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I thought it was a good epsiode and will explain in a comment separately.

robotaholic—you might consider
(a) giving constructive feedback to POI on which sort of episodes you like
(b) going to http://digg.com/podcasts/Point_of_Inquiry_4 and (i) voting for favorite episodes and (ii) reviewing the episodes with high scores and commenting.

Great episode. I found it enlightening with regard to certain sociological research popularized by the press.

Great episode! I am definitely getting Barbara Oakley’s book. Thanks.

Great episode! I am definitely getting Barbara Oakley’s book. Thanks.

I agree with George—I’m going to get the book.
I was interested in whether there was an audio book and couldn’t find one. So whenever D.J. puts in an ad for audible.com, I’ll put in a request for them to carry this book…  If it is available on audio CD etc. could you give us a link.

I was particularly interested in Barbara Oakley’s critique of the famous work of Zimbardo and Milgram—especially Milgram, whose famous book Obedience to Authority made an impression on me and can still be found assigned as reading in college courses.  I still think I believe certain parts of Milgram’s assertions (people tend to be susceptible to persuasion by appeal to authority), but Oakley helps to see that maybe they aren’t supported as scientifically as I had thought. 

The point that Zimbardo told people in his recruiting advertisements that he wanted folks for a ‘prison experiment’ is a strong rebuttal.  Those of us who have never had nothing to do with prisons or prisoners have a different perspective than those who know prison workers or prisoners.  But I hadn’t thought about it the same way before this audio.

I liked the episode.

I’d like to know more about her criticism about Milgram’s experiment. As far I see, she made strong points againts the prision experiment in the podcast, but I couldn’t see any good point againts Milgram in the podcast.

She said that some people who participate in the experiment, when they thinked they killed or badly injured someone went under severe stress. As far I understood, the point wasn’t that the people didn’t suffer, the point was that people tend to obey authority.

About the claim that people don’t expect that someone get injured in a experiment in a college, I must admit I don’t know where Milgram ‘harvested’ his subjects, but I’d say that this concept is not clear outside campuses.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting her thesis but she seems to be defining jerks out of existence. Does every self-absorbed ass need a scientific description to explain away their faults, can’t most of us inherently recognize them and act appropriatley? I also agree with the comments that she didn’t really get at the heart of the Millgram experiment

I was somewhat taken aback by her strong critisism of Zimbardo.  It’s been some time since I read his recent book, and I loaned out my copy so I can’t check myself, but my impression was that his book was hardly a defense of his own experiment.  While he certainly reached very different conclusions from Barbara Oakley, I think he was pretty critical of many of the same aspects of the study that she was. 

  Her assertion that the ads he placed would have attracted aberrant personalities may well have merit, but I think Zimbardo claims they tested out as pretty normal people using the standard tests available at that time.  The behaviors, admittedly through his own observations, occurred pretty universally among all the subjects, i.e. the guards became frightenly abusive and the prisoners submissive.  I would think it unlikely that any advertisement could attract such a specific group of such abberant personalities, and none would stand out, even if the tests available at that time were far less able to diagnose such personalities.  If Dr Oakleys assertions are correct you’d think he would have had to reject a large percentage of clearly unsuitable applicants, and perhaps he did.

  In addition, didn’t several members of the study, specifically some who were guards, go on to dedicate a significant part of their careers to understanding the prisoner/guard relationship.  That doesn’t seem to indicate a lack of ability among those subjects to evaluate, address, and change their behavior, which would seem to indicate they were not too far out on the scale.

  I suppose I’m coming on a little fiercly in Zimbardo’s defense and in oppposition to Oakley.  I in no way dismiss the idea that genetics play a large role in behavior, and I’ve met a few people who in retrospect were truly frightening,  but I’m pretty fond of the idea that most of us exercise some degree of ability to evaluate and modify our own behavior.  Perhaps it’s just to depressing and dire for me to believe otherwise.

In my opinion, this was one of the weaker episodes.  Psychology is not one of the specialist fields of DJ Grothe (which is not his fault!) but I think it showed in the lack of critical questions.

Just a few comments:
- To my knowledge, Zimbardo never said that it’s *only* environment that has an influence. But he did want to make the point that given the right environment even “normal” people can be made to do horrible things, in other words, that the “bad apple in a good barrel” argument does not always hold.

- It seems a valid point to me that the base line of people who would apply for the experiment might differ from the normal population. However, another central point of his study still holds: there was no difference between the group of guards and inmates. In other words, because he assigned the people entirely randomly to the two conditions, and because personality tests showed no difference between the two groups, it could be safely argued that the difference in behaviour and personality throughout the experiment was entirely due to the allocation of the two groups.

- I find it harsh and inappropriate of Barbara Oakley to presume that Zimbardo is happy/“Was scraping the barrel” because his study can not be repeated. That to me seems to imply that he doesn’t want it repeated, not for ethical reasons but because he is afraid that the results won’t be supported. Given that real-life tragedies like the Abu Ghreib incidences still happen, his research and his results seem more valid than ever.

What really irked me throughout the entire interview was Barbara’s differentiation between “real” science and (social) psychology. Yes, I am biased because I am a psychologist myself. But she seemed to be of the position that only biology/genetics are hard/real sciences and psychology is not. There may be cases of individual studies or researchers that fail to live up to the standard. But Psychology as a whole is a valid, regular, real science and I didn’t like the dismissive tone of her.

Finally, when DJ asked whether her research couldn’t be used by “bad” people as an excuse for their behaviour, she launched into a very general quip about how everything in science has its advantages and disadvantages. That missed the point of the question, which I understood to be about predetermination and accountability, and I was disappointed that DJ didn’t pursue that question more.

Given that real-life tragedies like the Abu Ghreib incidences still happen, his research and his results seem more valid than ever.

Not necessarily. It is entirely possible that those who committed the atrocities in Abu Ghraib were already genetically predisposed to behave the way they did. Since we are discussing “real-life tragedies” instead of science, I’ll add one of mine: my grandfather who was in the German army during the WWII escaped after being positioned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Abu Ghraib doesn’t add any validation to Zimbardo’s experiment because the same “experiment” didn’t work on my grandfather.

Given that real-life tragedies like the Abu Ghreib incidences still happen, his research and his results seem more valid than ever.

Not necessarily. It is entirely possible that those who committed the atrocities in Abu Ghraib were already genetically predisposed to behave the way they did. Since we are discussing “real-life tragedies” instead of science, I’ll add one of mine: my grandfather who was in the German army during the WWII escaped after being positioned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Abu Ghraib doesn’t add any validation to Zimbardo’s experiment because the same “experiment” didn’t work on my grandfather.

I am not quite sure I understand your point with the last example. Can you explain?

When Zimbardo talks about Abu Ghraib he is arguing that saying those people were alread “evil” is wrong for several reasons:
- It creates the illusion that you’re either good or bad, that being evil is determined
- Subsequently it creates the illusion of control, i.e. the feeling “Oh, that won’t happen to me, I wouldn’t do a thing lik this”
- It severely underestimates the impact of environment and chain of command

And that’s what I mean by saying Abu Ghraib validates his research, in a way, by showing that normal people can be affected by circumstances in such a way that they commit such atrocities. I’m using the example of AG because he writes about it at length in his book “Lucifer effect, how good people turn evil” and I find it very compelling, though also very scary.

And that’s what I mean by saying Abu Ghraib validates his research, in a way, by showing that normal people can be affected by circumstances in such a way that they commit such atrocities. I’m using the example of AG because he writes about it at length in his book “Lucifer effect, how good people turn evil” and I find it very compelling, though also very scary.

I think knowing we might turn evil helps us guard against it, whilst complacently thinking we wouldn’t behave like that puts us in m ore danger.

I also think it’s important to rememeber “evil” people can turn good too. So I can imagine someone who did something absolutely dreadful when young, being very upset by the experience and what they did and changing for the better.

I think it’s important not to brand people as good or evil, we are all capable of both.

Stephen

Daniela,

Why do think my grandfather didn’t turn evil while serving at Mauthausen? How come the same environment doesn’t impact everybody in a similar way?

And that’s what I mean by saying Abu Ghraib validates his research, in a way, by showing that normal people can be affected by circumstances in such a way that they commit such atrocities. I’m using the example of AG because he writes about it at length in his book “Lucifer effect, how good people turn evil” and I find it very compelling, though also very scary.

I think knowing we might turn evil helps us guard against it, whilst complacently thinking we wouldn’t behave like that puts us in m ore danger.

I also think it’s important to rememeber “evil” people can turn good too. So I can imagine someone who did something absolutely dreadful when young, being very upset by the experience and what they did and changing for the better.

I think it’s important not to brand people as good or evil, we are all capable of both.

Stephen

Stephen,

These are very weak arguments indeed. We are all capable of good or evil? Are psychopathic imbeciles capable of good?

These are very weak arguments indeed. We are all capable of good or evil? Are psychopathic imbeciles capable of good?

Yes, in two ways. 1) because somebody is a psychopathic imbecile for one period of their life, doesn’t mean they will be so for all of their life.

2) because even if given their circumstances, they remain a psychopathic imbecile, it’s still true that if they were in or had been in different circumstances, they could be good.

Stephen

Daniela,

Why do think my grandfather didn’t turn evil while serving at Mauthausen? How come the same environment doesn’t impact everybody in a similar way?

George,

Nobody is in the same environment! Often the same question is asked about say three children, two who turned out well and one who was a “bad apple.”

If you have an older brother you are in a different environment than if you have a younger brother, for instance.

Stephen

If you have an older brother you are in a different environment than if you have a younger brother, for instance.

First of all, you only share 50% of your genes with your brother. But you’re right that you’ll grow up in a different environment than your brother: you are most likely to have different friends. But the question here is if the same environment at a given time will affect two people equally. Will both brothers who end up at Abu Ghraib or Mauthausen react in the same way? I am a little confused by your reasoning, Stephen.

These are very weak arguments indeed. We are all capable of good or evil? Are psychopathic imbeciles capable of good?

Yes, in two ways. 1) because somebody is a psychopathic imbecile for one period of their life, doesn’t mean they will be so for all of their life.

2) because even if given their circumstances, they remain a psychopathic imbecile, it’s still true that if they were in or had been in different circumstances, they could be good.

Stephen

Both of you points are incorrect. Psychopathy is a genetic condition and psychopaths will remain this way for the rest of their lives. So the only “given circumstances” would have to be a different biological parent.

Since you have a brain there is very little you can do about that or about how it operates. Good people don’t just magically “turn bad.”

And that’s what I mean by saying Abu Ghraib validates his research, in a way, by showing that normal people can be affected by circumstances in such a way that they commit such atrocities. I’m using the example of AG because he writes about it at length in his book “Lucifer effect, how good people turn evil” and I find it very compelling, though also very scary.

Re: “real” science
Frankly, Social science has such an ignoble history of disregard for objective standards, rigorous testing, openly imbued with political not scientific goals and generally full of absolutely worthless research.. it has in fact earned its reputation as “soft science”. Earned it 100 times over, I’d say. Here I’m talking about the last hundred years or so. This is not to say there are not or have not been important works and people in these fields or that things are not improiving.. but it must be admitted there is a huge debt of dishonor that must be paid. Also, there does seem to be a lingering civil war in Psychology inparticular and this thread is the most recent proof. I wish to be a psychologist some day, myself.

re: Abu Ghraib. The military was investigating the place many months before the press ever caught wind of it. That’s because at least several soldiers tipped them off- in doing so they betrayed their peers and commanders.. its not a stretch to say they risked their lives in fact. Why did some soldiers behave with bravery and integrity and others with barbarism? They worked in the same environment. If the study can not explain this, then it really doesn’t explain much of anything. (That’s even assuming the study was conducted in a rigorous way, which seems not to be the case).

