its median member. The fields where the highest levels of intelligence are required to participate at all will therefore be dominated by smarter people (even if in absolute numbers there are more people of any given level of intelligence in larger fields like biology and psychology). The dominant figures in a field determine what that field's participants spend their time reading and what experiments they do, and thus the attractiveness of the field to smart people.
All of academia is far mode. History is about as near-mode as academia gets and about as far mode as normal people get.
BTW It seems obvious to me that the social sciences and humanities are not marginalized.
The most interesting fields will have the highest number of applicants, and will thus be able to be more selective. So it makes sense that the most interesting fields will have people with higher GRE scores.
You'll see the same thing in the military. IIRC, infantry is the highest demand (!) in army, so for the slots that are awarded purely on merit, you'll have the highest IQ members in infantry.
The CS-SS link is mostly a one way link of SS people needing CS people to do their work, but CS people don't really need SS people much, other than a few areas like social networking.
No link between neuroscience and computer science?
Arguably there's a pretty big divide within SS...
...I know many journals in Econ that probably have never cited anything in another SS let alone the Humanities. Citations of mathematics and statistics are far more common than of cultural anthropology, X studies, etc.
I suspect you'd see a similar lack of cross-citation if you looked at a journal of X studies.