1101
Polisci
(mander.xyz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
1101 points (99.3% liked)
Science Memes
10377 readers
2775 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Physics majors have every right to dunk on polisci. Too many majors throw around the word "science" to try to give their made-up voodoo legitimacy.
Political Science is the study of political systems and behaviours employing the scientific method. It's a sub field of social science and a very new one, at less than 150 years old. Political philosophy is of course much older.
Really? They have control groups? Blind and A/B testing? Hypothesis that they set out to reject?
I'm sure they have methods but are they scientific?
The answer to all your questions are
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes - Whatever goes against my political allegiances.
Yes - They all just have an n < 50.
The issue with considering these to be anything like the 'hard sciences' is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.
God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It's important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don't get me wrong, but they're pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.
Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.
Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven't been falsified.
Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.
And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that's completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It's not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.
Emergence in action.
Wdym
Emergence. As in when something becomes greater than the sum of it's parts. Sapience. Life. Consciousness.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=16W7c0mb-rE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UebSfjmQNvs
Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.
Isn't one of the point of all those telescopes we built in space and on earth to prove or disprove our hypothesis regarding astronomy? Is that not experimentation?
No, it's observation. An experiment involves manipulating an independent variable while controlling other variables. There's none of that in space, not counting the ISS and Apollo. That said, you can still test hypotheses using observation. And that's equally true in both astronomy and in social sciences.
You make those claims without ever having looked into polisci studies. Not really looking to reject your own hypothesis.
Yea computer "science"? Bitch you mean programming?
Depends. A proper computer science course is basically math with machines. At the highest level, it may have zero programming at all, and the machines in question are entirely abstract.
Software Engineering is, well, engineering (setting aside the whole debate on what makes a "real" engineer).
It used to be that universities crammed both under "computer science", and you had to look at the curriculum to figure out which one they were actually teaching. They tend to separate the two more clearly these days. Neither is really "science" in the strictest sense, but the term stuck now.
so computer engineering?
No, the machines tend to be abstract. Such as an infinite paper tape that can manipulate symbols.
That experiment must be ludicrously expensive
This just in: theoretical physicists are not scientists.
No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.
When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.
Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.
No, that's machines with math
Think of it more like programming without electricity.
That's why informatics is by far the superior term. Computer science is such a boring terms anyways, you don't call maths "number science", biology "living beings science " or chemistry "atoms science" either.
All of thoose are different. Computer science, computer engineering, software angineering and informatics are all different conceptually
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics
^From the same link. Central notion is transformation of information
Now,
Also
Yeah, polisci has gotten as far as the "observation" part of science and kinda has to stop there for moral reasons.
What's voodoo about political science?
“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That's pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
Same thing astronomy did.
Astronomy has roughly a 400 year head start on most of these. Thousands of years if you're counting astrology (which was good observations mixed together with nonsense).
That's irrelevant. Astronomy and polsci can both only test their hypotheses through observation.
And Astronomy has had much, much longer to make those observations. They can also gather potentially millions of data points instead of five.
All the zombies
only a self inflated STEM-oid would take a joke in the OP and use it to delegitmamize an entire field of science based on vibes
having a BA in physics doesnt make you able to disprove social sciences, dont be like bobby fischer.