By the way- I’m a soldier, inculcated with the respect for orders and the chain of command and all that. I’ve been to war. I have questioned and defied my superiors and/or peers hundreds of times for a variety of reasons including purely moral grounds. There is no “environment” whereby I forget my conscience.

Social science has such an ignoble history of disregard for objective standards… there is a huge debt of dishonor that must be paid.

That’s a really strong position to take. How familiar are you with social science? Have you read any scholarly works in the field? Not just popular works, but the real thing. Have you ever spent any time conversing with a social scientist?

You shouldn’t condemn a person until you’ve driven a hundred miles in their car (modern version of old saying).

That’s a really strong position to take. How familiar are you with social science? Have you read any scholarly works in the field? Not just popular works, but the real thing.

Yes, well said. There is some nonsense in the social sciences, but there are also a lot of very dedicated and competent researchers doing the best to understand complex phenomena.  “Dishonor” is way too strong a descriptor here, at least for the vast majority of practitioners. One has to be careful not to collectively condemn, particularly when it comes to a difficult and important field of study.

Social science has such an ignoble history of disregard for objective standards… there is a huge debt of dishonor that must be paid.

That’s a really strong position to take. How familiar are you with social science? Have you read any scholarly works in the field? Not just popular works, but the real thing. Have you ever spent any time conversing with a social scientist?

You shouldn’t condemn a person until you’ve driven a hundred miles in their car (modern version of old saying).

Ive had courses in psychology, sociology, anthropology and gender studies. Im reasonably well acquainted with the historical development of the social sciences and popular literature. I have had discussions with several social scientists. I stand by my remarks.
Doug, i said and know there are very fine minds and research. For example I very much admire anthropologists like Donald Brown and Derek Freemon. I could name at least ten such in psychology. I endeavor to be a psychologist myself.  If anything my bias should favor social science.

sate, I can understand a condemnation of social science as it was practiced in the 19th century, or even the first half of the 20th. But I cannot understand a condemnation of social science as it has been practiced for the last 50 years. Can you be more explicit regarding your condemnation?

Barbara Oakley mentioned a book by Augustine Brannigan called The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method (Social Problems and Social Issues), for those of you who are interested. I looked for it at a local bookstore but they didn’t have it. Has anyone here read it?

If you have an older brother you are in a different environment than if you have a younger brother, for instance.

First of all, you only share 50% of your genes with your brother. But you’re right that you’ll grow up in a different environment than your brother: you are most likely to have different friends. But the question here is if the same environment at a given time will affect two people equally. Will both brothers who end up at Abu Ghraib or Mauthausen react in the same way? I am a little confused by your reasoning, Stephen.

Hi George,

I think I confused matters by saying we never are in the same environment. What I really meant was we are all, always, in a unique set of circumstances and therefore we wouldn’t expect the same environment to have the same effect on two people even if they were identical.

You might say if two people were in the same room that they would share certain experiences but it’s not true. We each sit in a different space have a different view, etc etc.

In the case of two brothers they won’t only have different friends, the interaction they have with their parents will be different. Their parents will themselves be different each time they interact and so on. So to give an example my yongest daughter who is ten is experiencing having quite a different father than my oldest daughter who is 22 did as I’ve changed quite alot since my eldest daughter was ten. But although this is obvious over a period of 12 years, it is true over periods of seconds too. 

Stephen

Yes, Stephen. No two people are exactly the same. Even identical twins who share all of their genes differ in personalities (less than fraternal twins) and even the physical structure of their brains are not the exactly the same. They still don’t know what causes these differences. But I am not sure any of this disproves that people might be genetically predisposed to engage in evil acts when the opportunity presents itself, neither it proves that undesirable environment will have the same negative impact on everybody.

sate, I can understand a condemnation of social science as it was practiced in the 19th century, or even the first half of the 20th. But I cannot understand a condemnation of social science as it has been practiced for the last 50 years. Can you be more explicit regarding your condemnation?

If you would like. I may not be the best commentator, but where I lack in experience I can make up for in colourful venom. However, the scope must be limited because vitiating 50 years of multidisiplinary science sounds more like a thesis project than a casual forum romp. Also my assault on soft science would be better housed in a new thread in a more relevant forum, may I suggest psuedoscience.

sate, I can understand a condemnation of social science as it was practiced in the 19th century, or even the first half of the 20th. But I cannot understand a condemnation of social science as it has been practiced for the last 50 years. Can you be more explicit regarding your condemnation?

If you would like. I may not be the best commentator, but where I lack in experience I can make up for in colourful venom. However, the scope must be limited because vitiating 50 years of multidisiplinary science sounds more like a thesis project than a casual forum romp. Also my assault on soft science would be better housed in a new thread in a more relevant forum, may I suggest psuedoscience.

Chris I’d like to pick this back up. I find it interesting you did not comment on the podcast.. only on my remarks about it. Anyway to answer you and confine the subject matter to the podcast I will use the its content to justify my position.

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study

I submit that Philip Zimbardo is typical among social scientists in wanting to prove a political point (authoritarian hierarchies corrupt people) and unconcerned about scientific objectivity or methodology. Amazingly, Zimbardo went on to be president of the APA in 2002. Here are Barbara Oakley’s remarks from the podcast regarding the Stanford Aggression study (I’m paraphrasing)
-Zimbardo placed newspaper ads requesting participation in a prison study. later research showed solicitations including words like “prison study” attracted more “Machiavellian” types
-Z’s tests to show his recruits were “normal” were interpreted in a completely nonstandard way such that no other researchers could know this to be correct or incorrect
-the study is so deeply unethical that it can not ever be replicated, insulating Zimbardo from refutation. Barbara reference’s Karl Popper’s “an unfalsifiable theory is to that extent weak”
-Z started his experiment by inviting a news crew to cover his work
-Z had no hypothesis, was staging a morality play where the participants acted out their part as was obviously expected of them
-When confronted with criticism later over his methodology, Z weakly answered that a 70’s study can not be done today
-Z was the “warden” and could guide or direct the events however he liked
-new review boards had to be created to ensure studies like his never happened again
Criticism from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_study:
-small sample size of 24 can not be generalized
-most of the “guards” were not abusive and even favored prisoners. Zimbardo made no effort to explain this
-conclusions drawn were subjective and anecdotal
-Haslam and Reicher’s research produced conclusions contradicting Zimbardo’s

Milgram’s study (again paraphrasing Barbara)
-study tacitly artificial “as far from a real life situation” as you could get such that participants would not have ever thought it was real; study irrelevant to soldiers in real life
-participants supposedly administering shocks would laugh upon hearing screams, indicating they knew it was not real and a bit silly
-study is one of many, many morality plays masquerading as research in social science

Malignant Narcissism (paraphrasing Barbara)
The term appears is referenced in thousands of social and hard science studies (found in Medline) but not a single study on “malignant narcissism” itself could be found. Thus, there is no scientific meaning to the term though psychologists bandy the term around as if a legitimate diagnosis. “no scientific research foundation at all”

Back to me-
Barbara Oakley cites each of these not just as bad science but as highly typical of social science. Zimbardo’s study in particular is telling not just because mistakes were made, but because they were so brazen and so numerous. I could bring up other horribly flawed socially-agendized studies but I am trying to confine my remarks to the podcast.

Here’s our problem: you make a generalization that applies to tens of thousands of instances. You support this generalization with three examples. You point out that you could offer more examples. How do we know that your three examples are representative of the tens of thousands of other instances?

We do have one indirect indicator: how well received were these examples? Did other social scientists ignore the many flaws in them? Where was it published?  I did a quick search and discovered that Wikipedia has an article on the Zimbardo experiment; the Wikipedia article states that “The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific.” If this statement be true, then it is unfair to condemn social science for an experiment that social scientists themselves condemn.

Chris, I think you bring up something interesting about the issue raised. Your pointing out the Wiki statement: “The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific.” is more true than an exaggeration. However, the criticism was often viewed coming from elements within social science that were less than willing to open up to a more scientific approach to social science. People I’ve read over the years in the skeptical movement seemed much more open to the experiments, with only limited criticism of the conclusions offered. Oakley, to me anyways, seems to be one of the few I’ve seen to actually come from the “skeptical community” that has raised such criticism so directly. The “unethical” argument, which lead to further restrictions on such research, have at times been portrayed as more concerned with how participants were treated and any psychological effects possibly imposed. Oakley’s open accusation that some of these conclusions are basically unfalsifiable from more that just the “unethical” restrictions imposed and stem from the onset of the research protocol, is interesting to me. As to the wider debate on social science, it is to me a welcoming sign to be open to skepticism and acceptance that there are possibly wide ranging problems within the field itself.

For anyone who is aware of what I am talking about, I’d truly welcome any correction or clarification. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to this podcast and I haven’t the time right now to go through reams of research to make my arguments or comments any more exact.

Has anyone seen Zimbardo’s talk at last year’s Beyond Belief. There he talks about the test where four-year old kids who were offered a marshmallow and told if they don’t eat it right away they will get an additional marshmallow later. When the psychologist left, some kids didn’t wait (Zimbardo calls them “present oriented”) and other did wait (“future oriented”). And how does Zimbardo explain the difference in the four-year old kids? Cultural and other environmental differences, like religion, geographic location, etc. In four-year old kids? So, I guess being a four-year old Christian from Nicaragua will result in eating the marshmallow and being a four-year old Muslim from Saudi Arabia will make you to wait. Right? Zimbardo is a joke.

The conflict between the “hard science” people and the “soft science” people in the social sciences has been going on at least since the 1950s. The hard science people want the social sciences to emulate the methodologies of the hard sciences; the soft sciences people maintain that useful insights can be gained from material that does not conform to rigorous scientific methods. The hard scientists have been steadily advancing as they have developed techniques that permit the utilization of rigorous scientific methods to ever more subtle questions. However, I reject the assertion that “if it’s not scientific, it’s useless”. Sure, you can’t prove anything with soft methods—but then, you can’t prove anything with rigorous methods. You can DISPROVE things with rigorous methods, but the fact that information was not derived by rigorous scientific methods does not render it useless. The field of history, for example (NOT archaeology, history!) has an enormous amount of useful information, despite the fact that it is utterly lacking in scientific method.

I believe that we should accept the sad truth that we can’t nail down everything with scientific rigor. Some issues just have to be handled using unscientific methods. And I think there’s lots to learn by these methods.

The conflict between the “hard science” people and the “soft science” people in the social sciences has been going on at least since the 1950s. The hard science…

I believe that we should accept the sad truth that we can’t nail down everything with scientific rigor. Some issues just have to be handled using unscientific methods. And I think there’s lots to learn by these methods.

My axis for disagreement over the state of social science is not so much about the “rigorous scientific methods” so much as it is taking up truth and objectivity as cardinal values whatever way you run your research. In hard science these are cardinal values but not in soft science. The difference is not that one is possible and the other is not.. its a question of attitude not protocol. People like Zimbardo are not interested in accuracy. They have a message they want to get out. They abuse “science” as a vessel for doing so because anyone can dismiss you opinion but fewer can dismiss your shiny new “scientific fact”. This is why Zimbardo invited a news crew. This is why he did not care if anyone could verify his subjects were statistically average/normal. This is why researchers merrily cite technical terms (narcissism) that don’t even exist. This is why a day never went by in anthropology class where I did not feel like I was being sold political (not factual) points. This is why I emphasized that one bad study was not surprising but the numerous and brazen nature of the flaws was- uh don’t you expect more from a Yale grad? No one else did.. he went on to author textbooks and serve as president of the APA despite his awful “research” a year before receiving an Ig Noble award.

I happen to think the study of societies is both scientifically doable, and important. Certainly you can ask a question like why is race X overrepresented in prison or in college and find useful answers regardless of whether or not this meshes with physics-level certainty. Some social scientists I know of are of the highest integrity.. they’re just closer to being the exception than the rule.

