I have an MA in economics and an MBA so this is a topic of interest to me. Noting that, there is merit in the argument that thousands of economists failed to see the 2008 financial crisis. As such, that does speak to weaknesses of economics as a discipline. And in effect, other social sciences. There are limits to what social scientists can and can't do. Social scientists can't do experiments like physicists and, in general, create rules or laws. The late physicist Richard Feynman made that criticism. There is video on RU-vid with Feynman speaking on this. However, here are some weaknesses I see in Epstein' s arguments: 1. He took one year of journal articles for his study to debunk the social sciences. Not impressed as a sample size. 2. Economists and historians have written great literature on various topics that are insightful. But business and political leaders aren't necessarily listening or care. People read less today. 3. The speaker almost imagines a world where business and political leaders are sitting at their desks waiting for social scientists to save them. Sorry. That isn't the real world. 4. Even if these improvements were made in the social sciences, greed, fear and power will always impact leadership choices. That means the improvements he advocates may not help since they may contradict these motives. These forces always impact decisions in institutions. 5. His talk gets very convoluted and excessively abstract. That leaves me skeptical. To invoke physicist Richard Feynman, solutions should be simple. 6. You still have to sell your ideas. Even if his improvements are made in these disciplines, doesn't mean business, non-profit and political leaders can or will buy in.
Alex Plotkin: Your criticism hits home at #4, where you talk about greed. It seems to me that we would need departments of 'Greed' to explain the social and economic worlds we inhabit. Or maybe just departments of 'Corruption."
First of all, the biological facts were almost all wrong. The cornea is made of cells and bones are made of cells (medical student here). Different tissues have a different cellular density, but that doesn't negate that cells ARE the structural and functional units, because the substances around the cells keeping them together are synthesized and secreted BY those cells. "Made by cells" doesn't mean "it only has cells", and anybody who understands it that way simply shouldn't be talking about biology, much less using it as an example. Aside from the fact that the example was wrong, it seems even the point trying to be made by that example is also wrong. Are we re-inventing the wheel? Seriously, is it being claimed here that in social sciences no one has ever asked these questions? How do the individuals think or how do their interactions work? The problem is, figuring out how brains work is hard, so while neuroscience gets to learn more about that, we're left studying the descriptive side. The more we learn about the brain, the more we will be answering the ontological questions. Otherwise, we would just be making things up. Additionally, social sciences clash with politics. The idea that "nobody saw the crisis coming" is absolutely ridiculous. Of course, many did. I can see how someone might think that, if they only get their economic news from their TV. This is a very over-simplified description, quite naive both about natural and about social sciences. What did we learn? That social sciences are hard and complex and we should try harder to understand them. Was there someone who didn't know that?
Freedom of own interpetition N expressing it is interesting in social scientific perspective, don't u think? Shit is reported W various resemblance N accuracy to any referred matter of if so in fact... Being as.. Ever such... It's South Park news or social sciences statistics stuff of interaction patterns shaping N aping N coping counter chain reaction ongoing as we speak... Yeah. N Then the numbers I realLy don't knoooowww.. But,... Hey... U wanna a a hear latest reports on what researchers studies showed?
+warfire101 Thank you, I was pretty surprised by this talk. Only people who know nothing about science would find it insightful. +Nimi I'm also not sure I understand what you're saying. Maybe you can elaborate?
"The stakes are huge in the social sciences." Yes they are. Basically the whole world, as humans experience it. It will be the greatest achievement of science.
A social scientist (anthropologist) named Gillian Tett predicted the financial crisis and wrote a best selling book about it called Fool's Gold. And many social science perspectives, like Actor Network Theory, decentralize human beings and social systems. Even old fashioned American anthropology was founded as a holistic field of study. There's more to social science than economics and social network theory.
THANK YOU ! It's just what I asked him... "What is a social science for you? I am a social anthropologist. As such, what is a group, what is a culture, what is a blockchain, and so on are genuinly what we study..."
Hey I'm a first year anthropology student and I really enjoy the course! I'm still insecure about career opportunities so how did you guys make a career with an anthropology degree?
Why are the social sciences failing? First of all we aren't, and second, you try making substantial policy changes whilst being constrained by working within a pre-existing hegemonic governmental system.
