Over at Scientific American Blogs Maria Konnikova posts Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one. The whole write-up leaves me scratching my head, because I don’t really get what the whole point of all the prose is. This is a thesis that is as old as 19th century romantics, and not all too complicated. The author herself has an academic webpage which indicates she works within an analytic framework that’s anything but “soft.” There are huge confusions with terminology, and Jerry Coyne has a response which addresses many of my questions (e.g., what exactly is the alternative to doing statistical tests in psychology? Rely on the impressions and intuition of the researchers and just trust them?). But let me highlight one section:
… Societal conventions change. And is today’s real-world social network really comparable on any number of levels to one, say, a thousand, or even five or one hundred years ago?
Yes, today’s real-world social network probably is comparable to those of the past. There is some science on this issue. Not even rocket science with abstruse statistics. Science which is highly relevant today. Question science, and it may surprise you with what it …