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Serious Social Science (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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I once attended a psychology lecture in which the speaker argued that Freud was really a brilliant psychologist, but the field had passed him by because of its “physics envy”. His specific example is perhaps easy to mock, but it has resonance because the problem is a real one. As Paul Graham shows, in general physicists are smarter than social scientists. But (to use a Grahamism), like kids trying to act adult, the social scientists end up emulating the form of these fields but not the content. In other words, instead of getting smarter, they play make-believe. The first thing that comes is the numbers. Real science papers are filled with tables and graphs and regressions on piles of data, so the social scientists decide to do all that. In economics, they even go so far as to start coming up with equations and proving theorems. Then comes the technical language. Physics papers discuss the “gravitational wave perturbations about a brane cosmology embedded in a five-dimensional anti-de S

Serious Social Science (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz Serious Social Science I once attended a psychology lecture in which the speaker argued that Freud was really a brilliant psychologist, but the field had passed him by because of its “physics envy”. His specific example is perhaps easy to mock, but it has resonance because the problem is a real one. As Paul Graham shows , in general physicists are smarter than social scientists. But (to use a Grahamism), like kids trying to act adult, the social scientists end up emulating the form of these fields but n

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