"What is IT" vs "How does IT work" question? I guess he mean social science (in the sense of theories of modeling society and economy, and maybe more) should be more like mathematics or at least theoretical physics. Mathematicians define a lot of mathematical structures, such as group, ring, topology, manifold, etc (defining the IT). Then they try to derive theorems from the definitions that was proposed (how the IT works). Then they use these collections of definitions+theorems, which we can call a "theory", to model some other mathematical (and not so mathematical) entities. For example, a mathematical analyst "modeling" a subset of function space as a countably infinite dimensional vector space, and a theoretical physicist (they can be pretty close to a mathematician, if not one themselves) modelling space-time with theory of geometric manifolds. Similarly, social science should define more structures (the WHAT is it question) and less mechanism/process (the HOW does it work question). Actually if you define a structure "properly", that is answering the WHAT question in a very "nice" way, the HOW will follows naturally without much thought in the form of mathematical theorems with easy proofs (Spivak's hard definitions easy theorems). At least that's the stereotype of a mathematical genius' work (Ask your local mathematician about this). Ultimately, the message is probably to ask social scientists to examine their traditional assumptions more rigorously, and see if they miss something when using those traditional assumptions. And more importantly, to be more brave in proposing new models and assumptions even when those new ones look pretty far away and strange (even weird!!) when compared to traditional ones (Redefinition can happen often in mathematics, and the newest definition can look pretty strange and alien to the traditional “more intuitive” definition). Disclaimer: I'm not a social scientist, so there might be implicit misunderstanding about social science coming from myself.
I'm a social scientist. So you're halfway there. We still have to focus on processes too. Increasingly there has been a move for mixed research methodology. Specifically using bother qualitative and quantitative methodologies. With fields like Data Science. I think there is a job market out there now for Social Scientists willing to pick up quantitative methodologies and theories, and are willing to learn how to code and gain an understanding in computer science.
This is an interesting comment, let me add some thoughts. I'm a sociologist ("social scientist" is just too vague, there are way many isolated traditions in what we call SS) and have studied some economic theory and its historical development. What you say is what economists have tried to do to portray individual decision making: start with some basic assumptions about what reality contains (people make choices; these choices are done as to maximize a utility function; this utility function is tied to an internal preference scale; and others). They mathematized these assumptions (a process going as back as Bernoulli, Fermat and Pascal), and by modifying some assumptions and developing theorems they have now an enormous logically-connected theory (that sociology, anthropology, and others can only dream of). Now: - Epstein's critique is not really about that process, but regards the "taxonomy" (what we call "ontology" in Philosophy) assumed by a social-scientific theory. And his critique also applies to individual decision-making economics because the taxonomy (people and preference scales) is very simple, compared what for Epstein are relevant objects all in all. I wouldn't say I agree completely with him, but he is right in pointing out that SS is hard and in the dark ages, because... - Even a very good mathematization does not warrantee you'll have a good scientific theory. This is because empirical research cannot be done only on the grounds of deduction (e.g. proving theorems out of some set of axioms): you need a way to evaluate which formal (mathematical) model actually fits what you are empirically observing. So you need to agree in some methodology and sets of standards to discard the models and explanations that don't describe the reality of what you are studying, EVEN if what you are discarding is mathematically consistent. This issue is non trivial and FAR from settled in any of the SS. For me the big issue with decision-making economics is not a lack of mathematization or a lack of a poor ontology. Rather it is a lack of a methodology to approach reality and discard explanations when they don't work. Economists tend to disregard evidence that goes against their predictions and theorems, in what some external observers (e.g. from the natural sciences) call dogmatism rather than science. I think there is some truth in saying they are dogmatic, but a remark to consider is that we don't really have anything better so it's hard to give up the small amount of progress done. As he said, we are in the dark ages of SS. I think we will need a touch of Newton or Einstein level of genius in this if we are ever to really progress.
The topic is one of the main legs in my perspective about epistemology. I’m an economist by the way, but in my opinion and probably aligned with you guys is that there is a misconception on how to proceed in social science. Scientific method is an epistemological way to approach social science but the problem, like some of you said, is that economists get model oriented heads rather than hybrid one that can considered the common sense. They cannot consider social intuition into their models as soon as they need numbers (even for a qualitative description). Descriptions about the human nature are very complex in order to set a reductionist scientific model that hopefully and only hopefully could outperform by its own the big picture of the whole reality. Regards.
I am reading the fifth edition of Alex Rosenberg's Philosophy of Social Science and much of this book centers on this debate on the aim, scope, and purpose of the social sciences and the argument that progress is equated to predictive value.
I encourage the presenter to read sociological literature. We do exactly what he says social science doesn't do. In addition, the presenter should not generalize the social sciences.