Chris, in a way I hope you see the slight paradox in what I wrote. As an example to how interesting this issue is to me, let me use your statement of; “The field of history, for example (NOT archaeology, history!) has an enormous amount of useful information, despite the fact that it is utterly lacking in scientific method.” Take Michael Shermer, who from my indication has been supportive of Zimbardo’s research in way where it appears he accepts the conclusions without consideration to the concerns raised by Barbara Oakley (anyone who has any information that would show Shermer is aware of Oakley’s criticisms or his reaction to them would be fantastic - he might be helped by being aware of them). However, Shermer has written fairly extensively on the issue of making history more scientific - this also goes for social science. In fact, I would highly recommend his essay History at the Crossroads - Can History Be a science? -  Can it Afford Not to Be?” (can anyone locate a free online version of that essay? - if you have access to a research database, such as Academic Search Premier - they have have the entire issue for reading). To answer his title question, he uses examples of what has happened to researchers such as Frank Sulloway in that his scientific approach to history was nearly rejected out of hand by historians, I’ve seen much of the same complaint lodged toward others such as Jared Diamond and David Sloan Wilson. 

It’s a rather long essay, but here’s an idea of the direction:

The NSF (National Science Foundation) panel turned him down flat. Testing historical hypotheses? Using science to analyze history? Was he (Frank Sulloway) joking.* They rendered their judgment in no uncertain terms:

‘One of the most pervasive issues discussed by the panelists was the approach the Principal Investigator was taking toward history. Many panelists thought that applying a heavy-duty statistical analysis to history is naive, inappropriate, and even peculiar. Is it really the case that generalizations in history should be tested with statistics, rather than be tested through a detailed examination of the sources? Some noted that it seemed as if the Principal Investigator was going back to 19th-century beliefs that history is a science which could uncover laws. Panelists were opposed to such a narrow view of history.’

Sulloway was shocked. How could a panel of scientists think that using statistics to test hypotheses is “naive, inappropriate, and even peculiar”? Then he remembered, these were not scientists. They were historians and philosophers. “Besides being an odd response to receive from the National Science Foundation,” Sulloway recalled with some dismay, “where the principal criterion of grant evaluation is supposed to be ‘scientific merit’, this panel’s criticisms confuse a method of research (hypothesis testing) with a theory of history. Testing is what makes an approach scientific, not the particular viewpoint that is endorsed.” And to emphasize the point, Sulloway pointed out that “Even the claim that history can be studied scientifically can only be evaluated properly through hypothesis testing” (1996,p. 539).

How did we get into a situation where a highly respected scholar such as Frank Sulloway—working at one of the world’s preeminent scientific institutions and applying standard scientific techniques to test historical hypotheses—could be so coldly rejected by the one of the nation’s chief science granting agencies? This seems paradoxical. But then, to most people the idea of history as a science seems paradoxical. To resolve the apparent paradox we need to understand the history of the profession of history, how and why historians came to reject science, and how Sulloway and others are working to create a science of history. Can history be a science.* I submit that it cannot afford not to be.

sate,  you suggest that social scientists as a group are not primarily interested in truth, yet your prime example was roundly condemned by social scientists. That doesn’t add up.

And I’d like to tack a qualifier onto your statement that social science is scientifically doable. I’d argue that SOME social science is scientifically doable—and some is not. For example, what if we were to consider one of the most important questions facing humanity: why do societies fight wars? I have seen some quantitative studies of war, and they’re not very useful. Indeed, one of the most useful comments about the causes of wars was made by the first historian, Thucydides: “It was the growing power of the Athenians, and the fear that this caused among the Spartans, that made war inevitable.” It’s a completely unscientific statement, utterly untestable, without any quantitative data, and yet I consider it to be one of the most important truths of history. Or how about Santayana’s statement: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Are these statements without intellectual utility?

sate,  you suggest that social scientists as a group are not primarily interested in truth, yet your prime example was roundly condemned by social scientists. That doesn’t add up.

Zimbardo is like brief Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He was most likely appointed in order to illegally “clean house” for the Bush administration. He got caught doing so. Subsequently, everyone disclaimed relations with him. Here the faithful says SEE! The administration is anti-corruption! But it isn’t. It just got caught in such an egregious act that no defense of it can be publicly rendered. In the case of Zimbardo, the skeptics-for once-had a clear shot.

If you want to know how the social science establishment truly reacts to criticism, read up on Derek Freemon having his work voted as “unscientific” by enraged jackals at the annual American Anth. Assoc. meeting. Look up Herbert Terrace who was hit with a lawsuit when he used a frame of video from a study he helped conduct in order to author a critical paper. Only in a social science can you vote down ideas you can’t debate and file a lawsuit to prevent the public from finding out you’re a sham.

I will stipulate to your point about some things being scientifically accountable and not others.. in fact some things can’t really be studied at all, ever. What color was a t-rex? who knows.

I’m not an expert so I defer a bit to the likes of Oakley and here, to Anthropologist Donald Brown.

It is wrong to think that there is some zero-sum game-or even worse, a winner-takes-all game-between universals and the culturally particular or between biological and sociocultural approaches to anthropological problems. The notion that it is such a game has been a major contributor to producing a blinkered and shackled anthropology, an anthropology unable or unwilling to see the relevance of human nature, and thus severely handicapped in solving anthropological problems. The time is upon anthropologists to take off those blinkers; to rise above the self-serving motives and honest mistakes that put the blinkers on in the first place.
(p.156, Human Universals)

sate, after reviewing some of your references, I am coming to the conclusion that you are smearing an entire profession based on a few untypical cases. I looked up the case of Herbert Terrace. Yes, his research associates threatened to file a lawsuit to prevent his use of the imagery they owned. On that point they were absolutely justified. Their motivation for doing so is the questionable part: they didn’t want their research criticised. I don’t think this constitutes any kind of scientific censorship; it looks like a typical scientific dispute where somebody doesn’t like having their work criticized. It happens all the time. It does not suggest any grand agenda.

I also looked up the case of Derek Freeman and again, I think you are misinterpreting the behavior. Yes, anthropologists did not accept his research—at first. All scientists resist challenges to their fundamental tenets—but they also come around as the weight of evidence builds up. Wegner’s theory of continental drift was rejected by geologists when first proposed in 1915. But in the 1950s evidence in favor of his hypothesis began to build up, and by the 1960s it was accepted. Do you maintain that geologists aren’t honest? Freeman’s work has gained support from the anthropology community as evidence supporting it has accumulated. How does this differ from the history of other scientific hypotheses?

I do agree with you that politics intrudes into the social sciences too often. The nature/nurture debate has been badly affected by political preferences. Evolutionary psychology gets kicked around for exactly these reasons. And I further agree that the soft sciences are more vulnerable to political interference than the hard sciences—but that’s largely because the work of the social sciences often has political implications! Yes, the social sciences would be improved by a stricter standard on political influences. But I categorically reject your condemnation of this entire field of human inquiry.

Robert, I failed to address your point about the rejection of Mr. Sulloway’s proposal. I was unable to find much on the question other than his own representations, so I’d prefer to know exactly what he was proposing. I will acknowledge that there’s a Two Cultures problem that sometimes fouls this kind of work. I just don’t know whether that’s what happened in this case.

sate, after reviewing some of your references, I am coming to the conclusion that you are smearing an entire profession based on a few untypical cases. I looked up the case of Herbert Terrace. Yes, his research associates threatened to file a lawsuit to prevent his use of the imagery they owned. On that point they were absolutely justified. Their motivation for doing so is the questionable part: they didn’t want their research criticised. I don’t think this constitutes any kind of scientific censorship; it looks like a typical scientific dispute where somebody doesn’t like having their work criticized. It happens all the time. It does not suggest any grand agenda.

So you’re saying it ‘happens all the time’ that scientists use lawsuits in order to avoid peer-review? I hadn’t heard. Please provide 10,000 examples to establish this, as that seems to be the standard you apply to me.

I also looked up the case of Derek Freeman and again, I think you are misinterpreting the behavior. Yes, anthropologists did not accept his research—at first. All scientists resist challenges to their fundamental tenets—but they also come around as the weight of evidence builds up. Wegner’s theory of continental drift was rejected by geologists when first proposed in 1915. But in the 1950s evidence in favor of his hypothesis began to build up, and by the 1960s it was accepted. Do you maintain that geologists aren’t honest? Freeman’s work has gained support from the anthropology community as evidence supporting it has accumulated. How does this differ from the history of other scientific hypotheses?

“did not accept” is a laughable euphemism. In fact it isn’t a point about accepting or rejecting.. no one ever really said Freemon was wrong. They couldn’t.. he was both correct and meticulous. The point is the rage.. and the attempt to shut him down regardless of the quality of his research. And hey why not ask, why didn’t one of those clever honest anthropologists point out Freemon’s conclusion 80 years ago? Some did- brave or stupid they were ignored until someone came along willing to brave the trials required to speak an honest word against an uninterested establishment. You think a hundred good men in the field watching what happened to Freeman, even after he has been grudgingly vindicated, aren’t dissuaded from a similar course publicly disagreeing with Correct Dogma? You’d be naive to think so.
Interesting you bring up Wegener.. I wrote an essay about him once. A shameful chapter in geology, to be sure. What’s the difference between the two cases? Maybe nothing but time and frequency. I know of no other such example in geophysics. Moreover it’s a fantastic vital discipline.. productive and fecund.. a comment not well aimed at any purely social science. You said you disapprove of political interference in science as well, I merely see much of social science IS that political interference in and of itself.

So I am unfairly branding over a few bad apples? Is that what Donald Brown was doing? In his book he uses words like “all but banned the idea…” and “taboo to..” in describing his entire discipline. Does he not understand his own field? Derek Freeman would largely agree with my perspective.. is his multidecade career too short? Is the entire generational insurrection lead by people like Steven Pinker railing against nothing and no one? They’re all lost and mistaken? The fact that my own experience in every social science classroom strongly reinforced all of the above? Prior to stepping into a soc science classroom, I was certain Brown, Freeman, etc.., were greatly exaggerating. They weren’t. I was taught madness and force-fed political bullshit. America is not becoming less religious, its wrong to judge other cultures, apes can learn to talk, Margaret Mead’s work was important and studious, Ruth Benedict’s work was important and astute, the incest taboo is arbitrarily culture, primitive peoples are more peaceable, the sapir-whorf hypothesis is viable and important, civilization is a corrupting influence, language has no principle base in biology, etc.., all of this is total bullshit in my brand new textbook and it was supported with bullshit arguments and statistics. Tell me Chris- how high does the bullshit pile need to be before we can agree there is a big systemic problem in this field? How many Freeman’s, how many Meads? How many empty, nonsensical and political claims shoved down students’ throats? How many exceptions ‘till it is the rule?

I’m not anyone anyone should listen to- I’m just a DoD mailman with a gun. So don’t. Listen to Oakley, Brown, Freeman, Pinker, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Marc Hauser, Donald Symons, Napoleon Chagnon, Noam Chomsky. Listen to your own conscience when you try to answer Darwin’s ghost asking, why did it take over 100 years for my theory to revolutionize psychology?

So you’re saying it ‘happens all the time’ that scientists use lawsuits in order to avoid peer-review?

No, I’m saying that scientists get mad over criticisms of their work all the time. Does that seem odd to you?

I know of no other such example in geophysics.

How about Thomas Gold’s Deep Origins Hypothesis?

sate, if the social sciences are so corrupt, then why are you citing renowned people like Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker as examples? These people are not victims being crucified—they are respected scientists. Yes, of course there is controversy: do you expect science to proceed without disagreement?

I’d like to ask exactly what behavior you find so objectionable. So far, you have only argued that some scientists don’t accept the work of other scientists—and then you use wild words like “taboo”, “banned”, and “rage”. So let’s examine your words, starting with “Taboo”. You maintain that the work of Mr. Freeman is taboo. Yet I can easily find items on the Internet from reputable sources that discuss Mr. Freeman’s work in the open. If Mr. Freeman’s work were taboo, there would be no such discussions. So you are wrong in claiming that Mr. Freeman’s work is taboo.

