For me, the year’s best reading is usually the many thoughtful answers to The Edge‘s annual question. This year they ask: What have you changed your mind about? Why? I’d love to hang out with these folks, so maybe I should audition. My answer:
I find it altogether delightful that, after reading to the bottom of the comments, not one person has managed to provide an actual example of something social scientists know.
Doug S,check outhttp://terranova.blogs.com/If that doesn't answer questions about how much economists care about such experiments, how hard they are to do, etc, you could ask the people there.
Doug, the reason it is hard to experiment on people is expense: people care what happens to them, and so must be paid to accept random things happening. This is just as true online as offline.
Seems to me that some people will pay to have random things happen; consider the popularity of gambling. ;) An MMORPG is a game, and "random" things are expected to happen at the whim of the game designers. They're called "events." Remember Corrupted Blood? That was an accident, but it was still the kind of thing that many players find interesting. In order to perform experiments using an MMORPG as a laboratory, one simply has to secure the cooperation of the game designers, as they would (presumably) veto anything that would make the game significantly worse for players. Furthermore, MMORPGs even offer the ability to run a controlled experiment; popular MMORPGs consist of several independent "servers" that are theoretically identical except for the players and their actions; one can designate one server to be an experimental group and another server to be a control group.
I suppose there are plenty of obstacles involved, but getting a game designer to agree to change an aspect of an MMORPG should be easier (and less dangerous) than getting the Federal Reserve to do the same thing. ;) If economics is important (and I think it is) then wouldn't the ability to do controlled experiments on the scale of actual economies be worth investing a small fraction of the money spent on, say, building better particle accelerators?
I skipped the comments section since this should be a no brainer. An effective social science is the end of any individuals creativity, conscience or worth. Only by destroying their (they being: governments, academics, corporations or your family) models do we as people effect change in our living conditions. I'm talking history people, recent history, how about the polling failure in New Hampshire for example. Always lie to pollsters, sleep with inappropriate people, be unexpected and then try to take over the world. I do love my physics and computer science but never ever confuse them with real life.
20 years from now, the public schools in Compton, CA will have lower average test scores than the public schools in Beverly Hills, CA.
Your claim is about as scientific as me saying 'the sun will rise tomorrow, and that's physics' (and not saying anything else).
Just because you're saying something about the world that's probably right, doesn't make it science. I'm sure you would get 85% right, but without empirical data to support your claim, it's just pattern recognition and guesswork. I could predict the rising of the sun every day until the end of the world, but unless I think about gravitation and make some measurements, I'm not doing The Science Thing.
What you say plays into the hands of those who would claim that social science isn't science at all.
Here's a social science prediction bet that we won't have to wait 20 years to see if I'm right.
Take all the public schools in California.
Give me the racial makeup of two schools picked at random. Don't tell me the name of the the schools or where they are located or anything else. I'll tell you which school has higher average test scores on the state exam. We'll do it for 100 random pairs of schools and I'll be right for at least 85 pairs.
Anybody want to bet?
If making accurate predictions is the essence of science, then this is science. But people don't like their social science to be that depressing and boring.
I'm not a social scientist, but I can play one on the Internet.
In defense of social science, it's actually quite easy to make social science predictions that come true. Here's one: 20 years from now, the public schools in Compton, CA will have lower average test scores than the public schools in Beverly Hills, CA.
Anybody want to bet against me?
I've got a million social science predictions, all just as depressing and boring as that one.
So, the social sciences have discovered lots and lots of stuff, it's just stuff nobody wants to hear.
Nadim, Caledonian, most of the left-wing social scientists in my experience favor a market economy with substantial redistribution.
So they've abandoned the idea of founding an economy on their economic ideas and just want to graft their programs onto a supporting capitalistic base?
What does this movement from communistic principles suggest to you? (Better question: what does it suggest to a reasonable person?)
Nadim, Caledonian, most of the left-wing social scientists in my experience favor a market economy with substantial redistribution. There are some out-and-out Marxists (including some out-and-out Marxist economists), but most don't want to abolish private property and so forth. But this is very casual empiricism.
Doug, the reason it is hard to experiment on people is expense: people care what happens to them, and so must be paid to accept random things happening. This is just as true online as offline.
It seems to me that MMORPGs could make amazing laboratories for economists. An MMORPG has a mostly self-contained economy that can be manipulated in all sorts of ways that real-world economies cannot be, and they exhibit characteristics of real-world economies, such as inflation. Robin, you're an economist: if someone tried to do a Ph.D thesis on the macroeconomics of World of Warcraft, how would other academics tend to react?
What happened to those far-left economists you were talking about? Perhaps you say "far-left", you mean something totally different than everyone else.
Paul G.: Can you provide sources for the statement "The vast majority of left-wing social scientists don't want to take away the whole market economy"? Thanks.
Caledonian: no, but I don't have to. The vast majority of left-wing social scientists don't want to take away the whole market economy, so you're attacking a strawman.