That was terribly poor and speaks more to why some have a distaste for philosophy than it does of the shortcomings of the social sciences. He just took twenty minutes to explain that the social sciences are hard. What a shocker. One of the major flaws in his line of reasoning is that the ontology questions that he focuses on are also a function of the data being fed from the physical sciences. You can't complain that the social sciences are not trying to define the entities, without recognizing that the most central of things (the person and the brain of the person and how brains function in groups of brains) are not yet understood sufficiently in biology and neuroscience. Without a better understanding of the person, which is central to the social sciences, we will not adequately understand nor be able to predict how persons function in any given system. This was a facile argument which simply misrepresents the scientific disciplines and complexity involved. It also did not include even a basic understanding of ideas like emergence and convergence and the gaps in the physical sciences which are crucial inputs to the social sciences. Very disappointing.
Thanks for your very thought-provoking insight. Judging from the comments, you have stimulated very insightful and interesting debate - the very essence of scholarship.
Social sciences have many deficiencies but they are also based on cumulated knowledge. It takes time to learn about the weaknesses of studying society - whatever it may mean. One must gain a certain level of inter- and multi-disciplinary knowledge to reach the depth of social phenomena. For instance, the limits of language, limits of mathematics, etc. I am not impolite but this nice Professor has still to learn quite a lot. The directions of his studies are absolutely correct. Once mathematics, physics, etc. were regarded as "difficult" sciences. Social sciences based on storytelling were treated as "easy". Now we realize that situation is the opposite. As to understand society we have to know more about ourselves. And when we look at the status quo of knowledge about the human brain and cognitive processes, we can see that we are at the beginning of a long journey. Unfulfilled dreams of cybernetics, systems approach, etc. provide some valuable lessons.
A Markov boundary encompasses a context that's sufficient to predict the variance of a given agent who's situated within a network. There's no need to abandon the primacy of the individual.
Stanford? I apologize, maybe I didn't understand something. Regardless, I recommend the narrator a basic sociology textbook, particularly the structure / action chapter.
I think he might be talking about *economics* rather than sociology. His argument is probably more than economics should consume some concepts from sociology. I'm not that familiar about this sort of stuff, but I imagine he wants sociology with models and predictions... (if it does not exist laready)
I know very little about this, but he's not arguing that "what is it?" questions aren't studied at all in social science, but that they are studied a lot less. He shows a graph of, which questions articles in two journals answer at 4:19, though it is true he only showed this for two journals, so considering the social science journal he chose was an economic one, it could just be a problem in economics. You'd have to do a more comprehensive study to find out which fields are affected by the problem he describes.
Understanding the human psyche "perfect" actually requires an examination of the systemic dependencies that structure our reality. I basically agree with Epstein, but his notion of "anthropocentric" seems to be too narrow to me; he seems to think of rational actor theory (homo oeconomicus) and similar concepts from behaviourism and positivism, but psychology and psychoanalysis are way beyond this conception of psyche.
I get that things are complex but even the most complex thing has to fit with in the framework of reality or the best approximation if it which is hard science. I don't like seeing people denying the truth in pursuit of something that is socially acceptable or fit their narrative better.
It's hard to understand what he's getting at, but I think he's making a relevant point. I think what he's saying is that ... things are more complicated than they seem. I don't know I was following him at times and other times he lost me. Philosophers concern themselves with the "substance" of concepts, so to speak. So I believe what he's getting at is that our conceptualizations of many things are overly simplistic. We think the driving forces in the economy are people, when really the driving forces of people are extremely complicated in and of itself, therefore the driving forces of the economy can't be reduced to people. It's actually everything that goes into people. I think he's speaking about a need for a better integration of social sciences. Like when he said if you have that diagram of a business with the hierarchy of people, if you followed that in order to understand how a business works, all you have is people standing around at various business establishments. That's not a business. For some reason that's the considered the basics, the "definition" or concept of a company. A CEO with a board and a cfo, regional managers, employees, etc. And the driving forces are the relationships between these people. Not the layers beneath all those individual parts. Because after all his point was how we're failing at "what is it" questions, and as a result our "how it works" questions are suffering as well.