Next we turn to “banned”. From where has it been banned? Can you cite any forum or publication which has declared that arguments sympathetic to Mr. Freeman’s work will not be tolerated? I doubt it. So your use of the term “banned ” is incorrect.

Next, let’s talk about “rage”. I’m happy to stipulate that some scientists reacted to Mr. Freeman’s work with rage. How does this injure anybody else? I’ve known a lot of scientists and I have found them to be emotionally less mature than most people. So what? Does a scientific result require articulation by a suitably emotionally balanced person in order to be acceptable to you? If so, you’d better wipe out a lot of scientists. Newton was a pretty vicious character, and he demonstrated rage on a number of occasions. Are you therefore going to dismiss Newton’s Laws of physics?

As to the material you cite as being taught in your course, I am surprised that you took such a lousy course; certainly many the statements you attribute to this course are not representative of the social sciences as I know them. Let’s go through them:

1. America is not becoming less religious. That statement is difficult to assess because it’s unclear whether it applies to people or the political system.
2. It’s wrong to judge other cultures. Actually, I’ll agree with this, to some degree. I’m happy to judge specific aspects of specific cultures, but the starting point of any assessment of another culture is the assumption that the culture evolved in response to environmental pressures, and without knowing those pressures it’s impossible to form a rational assessment of any culture.
3. Apes can learn to talk. Gee, I never saw this claim anywhere. I did see claims that a few carefully educated apes appeared to be able to manipulate symbols. Perhaps you misunderstood what was being taught?
4. Margaret Mead’s work was important and studious. Well, it was certainly important. And she was a scholar. It appears that she screwed up badly with the Samoa work. Does that disqualify the entire body of her work?
5. Ruth Benedict’s work is important and astute. I won’t offer a judgement here.
6. The incest taboo is arbitrary culture. Gee, that’s not what I have read. Everything I’ve seen suggests that the incest taboo is almost universal and certainly not arbitrary.
7. Primitive peoples are more peaceful. Again, this isn’t what I have read. You must have gotten a strange textbook.
8. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is viable and important. Be careful here—I’m well versed in Sapir-Whorf and it is the strong interpretation of the hypothesis that has been discredited. The weak interpretation is almost universally accepted.
9. Civilization is a corrupting influence. Boy, you REALLY got into a weirdo course! I’ve never seen anything remotely like that in all my reading.
10. Language has no principle base in biology. There are some people who still hold onto that view—and they’re a diminishing minority. Chomsky dealt the death blow to that idea 50 years ago.

I too would react negatively if all this stuff were dumped on me in a course. I suspect that the course you are taking, or the instructor of the course, is pretty wacko. But that’s one of the things about the social sciences: there are all kinds of people out there with all kinds of different views. Have you run into any Marxist historians yet? They’re quite distinctive and they can make a pretty impressive case (although I don’t buy it to the extent that they’re selling it). If you want to see some really wild differences of opinion, try poli sci: a good poli sci degree will have you spinning in every different direction.

Here’s our problem: you make a generalization that applies to tens of thousands of instances. You support this generalization with three examples. You point out that you could offer more examples. How do we know that your three examples are representative of the tens of thousands of other instances?

We do have one indirect indicator: how well received were these examples? Did other social scientists ignore the many flaws in them? Where was it published?  I did a quick search and discovered that Wikipedia has an article on the Zimbardo experiment; the Wikipedia article states that “The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific.” If this statement be true, then it is unfair to condemn social science for an experiment that social scientists themselves condemn.

The internet has changed the lives of skeptics—it is much easier to locate info about Zimbardo Milgram etc. than at the time they did their studies.  I wasn’t aware of the critiques until this podcast (though I never looked up these guys on the internet). 

In response to Chris, one would have to dig into this fairly deeply and determine if the criticism was by social scientists and whether it was timely. In Zimbardo’s case, it might indeed be that his study entered popular culture, took off as a meme, and that regardless of the critiques of true scientists it became common knowledge….

Although I’m not inclined to wade too deeply into this interesting discussion, I do have a question and a few references to share.

QUESTION: Could someone kindly explain what’s considered a “social science” in the context of this discussion?  More specifically, what’s considered “social-science research”?  Some particular broad disciplines have been mentioned in this thread (e.g., anthropology, history, psychology); in the interest of being able to find relevant evidence to support (or refute) claims being made, however, a well-defined set might help ensure we’re all referring to the same thing.  When specifying this set of objects (or phenomena), bear in mind that some disciplines are rather heterogeneous w/r/t their topics and methods (e.g., APA has over 50 divisions, ranging from some very like biology to some very like anthropology or sociology).

REFERENCES: Seeing as this discussion seemed to be started by comments about psychology as a specific example of a social science, below are three articles about the scientific “status” of psychology.  One involves empirically assessing college students’ perceptions of psychology as a science, and the other two include attempts to objectively assess scientific features of psychology (and other disciplines).  (These may not be immediately available to everyone.)

  Friedrich, J. (1996). Assessing students’ perceptions of psychology as a science: Validation of a self-report measure. Teaching of Psychology, 23, 6-13.
 
Abstract: Training in psychology emphasizes the scientific method as the basis for knowledge claims about thought and behavior. Students are regularly evaluated in terms of their mastery of methodological and statistical Principles, bur little attention has been paid to assessing the degree to which students endorse the notion that psychology is, indeed, a science. Several studies are reported that validate a self-report measure of this construct. The Psychology as Science Scale is shown to be a reliable measure that predicts a range of construct-relevant attitudinal and performance criteria. Possible research uses of the measure, as well as broader issues surrounding the general public’s epistemological assumptions concerning psychology, are discussed.

  Hedges, L. V. (1987). How hard is hard science, how soft is soft science? The empirical cumulativeness of research. American Psychologist, 42, 443-455.

Abstract: This article notes the parallels between methods used in the quantitative synthesis of research in the social and in the physical sciences. Essentially identical methods are used to test the consistency of research results in physics and in psychology. These methods can be used to compare the consistency of replicated research results in physics and in the social sciences. The methodology is illustrated with 13 exemplary reviews from each domain. The exemplary comparison suggests that the results of physical experiments may not be strikingly more consistent than those of social or behavioral experiments. The data suggest that even the results of physical experiments may not be cumulative in the absolute sense by statistical criteria.

  Simonton, D. K. (2004). Psychology’s status as a scientific discipline: Its empirical placement within an implicit hierarchy of the sciences. Review of General Psychology, 8, 59-67.

Abstract: Psychology’s standing within a hypothesized hierarchy of the sciences was assessed in a 2-part analysis. First, an internally consistent composite measure was constructed from 7 primary indicators of scientific status (theories-to-laws ratio, consultation rate, obsolescence rate, graph prominence, early impact rate, peer evaluation consensus, and citation concentration). Second, this composite measure was validated through 5 secondary indicators (lecture disfluency, citation immediacy, anticipation frequency, age at receipt of Nobel Prize, and rated disciplinary hardness). Analyses showed that the measures reflected a single dimension on which 5 disciplines could be reliably ranked in the following order: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. Significantly, psychology placed much closer to biology than to sociology, forming a pair of life sciences clearly separated from the other sciences.

Very interesting stuff, Adam. I’m surprised, though, at the very notion of “scientific status”. I would not expect any kind of “status system” for any area of human inquiry. Let’s contrast two extremes: physics, about as hard a science as there is, and history, about as soft a field as there can be. Does physics have higher status than history? Not in my book. Yes, it’s more “hard sciency”—but that doesn’t mean anything. History is a lot more “historistical” than physics, and that doesn’t make history any better or worse than physics. Indeed, if history were to try to use the methods of hard science, it would produce garbage results.

The argument can be made that physicists can build big bombs and historians cannot. I would counterargue that historians can show us the path to peace, something that physicists cannot do. Let me relate an interesting story. Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August, about the launching of World War I, was published in 1962. Later that year came the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy had just read the book and recommended it to other members of his Cabinet so that they might better understand the dynamics. Indeed, one of the crucial moments in the crisis came when Kennedy hammered home his insistence that the Navy remain within the constraints he had specified. Tuchman’s book had emphasized that, in August of 1914 the generals exacerbated the crisis with overly aggressive behavior, and the politicians had been unable to control their own generals. Kennedy made certain that this did not occur in October 1962. So physicists can boast that they bestowed atomic weaponry upon the world—but how many of them can claim, as historians reasonably could, that they prevented a nuclear war?

Every field has its own methods and its own value. I find it rather childish to set up some sort of ranking system based on use of quantitative methods and the scientific method.

Every field has its own methods and its own value. I find it rather childish to set up some sort of ranking system based on use of quantitative methods and the scientific method.

Not every field ... psychic research? Cereology? Phrenology?

Clearly there are some fields that have little or no value; clearly there are fields that are proto-scientific (here one thinks, e.g., of studies in sociobiology, perhaps economics). Clearly also there are some fields that have methods and value but aren’t scientific—perhaps history, but more clearly liberal arts fields like english, drama, painting, etc.

One way to make a rough delineation has to do with predictive capacities. To what extent do the studies provide predictions which are accurate, and to what degree are they accurate? Liberal arts fields don’t even try to make predictions. That’s not the point. Psychic research and phrenology made predictions that turned out false.

One concern about making these sorts of rankings is the implication that (e.g.) psychologists just aren’t doing their jobs very well. They should buckle down and do good work like the quantum physicists are doing. This clearly isn’t a fair critique—the subject matter of psychology involves large systems which are inherently many orders of magnitude more complicated than the systems typically studied in physics class. In other words, physics gains in predictive adequacy by narrowing and simplifying its focus. But that doesn’t mean there is no value to a rough ranking of this sort. To take an example, it should lead us to believe that if psychology asserts something which is physically impossible, we should expect that it’s the psychologists who’ve made the mistake and not the physicists.

Good point, Doug. Let me amend your suggestion so that we multiply the predictive power of a field by its social utility. Astronomers can predict that, if you watch for meteors on a special date at a special time, you will see more meteors than you normally would. That’s a prediction, and it can be quite reliable. But it’s not very useful. On the other hand, Barbara Tuchman’s book made a vague prediction to Mr. Kennedy: if you don’t keep the generals on a tight leash, they might turn a diplomatic crisis into a shooting war. As predictions go, it was pretty vague and impossible to verify. Yet its social utility in this case was probably greater than all the astronomy in human history.

This still leaves the arts out in the cold, but they operate in a completely different dimension. I’m considering only the pursuit of knowledge of the world.

Chris: ...I’m saying that scientists get mad over criticisms of their work all the time. Does that seem odd to you?

When it is inexplicably often, neurotic or extreme.. then yes. Same for Wegener’s critics who said things like “utter damned rot!”. Hardly a scientific rebuttal.

How about Thomas Gold’s Deep Origins Hypothesis?

Vaguely aware, but not aware of any climate of “taboo” or prohibited research topics re: petroleum origins. The contrary seems the case as much research is done on both sides. Is there a digestible account of the debate in book-form?

sate, if the social sciences are so corrupt, then why are you citing renowned people like Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker as examples? These people are not victims being crucified—they are respected scientists. Yes, of course there is controversy: do you expect science to proceed without disagreement?

Those “renowned” people are only respected in limited circles and are often part of the insurrection against the Old Guard social science. I said in one of my first posts that there is something like a civil war in psychology.. which is the point. Those renowned people remain controversial and unbelieved. Try telling a social science major (whatever stripe) that rape isnt about sex, that ethical emotions are inborn, that there is no pay gap between men and women (once you factor out preference), etc.., and you will see what dogma is. The president of Harvard was fired as he cited research of these new “renowned” people- he isn’t a victim?
I’ve never said I don’t expect disagreement or that that is the problem. In science I would say disagreement is the solution- peer review. The disagreement is often not over who or what theory is correct but over whether or not you get to disagree. The AAA was essentially voting to tell Freeman he was not allowed to disagree, the content was irrelevant.