Social Scientists Know Lots
Niice.
I find it altogether delightful that, after reading to the bottom of the comments, not one person has managed to provide an actual example of something social scientists know.
Doug S,check outhttp://terranova.blogs.com/If that doesn't answer questions about how much economists care about such experiments, how hard they are to do, etc, you could ask the people there.
Doug, the reason it is hard to experiment on people is expense: people care what happens to them, and so must be paid to accept random things happening. This is just as true online as offline.
Seems to me that some people will pay to have random things happen; consider the popularity of gambling. ;) An MMORPG is a game, and "random" things are expected to happen at the whim of the game designers. They're called "events." Remember Corrupted Blood? That was an accident, but it was still the kind of thing that many players find interesting. In order to perform experiments using an MMORPG as a laboratory, one simply has to secure the cooperation of the game designers, as they would (presumably) veto anything that would make the game significantly worse for players. Furthermore, MMORPGs even offer the ability to run a controlled experiment; popular MMORPGs consist of several independent "servers" that are theoretically identical except for the players and their actions; one can designate one server to be an experimental group and another server to be a control group.
I suppose there are plenty of obstacles involved, but getting a game designer to agree to change an aspect of an MMORPG should be easier (and less dangerous) than getting the Federal Reserve to do the same thing. ;) If economics is important (and I think it is) then wouldn't the ability to do controlled experiments on the scale of actual economies be worth investing a small fraction of the money spent on, say, building better particle accelerators?
I skipped the comments section since this should be a no brainer. An effective social science is the end of any individuals creativity, conscience or worth. Only by destroying their (they being: governments, academics, corporations or your family) models do we as people effect change in our living conditions. I'm talking history people, recent history, how about the polling failure in New Hampshire for example. Always lie to pollsters, sleep with inappropriate people, be unexpected and then try to take over the world. I do love my physics and computer science but never ever confuse them with real life.
Steve,
20 years from now, the public schools in Compton, CA will have lower average test scores than the public schools in Beverly Hills, CA.
Your claim is about as scientific as me saying 'the sun will rise tomorrow, and that's physics' (and not saying anything else).
Just because you're saying something about the world that's probably right, doesn't make it science. I'm sure you would get 85% right, but without empirical data to support your claim, it's just pattern recognition and guesswork. I could predict the rising of the sun every day until the end of the world, but unless I think about gravitation and make some measurements, I'm not doing The Science Thing.
What you say plays into the hands of those who would claim that social science isn't science at all.
Here's a social science prediction bet that we won't have to wait 20 years to see if I'm right.
Take all the public schools in California.
Give me the racial makeup of two schools picked at random. Don't tell me the name of the the schools or where they are located or anything else. I'll tell you which school has higher average test scores on the state exam. We'll do it for 100 random pairs of schools and I'll be right for at least 85 pairs.
Anybody want to bet?
If making accurate predictions is the essence of science, then this is science. But people don't like their social science to be that depressing and boring.
I'm not a social scientist, but I can play one on the Internet.
In defense of social science, it's actually quite easy to make social science predictions that come true. Here's one: 20 years from now, the public schools in Compton, CA will have lower average test scores than the public schools in Beverly Hills, CA.
Anybody want to bet against me?
I've got a million social science predictions, all just as depressing and boring as that one.
So, the social sciences have discovered lots and lots of stuff, it's just stuff nobody wants to hear.
I don't know Caledonian, you're a reasonable person, and I'm obviously not, so why keep me in suspense?
Nadim, Caledonian, most of the left-wing social scientists in my experience favor a market economy with substantial redistribution.
So they've abandoned the idea of founding an economy on their economic ideas and just want to graft their programs onto a supporting capitalistic base?
What does this movement from communistic principles suggest to you? (Better question: what does it suggest to a reasonable person?)
Nadim, Caledonian, most of the left-wing social scientists in my experience favor a market economy with substantial redistribution. There are some out-and-out Marxists (including some out-and-out Marxist economists), but most don't want to abolish private property and so forth. But this is very casual empiricism.
Doug, the reason it is hard to experiment on people is expense: people care what happens to them, and so must be paid to accept random things happening. This is just as true online as offline.
It seems to me that MMORPGs could make amazing laboratories for economists. An MMORPG has a mostly self-contained economy that can be manipulated in all sorts of ways that real-world economies cannot be, and they exhibit characteristics of real-world economies, such as inflation. Robin, you're an economist: if someone tried to do a Ph.D thesis on the macroeconomics of World of Warcraft, how would other academics tend to react?
What happened to those far-left economists you were talking about? Perhaps you say "far-left", you mean something totally different than everyone else.
Paul G.: Can you provide sources for the statement "The vast majority of left-wing social scientists don't want to take away the whole market economy"? Thanks.
Caledonian: no, but I don't have to. The vast majority of left-wing social scientists don't want to take away the whole market economy, so you're attacking a strawman.