How can a study of human society not be anthropocentric?A society is nothing more than people interacting with each other on certain terms (usually laid out as a social contract). You can look at this as a simple binary. In the absense of those terms (or laws), we'd be living in what is the 'state of nature'. Because there are so many people in the world, these interactions manifest in very complicated ways- what the analogy of his bank statement presents. However, it was careless of him to pick up this complexity and use it to refute the idea that the same could solely be a product of mere human interactions- just because the former is so complicated and the latter easier to grasp. Its the equivalent of saying the forces of natural selection, genetic drift and mutation are too simple by themselves to be able to explain the complexity of life that we see around us.
Legitimation Code Theory? Actor-Network Theory? Marx's and Engels' materialist conception of history? Material conditions? What about node attributes in social network analysis? It's not necessarily 'just people'.
+Mathew Toll I can't believe he talked to an economist about the foundations of their analysis as 'just people' and they didn't turn around and say 'factors of production'? Thinking about sociology, a founding discussion is what is 'social' what is 'society'....it's a staple of intro week 1.
my 2 cents worth. The stuff he said although valid but the title is a attention grabbing clickbait. The stuff he said (what is it vs how is it) is nothing new. Good social scientist grapple with such issues all the time, and examine it in depth before launching into their research. Lastly, people have wrong expectations that social scientist are prophets. They are not allowed to make mistake. They are supposed to predict every problem which humanity's way. Ultimately, social scientist are not gods. They are also human beings. Like all human beings, biases and flawed data may interfere with analysis. Furthermore, social science is a branch of knowledge fragmented by many schools of thoughts. The first and foremost way to fix social science is to recognize that people who study it are neither prophets nor gods.
Social Scientists are increasing starting to dominate IT specifically Data Science and Data Engineering. Because it just isn't enough to know how to code in those fields. And PhDs in the Social and Political Sciences actually know what to do with the data. They know what questions to ask, and understand statistically modelling and how to relay that in a qualitative manner. Since companies want to increasingly automate. That automation has to actually work and stop operating within the literal sense. Social Sciences aren't dead. The problem right now are the institutions that don't prepare Social Scientists for this new world.
Social ”scientists” are Not starting to dominate in the field of data lol. And I mean, why would they? Since they lack all type of quantitative knowledge.
When I came across the title of Epstein's lecture, I must admit that as someone coming from the social sciences, I was let down initially but as I came to watch this video, I have come to the recognition that Epstein does make a valid point in as far as the social sciences are concerned. I mean where were the social sciences when the world experienced an economic meltdown in the late 2000s? I believe that Epstein's talk is a wake up call to us social scientists to make our knowledge relevant. I am a huge advocate of this approach. I feel that the social sciences have remained dormant in as application is concerned. The change starts with us.
Christine Lagarde said about american financial institutions "It was like a tsunami was coming and they arguing about the colour of the swimsuit to wear" ... 'nuff said.
Relevance and irrelevance is a matter of subjectivity. Relevant for who? The entire debates and dramas from the history of social sciences are a very useful lesson for long term policies, but, the kind of social scientist this man is proposing would be incapable of understand that amount of knowledge -he's proposing mere bureaucratic researchers, that will mostly rely on papers rather than books (that happens today yet).
I liked the intent behind the talk. Yes, social science often is not very scientific. Richard Feynman was right. The slight worry I have in this carefully explained logic of this talk is whether we are going back to reductionism. A lot of natural science is reductionist and that is also a problem. So I hope we do not go from one faulty understanding to another faulty understanding of the “what” questions. Quite a lot of bad theories emerge from relying on reductionism and our human need to have a deterministic explanation for all complex phenomena.
Epstein clearly needs a better understanding of "what social science is" before he can make any claims as to whether or not "social science works." This is one big straw man argument that equates all of social science with (a small handful of) micro-level theories of interpersonal interaction (e.g. rational choice theory, network theory).