I’d like to ask exactly what behavior you find so objectionable. So far, you have only argued that some scientists don’t accept the work of other scientists—and then you use wild words like “taboo”, “banned”, and “rage”. So let’s examine your words, starting with “Taboo”. You maintain that the work of Mr. Freeman is taboo. Yet I can easily find items on the Internet from reputable sources that discuss Mr. Freeman’s work in the open. If Mr. Freeman’s work were taboo, there would be no such discussions. So you are wrong in claiming that Mr. Freeman’s work is taboo.

Mr. Freeman overcame 80 years of suppression of a taboo truth- that Mead was a fraud or incompetent. The fact that the lies did not survive beyond 8 decades because someone fought bitterly to overcome is proof of a prevailing dogmatic establishment, not proof there isn’t one. I actually used the word taboo citing Donald Brown not Derek Freeman. Brown talks about the study of universals being essentially taboo. You will find Brown has become rather accepted as well to some degree but his is another cautionary tale of a won battle in a bitter conflict. He says flatly his subject matter flies in the face of all of his education as an anthropologist and primarily for ideological not academic reasons.

Next we turn to “banned”. From where has it been banned? Can you cite any forum or publication which has declared that arguments sympathetic to Mr. Freeman’s work will not be tolerated? I doubt it. So your use of the term “banned ” is incorrect.

I never used the term banned. I quoted Brown (not Freeman) using it. He said “...all but banned” indicating a dogmatic attitude. I wonder if you have read my posts as carefully as you may.

Next, let’s talk about “rage”. I’m happy to stipulate that some scientists reacted to Mr. Freeman’s work with rage. How does this injure anybody else? I’ve known a lot of scientists and I have found them to be emotionally less mature than most people. So what? Does a scientific result require articulation by a suitably emotionally balanced person in order to be acceptable to you? If so, you’d better wipe out a lot of scientists. Newton was a pretty vicious character, and he demonstrated rage on a number of occasions. Are you therefore going to dismiss Newton’s Laws of physics?

It injures any honest scientist who wants a fair hearing, not vitriolic nay-saying demagogues who don’t care a wit about the content of their research. Most people simply don’t have the stomach for the level of acrimony people like Freeman had to endure. Freeman’s case spells out in no uncertain terms: here is the price you will pay for going against the Establishment.
Again you misunderstand.. the crux of my alarm is not that there is disagreement or high emotions- that’s normal. When the disagreement amounts to “you are not allowed to ASK that question” something is terribly wrong. When the fury comes not from content but sheerly from the act of disagreement, there is a deeper problem. Dogmatism is cancer here. Yes people are flawed and there is an element of it in every human endeavor but in some it is typical and in control of said endeavor.  By the way when Einstein effectively did dismiss (or rather, update) Newton’s physics, no one voted him down as unscientific.

Chris: As to the material you cite as being taught in your course, I am surprised that you took such a lousy course; certainly many the statements you attribute to this course are not representative of the social sciences as I know them. Let’s go through them:

I only listed items in brief and from the top of my head. Generally I could have randomly opened the textbook to any page and found a questionable concept or outright falsehood within a page or so. The school was CSN (http://www.csn.edu) which enrolls 40,000 students each term. I no longer have the text, but it was the standard anth textbook, 2003 I think (new that year) by William A. Haviland if you wish to track it down.

America is not becoming less religious. That statement is difficult to assess…

Actually the point was the modern world is not becoming less religious. The US was cited as an example of this alongside a vague list of things that scare or prompt people to believe (such as nuclear war, global warming, terrorism etc) though no evidence or study was cited indicating any of those things actually cause anyone to be more religious. The US, particularly a few small Christian denominations were cited to indicate growth of religion for the entire western world. In other words, the US, the freakish statistical outlier among western states was held up as a typical example of western states. This is first rate bullshitery. Not a single word mentioned the decline of religion in the rest of the first world, let alone any attempt to explain it. This is not bad research or a dissenting perspective.. it is a brazen lie.

It’s wrong to judge other cultures. Actually, I’ll agree with this, to some degree. ....

How the culture evolved is a separate topic, Chris. That would be the study of said culture, which would be fine. Actually I don’t care if you agree or disagree.. the fact is telling me the correct moral position I need to take on any issue is outside of science. It is the domain of politics and ideology- why is it being shoved down my throat in a “science” class dressed up as content?

Apes can learn to talk. Gee, I never saw this claim anywhere. I did see claims that a few carefully educated apes appeared to be able to manipulate symbols. Perhaps you misunderstood what was being taught?

You’re asking the wrong question, Chris. The better question is, why does it matter if apes can talk, if dogs can rollerskate or if squirrels can waterski? Scientifically, it is basically irrelevant. To the ideologically compromised it matters. Why? because culture hinges on language and if language is biologically rooted (and it is) then it means there is a biological basis for culture. This would be the dreaded determinism that social science has always desperately fought against because they believe the mere idea of determinism leads to justifying classism/sexism/racism. Also many believe that “ape rights” hinge on how much like us they are so apes need language to have proto-culture and thus gain protective rights. Now, it does not matter if you or I think apes should have “people” status- the point I am making here is anth is desperate to “scientifically” show apes can talk for political reasons. The truth is, they can’t and yes they can do some sort of symbol manipulation but the fact has not stopped the endless parade of disingenuous or incompetent researchers from trying for the last 60+ years. Often in embarrassingly awful attempts.

4. Margaret Mead’s work was important and studious. Well, it was certainly important…

Mead’s god-like stature for empty, meaningless field work suppressed legitimate study for decades. Only religion has otherwise been so acutely lethal to honest inquiry. Mead’s only legacy of import is “how not to do science”.

6. The incest taboo is arbitrary culture. Gee, that’s not what I have read. Everything I’ve seen suggests that the incest taboo is almost universal and certainly not arbitrary.

The text cites ancient Egypt, a time when incest was seemingly openly permitted. This is a comically anemic support for such a grand claim but it was nonetheless the claim.

7. Primitive peoples are more peaceful. ...You must have gotten a strange textbook.

I strenuously objected in class, and even brought in my own sources. The text cited a few rare bands.. as before citing the extreme outlier as typical.

10. Language has no principle base in biology. There are some people who still hold onto that view—and they’re a diminishing minority.

Aye. But I am not soliciting your opinion. I am telling you what was taught to me, as fact, in a classroom.

I too would react negatively if all this stuff were dumped on me in a course. I suspect that the course you are taking, or the instructor of the course, is pretty wacko. But that’s one of the things about the social sciences: there are all kinds of people out there with all kinds of different views…

I wouldn’t say I reacted negatively so much as I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone; I would look around me to see if anyone noticed we were in the grip of madness and insanity- but in true TZ form I was the only one who seemed to notice.
This was only one course but the others I had reinforced the same ideas and positions where overlap exists at all- including other professors, other text authors, and a school in a different state entirely. It strains reason to imagine I coincidentally had many wacko classes and that they are all wacko in precisely the way criticized by people like Pinker.
I could go into more examples but to do so convincingly I would have to again research those subjects and people and I am out of time. Perhaps I will revisit later. I recommend Pinker’s The Blank Slate as a good review of many of my own objections

I looked up that textbook on Amazon.com and there isn’t much information there. So I decided to see what information there is on the web. I started with Wikipedia, looking at its articles on cultural anthropology, social anthropology, and ethnology. The only mention of Margaret Mead in these articles was 1) a mention of her Samoa book in a list of important books in the early history of ethnology; and 2) her inclusion on a list of notable ethnologists. There was no mention of her on either the cultural anthropology or the social anthropology articles. The Encylopedia Brittanica entry on her mentions that her book on Samoa was controversial because she relied on direct observations rather than more rigorous statistical methods.

The problem with rejecting Ms. Mead is that she did a great deal more than Coming of Age in Samoa. She was an early feminist, a prolific writer, and a popularizer of social sciences. Albert Einstein was dead wrong about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t tarnish his stature in the world of physics because he did so many other things. The same thing can be said of Margaret Mead.

I spent some time researching the history of this controversy and it’s very complicated. I think your presentation is oversimplified in a misleading way. Yes, Margaret Mead is revered by anthropologists as one of the major figures in its history. But there’s plenty of criticism of Ms. Mead to be found. Indeed, my impression is that most anthropologists now conceded that her work on Samoa was wrong. Nevertheless, they honor Ms. Mead for her other work.

Another factor in this is that Mr. Freeman’s attack on her was itself rather acidulous. There had been criticisms of her work before Mr. Freeman came along. There’s also plenty of evidence that Ms. Mead’s work was not well-received by the academic community in the 20s and 30s. Again, this suggests that she is honored for a lifetime of work, not a single book.

Another factor at work is the nature of anthropological evidence. Some anthropologists prefer the more limited but more rigorous statistical methods; Ms. Mead was in the opposing camp that favored observation and analysis over numeric data.

Yet another element of controversy was the question of the degree to which the anthropologist’s presence altered the behavior of people being studied. This controversy also figured in the Freeman-Mead controversy.

But the core controversy involved “cultural determinism”, initially articulated by Mr. Boas. Ms. Mead apparently set out to Samoa to prove Mr. Boas’ hypothesis, and fudged her data accordingly. The cultural determinism controversy is part of the larger nature/nurture controversy that has been going on for decades. And that controversy is now losing some of its heat as some of the claims of both camps are being demonstrated to be true. The growing consensus is that culture builds on a foundation of genetic predispositions.

Ironically enough, I’m very much on the side of the people arguing nature (and I read The Blank Slate when it first came out). And I have actually taken some serious heat for writing about this. An article about my work that mentioned a few things about genetic determinism generated a comment that I deserved to have a rusty spike rammed up my, er, exhaust port. So yes, some of these people are pretty emotional about it. But I do not condemn the social sciences in general, or anthropology in particular, for the exuberance of some partisans.

Thought this might be of interest.

Massimo Pigliucci - Strong inference and the distinction between soft and hard science, part I

http://www.rationallyspeaking.org/

Massimo Pigliuuci has posted his follow up piece on the distinction between soft and hard science [part II].

http://www.rationallyspeaking.org/

I find this entry even more fascinating than the first. Massimo throws out a couple zingers, my favorite being the quote below. The first sentence is familiar as it has been expressed widely, but it plays a nice lead up to the conclusion of what follows.

The realization is beginning to dawn even on molecular biologists that the golden era of fast and sure progress may be over, and that we are now faced with unwieldy mountains of details about the biochemistry and physiology of living organisms that are very difficult to make sense of. In other words, we are witnessing the transformation of a hard science into a soft one!

Chris: The problem with rejecting Ms. Mead is that she did a great deal more than Coming of Age in Samoa. She was an early feminist, a prolific writer, and a popularizer of social sciences. Albert Einstein was dead wrong about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t tarnish his stature in the world of physics because he did so many other things. The same thing can be said of Margaret Mead.

I spent some time researching the history of this controversy and it’s very complicated. I think your presentation is oversimplified in a misleading way. Yes, Margaret Mead is revered by anthropologists as one of the major figures in its history. But there’s plenty of criticism of Ms. Mead to be found. Indeed, my impression is that most anthropologists now conceded that her work on Samoa was wrong. Nevertheless, they honor Ms. Mead for her other work.