I don't think he's actually saying the social sciences are dead or not working. I mean he's a philosopher of the social sciences at Tufts University with a PhD from Stanford. I doubt his whole argument is a strawman. I think what he's saying is that our conceptualizations of things are overly simple. It's like the example about a business he uses. For some reason our basic conceptualization or definition, or "what is it" for a business is a ceo, a cfo, cio, board, regional managers, employees, etc. If that was what a business was all you would have was people standing around at various business establishments. And it's when our what is it question like this one is insufficient that we struggle to understand how a business, or how an economy works; the "how it works" question (a lot of his examples have to do with people for this reason -- the driving forces in something aren't people standing around). In biology or something, we have less labels and categories and titles and more thorough definitions. I think it's in part because we're usually talking about things we can't really see. I can see how what he's saying can seem redundant, like that things are more complicated than they seem, thanks duh. But other times I was totally following him. I think it's hard to think about the relevance of what he's talking about, but if it's all you think about like he does, it's probably easier to understand it. I know there's already a field of social science or philosophy that studies money from a humanistic, holistic, psychological, sociological perspective, etc. I think what he's talking about is a need for a better integration, and a need to stop viewing it as "soft science," as if it should be influenced by intangibles and not cold hard facts and determinism. As a psychologist I can appreciate this, and is why I've always tried to distance myself from the "social science" label. I didn't perceive to this to be about rational choice theory or network theory (maybe a little bit in retrospect), but more broadly about something that to me seems like chaos theory. He's talking more about the determinism and causality of systems, like how something like "the mortgage crisis" isn't a sufficient answer to why the economy crashed. There are so many more layers of determinism that are equally important and in understanding how something like that arises. What was the political climate that led to the policies being in place that enabled this? What were the psychological incentives that caused people to both use and fall victim to this exploit? Were any of these culturally influenced? What are the fundamental qualities of this exploit (subprime mortgages) that caused the recession? Hindsight is 2020, part of his point was that in the weeks or months before the economic crash, nobody saw it coming. Next time it might not be a mortgage crisis, but because that was our fundamental answer for how this happened, we won't see the next thing coming. The same forces could be at work but be product of something superficially different. I'm sure the same mathematical processes that spiraled our economy into a recession or similarly destructive ones could take very different forms of economic "mechanical failures". This is why these superficial conceptualizations aren't sufficient.
I major in social sciences and I found nothing inconsistent in the first 4 minutes this is true. The huge problem of social sciences is that we don't ask the what is questions we go into automatic assumptions and pretend to know what these are rather than taking some time to actually what they are. We proceed to jump from step 1 to step 3 without taking step 2. Still to this day social sciences remain inconclusive in many of their assertions hence why the social sciences went to postmodernism the notion that there is no truth. It is truly the greatest failure but still, there is so much attractiveness with that field. Perhaps it's false hope but their uniqueness in combining anthropology, psychology, economics, political science, geography, sociology, and more was refreshing in its time. How they combine those things together to analyze the problems and find potential solutions to me personally can be quite breathtaking making one feel whole. However, it's clear there are clear problems within Social Science that one cannot ignore and that itself is a problem that needs to be solved.
@@CultofThings This just isn't the case, though. Sure there are various theories within each discipline that lives under the umbrella of the social sciences, and these theories address the questions they are answering with differing levels of complexity, but generally speaking the social sciences acknowledge the complexity and fluidity of our species and the institutions we produce. I'm studying sociology and anthropology, personally. In every sociocultural anthropology course I've taken, a central theme of the course has been that there are no completely right or wrong answers, and that things are always more nuanced than you think. A good social scientist isn't interested in finding a single answer or a clean-cut definition for a phenomenon. A good social scientist is interested in exploring s o m e of the possible causes for and solutions for different problems. A good social scientist wants to understand humans and human culture to the greatest degree possible while always keeping in mind that human behavior and society is far too complex and fluid to ever be pinned down by strict definitions or algorithmic prediction.
Legal scholars and practitioners of the new institutional economics devote substantial amounts of attention to precisely the kinds of questions that Professor Epstein claims are being overlooked by social scientists.
I'm very confused, I feel like he had an idea and then didn't present it well. How is "what is it" the right questions instead of how it works when looking at the human body. Some of it isn't cells, so that's what it is, but then what are they and how do they work if they aren't cells? I'm very confused what he's talking about
I have finally found my calling, i have been on the hunt for a career path for my school. So i was thinking of which work environment i was going to choose, and i wanted to enter a world that NEEDED my point of view needed my thoughts my feelings my mind. And bingo! I found it !
This guy right here in this context to its detriment oversimplifies, generalizes, and throws the entire social sciences under the bus. Now, I understand his frustration with economists who had not warned, and the models weren't adequate enough to see the crisis. He hasn't considered that it requires transparency, and accurate accounting and/or data to see what was going on in the financial/banking sector? The breakdown of the economy during 2008 happened at the heart of capitalism (capital markets) where the cop on the beat (regulators and enforcers) and policies matter. The heart (capital markets) in this analogy had a stroke, then a full-blown heart attack that shut down the entire body (economy). Plenty of fraudulent activity, and so forth also played a factor. And he acts as if many economists and educated folks didn't see it coming. Hello, Robert Shiller saw it coming and warned. There were plenty of whistleblowers, financiers, regulators, and others who were warning or trying to warn but to no avail--hello Brooksley Born anybody. While I like to see improvements in the social sciences, and it is good to criticize and have these kinds of conversations, I don't think it's in the Dark Ages, that's quite a crude way to put it. I think it progressed quite significantly since its origins with a few bumps down the road and setbacks, which is expected for any new discipline. The natural sciences have had a head start so it's not a fair comparison compared to a discipline that started post-enlightenment (but obviously takes inspiration and theories from as far back as antiquity). In addition, social sciences have more of an interpretive and subjective (qualitative) approach compared to the natural sciences (more of a " what is it" objective and reductive approach) which is quite different when studying history, society, and people. People are inherently flawed, and each of us is experiencing our own subjective life. But the story of consciousness, metaphysical, and theological questions is another topic altogether.
Not a whole lot of detail there, so it's hard to judge what's really going on. It is important to continually improve social science, but I think the assumption that we are not benefiting from them is wrong. Everything from election polling, to what kinds of teachers are better, to the effects of social policy, all these good jobs are being done without the benefit of a well thought out social ontology. There are very good books out there trying to solve these questions, thinking of what Searle is doing, and also the lectures of Robert Sapolsky. Dennett at your own tufts has also been doing some social philosophy on the sub-personal level. But, that is not the main thrust I realize. Most people at my local university are much more interested in improving public health, than researching the ontology of receipts. By the way, I think your very quick analysis of receipts there leaves something to be desired. For a relevant analysis, think of "interaction points", of the moment to moment actions. So, you need the physical bank terminal, the electronic systems and so on; but then to, you'd have to explain the computers programs instantiations of economic praxis and policy, which will not be identical to the law. Then there is the human side, with all the causal pathways to explore there, including; ideas about money, financial situation, hormone levels, demands made of him, wants and so on. The problem with such deep analyses is that; they are very rarely useful. What a person with 40$ probably needs from a sociologist is probably the knowledge of; where are the key institutions that will help me get a better job, therapy, family counseling, which party should I vote for, and perhaps, should I keep the friends I have; what will be the effect of exercise and so on.
In truth, when Hong Kong was 'returned back' to China by the British after 150 years, it triggered off A FINANCIAL CRISIS in 1997. From then, it spiralled 'once every decade or rather (decay)'. From 1997, 2007, 20..17, 18, 19(COVID).... .2027₩
It isn´t true that no one was warning about the collaps of 2008. In reality it starts years earlier with the real estate bubble and the laxity of controlling this business. What does the shareholder e.g. of a finance instituion? Who are the main stockholder of a lot of trust and funds?
What is it? SIN What does it do? Cost. How does it work? Obscured insecurities and insensitive acts of interference in interpersonal interactions. What is it? Love What does it do? Everything. How does it work? Hard.
Lots of degrees...doesn't mean one is right. One example: There seems to be some confusion for some professionals regarding “definition” within the modern social sciences community. The word “complexity” is often given the wrong meaning and context. For example, most recognize the external world as being extremely complex. Recognizing this is not the same as being competent in intellectually thinking about complex subjects, issues, or topics. Humans use both philosophical and ideological thought to measure and comprehend the real world. Philosophy is a SEARCH for what is true, while ideology is believing one has FOUND something that is true, and therefore, this “ideal” becomes incorporated into one’s belief system. Just because one has complex thoughts and ideas, this does not necessarily translate to a competent complexity in thought. The intellectual and mental dysphoria of individuals...although they may assume that complexity alone is sufficient to understanding the world...is rather a precedent to society falling into social dysphoria. The human brain has the capacity to take the complex and find ideas that simplify and change dysfunction to function. This is a greater indication of a more complete intelligence than people who...without direction, morals, or values...engage in frivolous and careless intellectualism without structure and a sure foundation. This is why simple ideas that are not corrupted, but are true, work in reality where corrupted ideas won’t. One can lead to internal happiness...the other cannot.
No, everything is a social construct, but 'the social' includes animals, plants, metals or chemical substances, radio-activity, electricity, artefacts and many other phenomena in the world which together co-construct/co-constitute/materialize/perform/ the becoming of matter and meaning in the world.
It isn't accurate that economist couldnt see the crisis. What were the economist supposed to do... Go to the private banks and beg them to stop their practices??
One answer: "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification ; the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit." (Popper, 1982).