I presented a cliff-notes version fit for a forum. Provided details that you could not call “oversimplifying” would actually be much more damning. I wrote a paper on Mead. As part of my research I read Coming of Age in Samoa as well as Freeman’s The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead and Oran’s rebuttle (of sorts) to Freeman Not Even Wrong. Admitting Mead’s work was “wrong” is a bit like admitting Enron had an imperfect business plan. Anth has been forced to downgrade its heroine rather against its will as we have seen. Now they focus on her “other work”.
So your (or their?) claim is that in Samoa she was either incompetent to the point of absurdity or a lying fraud .. who was then exhalted for her awesome field work and that this praise led her to change her ways and suddenly become an honest meticulous little scientist? Sure, nothing implausible about that. If only Enron could get the same PR agents as Mead.
Let’s look at some of her other awesome fieldwork. She went to New Guinea.. and told the world about the Chambri and the Arapesh-
Pinker: She called the Arapesh “gentle”; they were headhunters…
She said that the Tchambuli (now Chambri -s) reversed our sex roles, the men wearing curls and makeup. In fact, the men beat their wives, exterminated neighboring tribes, and treated homicide as a milestone in a young man’s life which entitled him to wear the face paint that Mead thought was so effeminate.(How the Mind Works, p426-7)

What a wonderful coincidence that Mead had a strong desire to promote feminism and her field work subjects just happened to prove her point and along just the axis that she needed it to. Except that it was wrong, maybe a lie. Tell me, is it in the interest of feminism to spread lies meant to buttress feminist claims? If it is not, then Mead’s vaunted contribution to feminism is suspect. In my view, people like Mead with a casual disinterest in what the facts are, are the reason a huge number of people who share the goals of feminism would never, ever want to be called a “feminist”.

Chris:Another factor at work is the nature of anthropological evidence. Some anthropologists prefer the more limited but more rigorous statistical methods; Ms. Mead was in the opposing camp that favored observation and analysis over numeric data.

This is apologetic nonsense though, when it comes to Mead. Okay so you’re big on observation and analysis? Here are quotes from Mead herself, notes I made on my own while reading her book.

“Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa” (Mead, 105)
Two pages later..
”…in olden days, if his heart was not softened, he might take a club and together with his relatives go out and kill those(appeasement party of the adulterer against his wife) who sit without.” (Mead, 107)

Yeah.. no jealousy or exclusiveness there, apart from the times they kill adulterers. In her summations she reported the second quote as factual. My critique here is not that she lacks rigorous statistics, but that she’s brazenly lying to us (assuming she is not severely mentally deficient). I could go on.. she had zero male informants but felt totally at liberty to discuss the life of males in detail. She said youth delinquency was very low while her own notes showed it to be very high..

Chris:..the core controversy involved “cultural determinism”, initially articulated by Mr. Boas. Ms. Mead apparently set out to Samoa to prove Mr. Boas’ hypothesis, and fudged her data accordingly. The cultural determinism controversy…. So yes, some of these people are pretty emotional about it. But I do not condemn the social sciences in general, or anthropology in particular, for the exuberance of some partisans.

The controversy is scientifically meaningless however. It proves the thesis that Anth. and sister disciplines hinge on ideology whereas any science is inflicted with ideological problems they are not actually generated, driven, and defined by them. We don’t get to make up “wouldnt it be nice” facts we think support our social agenda. The facts are what they are. How they impact our ideology is irrelevant to their truth. The idea is lost of the Boasian dynasty and its faithful descendants.. to this very day. Their rule is over. Their legacy, sadly, remains. It isn’t possible to draw a box called “social science” around this group of people.. at the start I merely said social science has a long way to go to overcome its shady past.

You know, sate, we really should just get down to the basics: you’re mad because you took some courses that you didn’t like, you disagreed with the professors, and you may have gotten some low grades because of those disagreements. Because you’re mad, you badmouth anthropology and the social sciences. Your comments here are not reflective of a reasoned, dispassionate analysis of a field of human inquiry—you’re pissed and you want to wreak some verbal revenge. I realize now that I’m wasting my time pitting reason against anger. My advice to you is to simply forget it for now. After you’ve cooled down—a year or a decade from now—you might want to explore some of these fields independently. I have found coursework to be largely a waste of time; the great majority of my education comes from my own reading. I encounter lousy books sometimes, but I don’t react by badmouthing an entire discipline; instead, I resolve never to read anything by that author again. There are some truly fascinating books on related subjects. Among them, I recommend:

Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance. by Steven Goldberg. Super Politically Incorrect! Great fun!
When Wish Replaces Thought: Why so much of what you believe is wrong. also by Steven Goldberg. Cranky sociologist cuts loose about everything
The Evolution of Civilizations. Carroll Quigley
Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. by Johann Huizinga. 70 years old and a classic
Archaeology and Language, by Colin Renfrew. A very nice synthesis of archaeology and linguistics, although he’s probably wrong.

I think that some of these books might well reverse your ugly perception of these fields.

You know, sate, we really should just get down to the basics: you’re mad because you took some courses that you didn’t like, you disagreed with the professors, and you may have gotten some low grades because of those disagreements. Because you’re mad, you badmouth anthropology and the social sciences. Your comments here are not reflective of a reasoned, dispassionate analysis of a field of human inquiry—you’re pissed and you want to wreak some verbal revenge. I realize now that I’m wasting my time pitting reason against anger. My advice to you is to simply forget it for now. After you’ve cooled down—a year or a decade from now—you might want to explore some of these fields independently. I have found coursework to be largely a waste of time; the great majority of my education comes from my own reading. I encounter lousy books sometimes, but I don’t react by badmouthing an entire discipline; instead, I resolve never to read anything by that author again.

Must be nice being able to dismiss me, and my cited evidence, on the basis of ad hominem vendetta-laying. I never got bad grades. The paper I wrote about Mead (which I called Drunk on Mead: 80 Years of Thought Pollution)? She gave it an A and held it aloft to the class and said ‘this is the best student paper I’ve ever seen’. She also had written on it “thesis well supported”. I always knew the “correct” answer on the test, even if it was also the false answer. I did fine in Soc. My gender studies prof loved me. You’re wrong on both counts. If I had an irrational grudge with the field based on a few isolated classes or books I’d never cite a Freeman, Brown, Pinker, Diamond (Diamond’s essay “Race without Color” was actually an assignment in one class), etc.., let alone commend their work- and I surely do. That list is much longer than I’ve ever mentioned here. Moreover, lots of people in those disciplines echo my criticism. Do they all also have an ax to grind? Strains imagination to think so. Is it possible that every text, class, teacher I’ve had in multiple schools in different states at different times all were “bad” in precisely the same way? The same way criticized by many in social science? Strains statistical probability to silly levels to think so. Maybe them Klansmen are OK guys- you’ve just only seen the “bad” ones. Such a rush to judgment.

Second, I am angry. But it isn’t personal. I am angry at injustice, dishonesty, and betrayal. I’m sad when ego prevents the advancement of knowledge. I’m upset seeing teachers, an almost sacrosanct position of trust and authority, feeding their students misinformation in a supposed institution of learning. I’m pained that bullshit research informs policy makers which ends in laws that fail to protect people they are meant to. I have ideals. When they get trashed, I become upset. The day that changes, I will no longer be alive.
I will get a chance to explore, as you say, this year. This fall will see my transfer to the University of Illinois for a different adventure. Should it be you are more correct or I.. es macht nicht as the germans say, I will bend toward whatever is truer without hesitation.

It’s good that you got good grades; at least your anger isn’t due to that. But it seems that you are changing your drift here. Earlier your complaint was, as I understand it, against the social sciences in general. Now, well, I can’t tell at all what ax you’re grinding, other than (perhaps) anger at Margaret Mead. Now you’re citing lots of teachers and writers as sharing your thoughts. But I have read some of those authors and I certainly don’t recall them dismissing anthropology and indeed the entirety of the social sciences outright. You’ve been very specific about one anthropologist (Margaret Mead) and one book (the textbook from your course). And I’ll be happy to join you in jumping up and down on both of those, merely because I don’t much care about either. But if you are still maintaining that anthropology and the other social sciences are a bunch of bull—all I can say is, that’s anger, not reason.

Fearing that I had done you an injustice, I decided to go back and re-read the last page or so of your posts, so as to get a clearer idea of what it is that you are so exercised about. Our discussion of Margaret Mead, I think, clouded that issue. I think that the central thesis that you are presenting is summarized in this statement of yours:

It proves the thesis that Anth. and sister disciplines hinge on ideology whereas any science is inflicted with ideological problems they are not actually generated, driven, and defined by them. We don’t get to make up “wouldnt it be nice” facts we think support our social agenda. The facts are what they are. How they impact our ideology is irrelevant to their truth. The idea is lost of the Boasian dynasty and its faithful descendants.. to this very day. Their rule is over. Their legacy, sadly, remains. It isn’t possible to draw a box called “social science” around this group of people.. at the start I merely said social science has a long way to go to overcome its shady past.

And this statement contains the contradiction that has been tripping me up. It starts off with a strong statement:

“Anth. and sister disciplines hinge on ideology”

and I certainly reject that claim. But then later on you make this statement:

” The idea is lost of the Boasian dynasty and its faithful descendants.. to this very day. Their rule is over.”

So your real statement is that SOME anthropologists were unreasonable, not the entire discipline. Or perhaps that the entire discipline was wrong at some point in the past, but is healing now. I’m not sure, because your statements bounce around quite a bit. Now, I hate it when people play gotcha games and rip quotes out of context and juxtapose them to suggest false conclusions, so I’m going to ask you to clarify your meaning. Specifically, are you condemning:

1. A school of thought within anthropology and/or the social sciences that you find unscientific

or

2. Anthropology and/or the social sciences in general.

1. A school of thought within anthropology and/or the social sciences that you find unscientific

or

2. Anthropology and/or the social sciences in general.

2. You ask for evidence, and of course whatever my answer is is going to be specific disciplines and people. We started with sociology- Milgrom & Zimbardo as well as Barbara Oakley’s (not mine) observation of thousands of instances of use of a non-existent technical term. You then accused me of overgeneralizing from few accounts so I brought up Donald Brown, Derek Freeman. I mentioned like-minded critics Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides, Hauser, Symons, Chagnon, and Chomsky. I cited evidence that even today good scientifically-supported ideas are dogmatically rejected: Try telling a social science major (whatever stripe) that rape isnt about sex, that ethical emotions are inborn, that there is no pay gap between men and women (once you factor out preference), etc.., and you will see what dogma is. The president of Harvard was fired as he cited research of these new “renowned” people- he isn’t a victim? . You engaged me on Anth and Mead and I gamely went down that path with you. For all I care, we could have been talking about Stanley Milgrom, Edward Sapir, E.O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin, Alan & Beatrix Gardner, the history of PC thought on rape, B.F. Skinner, Michel Foucault and on and on..,

I have offered evidence from other people-people actually in the fields which neither of us are- that there are widespread, systemic problems. I already quoted Donald Brown saying as much. Here are a few more-

The evolutionary psychology of this book is a departure from the dominant view of the human mind in our intellectual tradition, which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science model (SSSM). The SSSM proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture. ...biological evolution, according to the SSSM, has been supersede by cultural evolution. Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society. Even reformers have accepted its framing of the issues…
The SSSM not only has become an intellectual orthodoxy but has acquired a moral authority. When sociobiologists first began to challenge it, they met with a ferocity that is unusual even by the standards of academic invective. The biologist E.O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific convention, and students yelled for his dismissal over bullhorns and put up posters urging people to bring noisemakers to his lectures. Angry manifestos and book-length denunciations were published by organizations with names like Science for the People and the Campaign Against Racism, IQ and the Class Society. In Not in Our Genes, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin dropped inuendoes about Donald Symons’ sex life and doctored a defensible passage of Richard Dawkins’ into an insane one (Dawkins said of the genes, “They created us, body and mind.”; The authors have it quoted repeatedly as “They control us, body and mind.”).

(How the Mind Works, p44-5) Bolded areas are mine.