Epstein is completely and totally uninformed about modern economics. I know most of us have pretty low expectations for TED talks now, but this is the worst I have seen by far. There are so many different complaints I could make about almost every minute of the video that I scarcely know where to begin. To pick a central one - there is some nebulous concern about the failure of economists to model various uninteresting aspects of banking regulation (which are part of a broader social ontology beyond 'just people'), like the fact that a bank must have permission to operate. Know this about modeling: you can model many things, but each one will add complexity - for each feature you add, you are making it harder to understand and solve the model. You need to be sure you are getting some analytical mileage in your results out of what you are adding. What is adding the fact that the bank needs some signature to operate going to get me when I solve the model? (Hint: probably nothing!) There are numerous (and I mean literally hundreds) of papers about banking and banking regulation regarding capital requirements (another complaint on that slide). He would have you believe that we don't care about such things. This is totally false. Indeed, banking regulation and financial intermediation have been an extremely active area of research, certainly since the crisis but also before it. Please do not think that the ridiculous caricature presented here has even the slightest thing to do with economics as it is actually practiced in university departments. Do not feel that you have understood an important failure of economics! (There are surely many of those, none enumerated here.) Normal philosophers of science (e.g., in physics or biology) generally need to have at least MA's in the science itself so they don't sound like complete ignoramuses when they talk about it. From what I have seen that requirement is generally not extended to philosophers of economics, which is a shame. Well-done philosophy of economics could make useful contributions to economics, as well-done philosophy of physics can do for physics. But I have no sense from this that the speaker has that capacity.
+A Ab You mean social sciences have been interested in the systemic interactions all along?!?!?!? (sarcasm) You are completely right, this presentation had barely anything correct in it, which in a way is impressive. As I said in another comment, even the biological facts were completely wrong. Only people who have no idea about either natural or social sciences would find it profound or insightful.
From his attack on methodological individualism, it seems to me he's mad economics is harder to transform into vapid advocacy research than, say, sociology. That's the only explanation I can see for this embarrassing talk.
As a Humanities and Social Sciences M.A. student, I have started producing videos. I will produce content both in English and Spanish. I'm waiting for you.
Brian Epstein's answer to the "what is it?" of Social Sciences is very different to mine (BSc International Relations, MA Psychotherapy). Social sciences should target predictive power about future events? Run experiments? Social sciences should be LESS about people and their psychology? Epstein justifies his rant via relentless examples from the NATURAL sciences = intentionally what social sciences are not. Social sciences are in difficulty, I agree. Everything he suggests would take it in the OPPOSITE direction to "fixing" it.
This man is a new strike of positivist technocratic and utilitarian mentality. He's saying, substantially, that social sciences shall become (they're yet in many aspects) mere functions of legalist bureaucratic objectives. No criticism, no seek for deep understanding of social realm; just mere description of items in a superficial, level, just to maintain the machine working. Dehumanizing. He's a bureucratic philosopher.
IN the first place it was the natural science that dissected complex systems into manageable cogs, ignoring variables that doesn't seem to fit into a construct, which leads to many social malady. To go further redefining social science by going even deeper into the principles of natural science might exacerbate the problem. For a start answering "What is it" in social phenomena cannot be free from individual worldviews. Hence a clear answer is not possible unless the one seeking the answer is clear which worldview they want to use in answering it.
the future is of social sciences. thats actually a very thoght provoking lecture but philosopher , who is telling about vanishing of social sciences....... what about philosophy btw
Social sciences or not or any other science, people divide the discussion between the economists that were supposed to know what was going on pre-2008 and after 2008 crisis and the economists, scientist or whatever they are, that are supposed to figure out how to fix this problem now. They never mention people that came from random fields of life and backgrounds and yet were capable of seeing for example the financial crises coming and made a lot of money because of it. Now you can talk all day about the failures in science and the hopes in science, but you can also sit and think a bit how did the other part of people that nobody talks about know, prosper and win over this unexpected catastrophe of financial crisis ? what science did they belong to ? what did they comprehend that we in the academic world didn't ?
This presentation is indeed a long-winded strawman argument. Go to the wikipedia page for sociology and you will see that none of the arguments apply to sociology as an entire discipline. Anthropology and political science are also discplines which have addressed the concerns raised in the talk. Read the literature before making grand claims.
His interpretation of reality and readings of XIX capitalism are exceptional. Both him and Engels wrote a magnificent body of literature that are the base of a great part of XX century economy.
Marx' theories are full of flaws, but what is more important is that his predictions did not come true. Capitalism did not collapse but flourished, instead most communist economies, which are based on Marx' ideas, collapsed. The main reason Marx is still popular today is because it is a framework for an oppressor/oppressed narrative that is very attractive to professional victims and people with a parasitical mentality.
@@petersteenkamp People with parasitical mentality? Now what a great way of putting millions of oppressed people in the bag of "nah man, they're just lazy."
"None of the greatest economists in the world saw it coming." Really? Nearly every economist of the Austrian School tradition saw it coming and stated it publicly. RU-vid and the internet are wonderful things for finding these things out. If you define "greatest" in really limited terms that only fit with your presuppositions, then it makes it easier to craft a narrative, I guess.
Professor Epstein’s short lecture was thought provoking and worth watching (no doubt), However I have to disagree with the idea that social Science’s problem is the focus on people. People are the particles that form the fields which social sciences study. But these particles have something very particular, that is, we, (the people), lie and consciously so. Then we have the social scientists whom are not only presented with the difficulty of filtering those lies out -which consequently effects the quality of their observation- but also with the difficulty of managing their own bias on the phenomenon they are inspecting. Hence the end product of this generally long process fails more often than not. More Over, some branches of social science, say Political science that I’m currently studying, barely discusses the role of people in policymaking. Instead, we spend hours on end discussing the role that institutions, political parties and other mechanisms play in a political system. That is exactly why my country Albania looks like a perfect democracy - it has too many political parties, too many organizations that pretend to represent the civil society. But unfortunately the truth is they just pretend. If there would be a way to unbiasedly study the people who in fact own these political organizations, (courts do this when they properly work), then the Albanian democracy would look quite different to someone who never lived here. Sometimes, I think Social sciences are like young children whom after seeing their mom or daddy doing something only grownups can do, want to be like them immediately. I am totally blind, but I bet their facial expression changes in order to perfectly imitate their parents’ seriousness (their tone of voice certainly does). So if the relationship between social and hard sciences resembles that of children who want to drive a car just because their parents can, then we’re having considerable issues to deal with. Social sciences should not be a mean for professors to improve their hierarchical position in academia; neither should they be used by pseudo academics to gain unjustifiable research grants. Social sciences should only be in our society’s service and no dogma or fanatic belief should be allowed to stand in its way towards betterment.
Supply and Demand is, in of itself, a giant experiment that's always evolving. That right there, on it's own makes it a product of the scientific method, and therefore, economics is certainly a science.
+Joe Smith Science isn't a synonim of math or physics. Any discipline that uses the scientific method can be recognized as a Science, that's why there's also Natural Sciences. So, economics can be a Science, just as antropology, because it is not what they wanna prove what makes it a science, it is how, come up with an economical theory, like capitalism, or simple stuff like a deal, and they try to prove the different outcomes and posibilities based on data and past events in the field. Thats why politics, language studies, economics, and history can be as much a science as math, physics, chemistry. You'll have to excuse my english, it is not my language
What according to you is a 'science'? You can simply check any definition of 'economics' to see if it is a science. This is not a question for the youtube comments section, but something that can be answered by some basic reading as well
500 years ago, Copernicus was wrong. Astronomers before him are correct in not imagining a universe where people are right in the center. And in my Bachelor of Applied Science Information Technology program I do not want to take the Humanities/Social Science course.
This guy is deluded! If you think that social science is becoming irrelevant you should ask yourself what happens when you switch on the light? Think about the social structure behind it.
Brian is very confused as to "social science." I guess he forgot to ask, What is it? and How does it work? He thinks its all economics! Ugh! Then he said its too much about people!!?? OMFG! Dude, its all about people. Next, its a lot of different points of view. For political science learn about David Easton as Interpretivist www.academia.edu/31337872/David_Easton_as_Interpretivist
What is a social science for you? I am a social anthropologist. As such, what is a group, what is a culture, what is a blockchain, and so on are genuinly what we study...
"...if we got the human psyche perfect, we would only be understanding a fraction of the social world" So this guy rambles on about how social sciences don't ask "what is it questions" and then blows off the pursuit of understanding the building blocks of the social world, i.e. the psyche.
so if ur psyche is all the makes up a society u dont mind if i have all ur possessions i guess ? (obvious sarcasm). But dont wworry i respect ur beliefs
Nothing is going to change until you incorporate bio social sciences. Would be an understatement if i said postmodernist have not made you a laughing stock. ...PS Humanities are like the clowns of academia