They, in this case Pinker, Tooby and Cosmides, sure make it sound like a prevalent problem. Pinker immediately acknowledges his work is against the grain. T&C created the term, SSSM, which describes not a particular discipline or researcher but the Standard Social Science model- the politically-morally correct social science paradigm. Pinker notes the level of resistance is above and beyond expected academic resistance and conflict.

I am curious, what evidence would persuade you? You don’t like my emotion but don’t much argue the facts either. How big does the pile of bullshit have to be before it is a big problem for you? I guess so far it is manageable for you, for me.. not so much. Being something of an idealist though I do believe the honest will ultimately prevail and that the old ways will deteriorate under the fecundity of the new.
Thanks for the book list, by the way.

sate, my problem isn’t with the quality of the evidence you provide, or its magnitude, but with the conclusions you draw from it. Yes, you’ve presented lots of evidence of dogmatic behavior. But your point continues to escape me. I asked you pointblank whether you are condemning a school of thought or an entire discipline, and you didn’t answer my question. The conclusions that you do draw are all vaguely worded. For example, you use the evidence to come to the conclusion that “there are widespread, systemic problems”. What in blazes does that mean? Are these widespread systemic problems within the single discipline of anthropology, or are they within all the social sciences, or academia, or the United States, or humanity in general?

There are a number of other points I’d like to raise, but I don’t want to deflect your attention from the central question I am asking you. Since you didn’t answer my question, I will create a hypothesis regarding what I think to be your position, and you can correct my hypothesis. I infer that you are making the following claims:

1. There exists a school of thought characterized by Cosmides and Toobey’s term, the Standard Social Science Model
2. This school of thought dogmatically rejects all ideas inconsistent with the SSSM.
3. This school of thought constitutes the great majority of academics in the social sciences.
4. Members of this school of thought frequently attack dissenters viciously and injuriously.

My answer was 2. My conclusions are worded to the degree of precision commensurate with their scope.
If you don’t know what systemic means, grab a dictionary. It’s referent is the same as the SSSM.

OK, so you condemn anthropology and the social sciences in general, and you do not wish to avail yourself of the clarifying hypothesis that I offered. I shall proceed on the basis of your statement that you condemn anthropology and the social sciences in general.

Your statements contradict each other. On the one hand you condemn the social sciences in general, and on the other hand you quote approvingly the statements of many social scientists. It is therefore a trivially obvious conclusion that your case is nonsense.

Perhaps you would like to clarify your position? Or should we just leave it as nonsense?

Sometimes I think you are being deliberately thick and obtuse, Chris. But that can’t be right.

Think of it as an insurrection. One or more smaller factions rebelling against the fascist regime. I quote the rebels and condemn the regime.
Is this really so hard to understand? Wasn’t it clear enough in The Blank Slate, which you have read? That particular book is confined to the political battles within social science and to a degree, among the civilians as well.

OK, so let’s proceed with your metaphor. You condemn the entire regime of the social sciences, but not the rebels who oppose that regime. Hence you condemn William A. Haviland, author of the textbook you so denigrate, as one of the fascist rulers of the academic regime, while you praise Steven Pinker as an example of the rebels who are out to destroy that fascist regime.

William A. Haviland is an obscure professor at the University of Vermont; if you Google his name, you’ll get 14,300 hits. Steven Pinker is the Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology at MIT; if you Google his name, you’ll get 1,090,000 hits. So mighty Mr. Haviland is oppressing poor Steven Pinker from his omnipotent perch at the University of Vermont.

This is, of course, but a single example, but you cannot deny the fact that the very people you cite as rebels against the establishment are in fact some of the most honored and prestigious academics in the country. Sure, you might be able to make a case that such people were oppressed in the 1950s—even that would be difficult—but to suggest that this remains the case suggests to me that you have a very narrow perception of the size and breadth of the social sciences.

Here’s another example: you mentioned the case of E.O.Wilson having a pitcher of water poured on his head. Do you know anything about the circumstances of that attack? It was carried out by members of the International Committee Against Racism in 1977. I would hardly call those people representatives of the academic establishment—and the incident you cite took place 32 years ago! How has the Establishment reacted to Mr. Wilson? They have awarded him two Pulitzer Prizes, a Laureate from the International Academy of Humanism, and of course he occupies a prestigious chair. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has received the National Science Medal, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the ECI Prize, the Crafoord Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, a listing by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in America, the Lewis Thomas Prize… this rebel against the Establishment is certainly highly honored by the Establishment. Would you care to list the prizes awarded to some of his critics in the Establishment?

This world is much, much bigger than the classes you took, or the textbooks you read. There are tens to hundreds of thousands of social scientists (depending upon how you define your terms) pursuing a huge array of research topics and espousing a wide array of beliefs. And you, educated with a few dozen books and a handful of courses, claim to be educated enough to condemn this entire universe of thought (except for those noble rebels of whom you approve).

Have you compiled statistics on the citation records of the papers published by various academics on both sides of this overall controversy, so as to provide some solid evidence in support of your claims? Have you compiled lists of the academic awards won by the many partisans, to show some prejudice against those you favor? Have you examined the social science departments of any university other than CSN? Can you even produce a list of the ten currently most influential academic partisans on either side of this controversy? Do these partisans embrace the absurd beliefs you cited earlier? Do you even know what their arguments are?

I don’t think you know what you are talking about. I think you’re extrapolating a few bad experiences to an entire field of human inquiry.

The relative stature of Pinker vs Haviland vs Wilson is irrelevant. There are distinctive and recognized (and relative unknowns) on all sides. Pinker’s success makes it all the more striking that his science writing is often perforated with alibis and justifications having nothing to do with science. He has to walk on eggshells his detractors never do.  TBS is nothing but an impassioned defense for the mind science he champions. Why is such a defense necessary(and note, I don’t mean academic defense)? You never seem to ask these questions.

Have you compiled statistics on the citation records of the papers published by various academics on both sides of this overall controversy, so as to provide some solid evidence in support of your claims? Have you compiled lists of the academic awards won by the many partisans, to show some prejudice against those you favor? Have you examined the social science departments of any university other than CSN? Can you even produce a list of the ten currently most influential academic partisans on either side of this controversy? Do these partisans embrace the absurd beliefs you cited earlier? Do you even know what their arguments are?

This is really the point you want to get to, isn’t it. Not the right or wrong of it, but the sheer nerve of who am I to make such a claim and defame an institution larger than I could know. You thought it would be easy to call my bluff, that I wouldn’t really have much of a case. Now you’ve tired of wiki-googling your way into dead-ends.
I can’t answer most of those questions.. but then neither can you and your beliefs are just as strong as my own. Funny how that works.
I already told you that though- I told you two weeks ago, if you were paying any attention: I’m not anyone anyone should listen to- I’m just a DoD mailman with a gun. So don’t. That said, we all are obliged as skeptics to do the best we can with what we have. I have deferred to experts and heard from both or rather all sides. I have generalized from my experience as any rational person would. I also have not personally inventoried and conducted expansive metastudy of astrology either (have you?) but I trust the experts who have and find from their and my own experience that their conclusions are internally and externally consistent such that astrology can be defensibly dismissed. Tell you what- the first soc science course I have that doesn’t feel exactly like watching Fox News I will reconsider the dimensions of my condemnation.

My problem with your position, sate, is that you’re all too quick to condemn an entire field. I have already told you that I also disagree with the cultural determinists and I am very much in agreement with Mr. Pinker. But I confine my beliefs to matters over which there exists some clear evidence. I don’t just make things up, as you do:

He has to walk on eggshells his detractors never do.

This is a complete fabrication on your part. I have read much of Pinker’s popular writing, and I find him a top-notch writer largely because he’s willing to set aside the normal academic CYA language and get straight to the ideas. He doesn’t walk on eggshells.
You seem to think that I’m angered by your “sheer nerve”. It’s not nerve that I object to, it’s gross unfairness. I can disagree with the cultural determinists without condemning the whole kit ‘n kaboodle. You claim that cultural determinists constitute the “Powers that Be” within the social sciences. You’re just plain wrong. As I have already demonstrated, some of their worst enemies are highly honored members of the academic community. You’re generalizing from a handful of experiences with a small number of academics at one school to cover tens of thousands of people at thousands of schools. Extrapolation from a few data points works when you’re dealing with linear data. But it yields lousy results with people. Indeed, that’s one of the big points that they hammer away at in all the social sciences: you can’t extrapolate from your own personal experiences to draw conclusions about people in general. The eternal verities of one culture are the heresies of another. The gustatory delicacies of one group cause another group to gag. People can’t even agree on colors!

I have read the work of a great many social scientists; I have known a few personally; and I find them much like any group of intelligent people. There are some jerks, some geniuses, some plodders, and some scintillating wits. Among them are good writers and bad; ideologues and wide-open minds; conservatives and liberals; the humble and the vain. Condemning a large group of people based on their occupations is no different than condemning people for their creed, color, race, ethnicity, or gender. It’s narrow-minded and almost always wrong.

You write, “I have generalized from my experience as any rational person would.” No, generalizing from one’s own experience is usually the act of the uneducated. The whole point of learning is to benefit from a vastly larger range of experience than any individual could ever have. Yes, experience has its value in many situations. But it’s usually a lot smarter to rely on the experience of many people rather than your own narrow experience.

My problem with your position, sate, is that you’re all too quick to condemn an entire field. I have already told you that I also disagree with the cultural determinists and I am very much in agreement with Mr. Pinker. But I confine my beliefs to matters over which there exists some clear evidence. I don’t just make things up, as you do:

He has to walk on eggshells his detractors never do.

Actually I was surprisingly resistant to condemn the field. Before stepping into the classrooms I felt sure the critics had at a minimum overstated the case, that I was going to find out what you argue was true. I was shocked at how wrong I was. I made that up about Pinker did I?

I wish I could have discussed the evolutionary psychology of sexuality without the asides about feminist theory, but in today’s intellectual climate that is impossible. (How the Mind Works, p492)

The next page and a half explains why its OK for gender to be studied in EP. If you read Donald Brown’s The Universal People, you will find similar justifications just for talking about certain legitimate research topics.

You’re generalizing from a handful of experiences with a small number of academics at one school to cover tens of thousands of people at thousands of schools. Extrapolation from a few data points works when you’re dealing with linear data. But it yields lousy results with people. Indeed, that’s one of the big points that they hammer away at in all the social sciences: you can’t extrapolate from your own personal experiences to draw conclusions about people in general.

I have a lot of vectors, more than you probably have about lots of things you condemn. I have experience at 5 schools in 2 states and one overseas, one being UNLV. CSN is merely the one I had anth at. The textbooks are not single data points. They refer to countless pieces of research and researchers some of which I then researched independently. I mean what are you saying? Students should learn about say, Anthropology but assume everything in the textbook isn’t representative of anthropology? Learn it, but don’t learn anything? Like you I like to do my own independent study so I’ll add to my vectors at least a dozen books which in some way comment on the state of affairs of the social sciences which means each book is not a single data point either. Most of them talk about three or four dozen other researchers or studies. Then of course I have lovely podcasts like PoI where people like Barbara Oakley comment, again giving me a whole slew of new things to think about. Then there is the good ol’ internet and media.. news, TV (think Disc channel) papers, magazines, forums.. wiki-google.. usually not definitive but it can point you in new directions. Seems like I’ve got a pretty respectable cloud of data points. I think it could use some fleshing out myself.. but it is easily enough to notice broad patterns pretty easily.

Condemning a large group of people based on their occupations is no different than condemning people for their creed, color, race, ethnicity, or gender. It’s narrow-minded and almost always wrong.

I have already addressed this point. I said, It is not possible to draw a box around this group of people and call it social science… so let’s dispense with the strawmen OK?

No, generalizing from one’s own experience is usually the act of the uneducated. The whole point of learning is to benefit from a vastly larger range of experience than any individual could ever have.

I knew that you would mistake my meaning on this point. Generalization BAD screams the science monster! I was speaking more basically. Everyone, including haughty science guys have to make inferences just to get through any given day. Let’s say in your neighborhood you hear about 2 of your neighbors cars getting broken into. Do you infer the safety of your own is in jeopardy? Probably.. but wait you have no data, you’ve done no comprehensive study of the area.. you know no actual crime statistics. Should you still be extra careful about not leaving the IPod in the car? Probably. Another hypothetical.. let’s say a guy hates cheese. He really hates it. Because its sort of everywhere he has had to try all sorts of types of it. Every time it made him nauseous. Here a reasonably man will generalize- I don’t like cheese and should stay away. But wait, indignantly shouts Chris from the dairy, you’ve barely known a fraction of the thousands of cheeses from the world! You are a narrow-minded cheese bigot! The reasonable man knows that its easily possible somewhere, somehow one or several kinds of cheese would agree with ‘em alright but he also knows the dairy man is insane and silly. It all just leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He’d be a fool to pretend otherwise.

I’m impressed with your ability to dig up quotes to support your statements. However, you need to bring a bit more context to those quotes. Pinker is definitely on a rant against feminist theories (which I think is justified), and he makes a lot of strong statements about feminist theory:

“These non-sequiturs could be attached to any explanation, such as the common feminist theory that men are brainwashed by media images that glorify violence against women…” (pg 486)
“Thus it is ironic that… some academic feminists invoke a socially conditioned ‘interiorized authority’, ‘false consciousness’, or ‘inauthentic preference’ to explain away the inconvenient fact that people enjoy things that are alleged to oppress them.”
“Among the claims of ‘difference feminists’ are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning, that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate, that they do not argue from general moral principles, and other insults.”
“Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banal observations that natural selection designed women in part for growing and nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexual sex. They see in those observations the sexist and homophobic message that only traditional sexual roles are ‘natural’ and that alternative lifestyles are to be condemned.”
“The conventional wisdom of Marxists, academic feminists, and cafe intellectuals embraces some astonishing claims: that the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children is a historical aberration unknown in centuries past and in the non-Western world; that in primitive tribes marriage is uncommon and people are indiscriminately promiscuous and free of jealousy; that through history the bride and groom had no say in their marriage…”

You call statements like these ‘walking on eggshells’!?!?!?

You next provide a long list of your life experiences. I would expect anybody to have a long list of life experiences. But what support do those life experiences have on the issue before us? Does the fact that you took, say, a math course at college A provide you with any evidence in support of your claims? Does reading the newspaper provide you with any evidence in support of your claims? Reading novels? Watching television? Listening to podcasts? Participating in discussions on the Internet?

I have already addressed this point. I said, It is not possible to draw a box around this group of people and call it social science… so let’s dispense with the strawmen OK?

That’s a non-sequitur. It may well be that you have a valid point to make, but you certainly didn’t express it clearly here. Perhaps you could write a more detailed explanation of why condemning an entire group of people for their occupation is not comparable to condemning an entire group of people for their religion.

Your final paragraph offers a seriously flawed argument with two examples. In both examples, you show that a person is justified in drawing a generalization from a few data points. However, the flaw is that you do not consider the reliability of the conclusions drawn. You rigged both examples so that the unreliability of the conclusions was of no concern. In each case, taking action on the conclusion costs next to nothing. Let’s take your examples, exactly as worded, and change only the significance of the reliability:

“Let’s say in your neighborhood you hear about 2 of your neighbors being attacked by a guy wearing orange sneakers. Do you infer your own safety is in jeopardy? Probably.. but wait you have no data, you’ve done no comprehensive study of the area.. you know no actual crime statistics. Should you shoot the next guy you see wearing orange sneakers?”

Sure, it’s fine to draw quick and dirty conclusions when the cost of being wrong is insignificant. But if the cost of being wrong is significant, you need to be more careful. Now, perhaps you are being logically consistent here: perhaps you consider it insignificant to condemn an entire field of study on false premises. I don’t.

CC: You call statements like these ‘walking on eggshells’!?!?!?

Like you, I have a lot of respect for Pinker as a controversial firebrand. He has no qualms about puncturing PC bullshit but that isn’t what I meant. I was stating as he did he in the quote provided, that one should be able to talk about science without talking about politics. You can’t. Not even when you’re Steven Pinker, canadian firebrand extrordinaire. The fact that even the brave iconoclast has to stop and justify why its okay to talk about something is pretty telling about the importance of dogma over science.

Does reading the newspaper provide you with any evidence in support of your claims? Reading novels? Watching television? Listening to podcasts? Participating in discussions on the Internet?

I did not mention novels. By TV I specifically pointed to educational TV. Are they citable as specific evidence in this forum? Yes, because you made the claim that my experience was limited to few sources of exposure. It isn’t. By the way you commented on our own life experiences in post 64, seeming to think it was relevant. I guess it is only relevant when it is you doing the citing?

Perhaps you could write a more detailed explanation of why condemning an entire group of people for their occupation is not comparable to condemning an entire group of people for their religion.

It is comparable- and I will do it gladly. Consider for example, Moche people. They were natives of what is now Peru many centuries ago. Strong physical evidence indicates ritual human sacrifice was a big part of their religion, including that of children and teenagers. I hereby condemn the adherents of that religion as murderous and brutal.

Sure, it’s fine to draw quick and dirty conclusions when the cost of being wrong is insignificant. But if the cost of being wrong is significant, you need to be more careful. Now, perhaps you are being logically consistent here: perhaps you consider it insignificant to condemn an entire field of study on false premises. I don’t.

Actually I meant to say our inferences, science be damned, are often correct.. whatever the “significance”. You drive down the street and a green light is turns yellow. You prepare to stop. Why? You believe it will turn red. You further believe that this means other drivers will follow the opposite signals and act accordingly. Wow, that’s a lot of assuming about machines and the intimate psychology of a dozen nearby people. You’re not a machine programmer, city planner, nor psychologist. You’ve surveyed no data on the failure rates of street lights, conducted no study on sociological rule following. The significance is high- if you make the wrong choice you may be killed. You are making an inference based on your past experience and to some degree what experts have told you.
I have drawn inferences based on my past experience, and on what some experts have told me.

Since you condemn the adherants of the Moche religion with such confidence, I expect that you can provide me with an analysis of their diet. Please do so.

Your traffic light example is grossly flawed. I won’t even bother explaining why, because you don’t want to know why. You’re just arguing.

aye, I’m just arguing. But hey thanks for dropping by to pronounce me wrong. Your shining example of forensic valor has shown me the error of my ways and stands.

And where is your Moche diet?

I don’t do diet moche, I like my lattes straight. Fetch me one while you’re up won’t you?
I can’t be accused of arguing while sipping. win-win.

OK, then, I’ll explain this one for you. We don’t know much about the Moche diet, but we can make some statements on the limitations to that diet. In particular, they suffered from a lack of protein in their diets. They were coastal dwellers, so they did not have access to the camelids of the mountainous regions. They probably did have some guinea pig meat, and they probably had a few legumes. It is also likely that they had a little fish in their diet. But their dietary staples were maize and potatoes, two foodstuffs with very little protein. However, it is likely that none of these dietary sources provided sufficient protein to maintain the health of the population.

Of course, you didn’t know that, did you?

We also have excellent evidence from the Mesoamerican civilizations. They too suffered from protein deficiencies. Their staple, maize, has almost no protein. Again, they compensated for this with some legumes as well as dog meat, but again, these were insufficient sources of protein. Accordingly, the Mesoamerican civilizations responded to the challenge of insufficient protein by developing a method for recycling it: cannibalism. Their wars were not fought primarily for territory; obtaining meat was the purpose of war, in the form of captives. It appears that an aristocracy developed around the use of human protein. Members of the aristocracy enjoyed access to the protein, and also provided the warriors.

Of course, you didn’t know that, did you?

So it is likely that the Moche practiced cannibalism against their enemies as a source of protein. We aren’t sure of this, but my point is that you condemned another culture in utter ignorance of the social and environmental circumstances in which that culture operated. You made an absolute judgement of another culture’s morals without knowing that those practices could have arisen as a response to a severe dietary problem. It’s easy for you to condemn other cultures when you live in a culture with mountains of protein. But if our culture faced obliteration due to a serious protein shortage, we would do exactly the same thing. And you would probably be in there chowing down the protein with everybody else.

I suggest that you replace your smug moral superiority with a little education.

So, you decide to school me. You repeatedly and needlessly try to throw my ignorance in my face with a haughty refrain then tell me I need to replace my smug moral superiority? With what? your smug pedantic superiority? I’ll pass.

Anyway not much of that is news to me. A good portion is covered in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Not about cannibalism per se but agriculture, culture and climate.

Morality and history are different. Of course you did know that..? One can provide historical context which explains the lead-in to the Dark Ages of europe, the rise of Naziism or the very recent murder of “witches” in rural New Guinea. When the explainer is done, the acts are still evil. Explanation is not justification. Is is not ought. But you know that right?

Even the experts don’t know a hell of a lot of detail in this case.. but we do know the human sacrifice wasn’t a last resort of a reluctant people. It had been celebrated, ritualized and imbued with religious meaning. There is some evidence victims were tortured for weeks before being killed. That doesn’t get you more protein, but it does feed your sadistic glee. 

Hey while I got the pen out I will also condemn the following groups.. this would make a great awards show- The Condemmys:
Self-identified Christian fundamentalists; for their dedication to dogma and ignorance
the Flat Earth society nutjobs: sheer inanity; tinfoilhattery
the Lombouyi tribe: they just had way too many hats. rubs me the wrong way
members of the MPAA: unelected puritan coward snobs who hide their faces while playing moral police to the film industry and crapping all over the first amendment
Everyone can’t win a Condemmy but it is a dishonor just to be nominated… feel free to school me again on why each of these is justified and no different from the rest of us. Then explain why you can’t judge ritualistic murder and cannibalism but somehow can judge me just for talking.

Well, this is turning into a pissing match, so I’ll offer you the last word. I jumped on your condemnation of the Moche because my own information on Mesoamerican cannibalistic practices comes from some fairly obscure works, so I knew that you were indulging in uninformed condemnation. I agree that there are lots of practices deserving condemnation—but I don’t run around condemning entire fields of study or civilizations until I have a firm understanding of the facts. That’s where you and I differ.

Well, this is turning into a pissing match, so I’ll offer you the last word. I jumped on your condemnation of the Moche because my own information on Mesoamerican cannibalistic practices comes from some fairly obscure works, so I knew that you were indulging in uninformed condemnation. I agree that there are lots of practices deserving condemnation—but I don’t run around condemning entire fields of study or civilizations until I have a firm understanding of the facts. That’s where you and I differ.

Except that I was talking about South America, not mesoamerica. You tell me not to generalize, then generalize from one continent to another. That we do not agree hardly makes me uninformed, even if I lack your ‘obscure sources’.  Chris we do not differ on the point of the necessity of judgment being commensurate with knowledge. I’ve often chastised others for thoughtless remarks of the kind “who cares about what the experts say? today salt will kill you and tomorrow it will save you” because it is most typically the media that mangles science. The plaintiff that won millions from the McDonald’s hot coffee incident sounds like judicial insanity until you know any of the principal facts- that her skin was burned so severely that skin grafts, a particularly painful awful procedure, were required; that McD’s had had numerous complaints for years and ignored them all; that the big “millions” jury award almost always is reduced drastically on appeal, etc.., none of this means the verdict was a correct one but certainly it was not an insane one. Almost no one ever digs beyond the sensationalist 4-word headline and this sort of ignorant judging is a huge pet peeve of mine. So why come down so hard on social science? Because they never seem to get their due. Because trading truth for ego or agenda is the hottest of hot buttons for me.. the most disgusting betrayal, the most egregious crime one can commit under lab coat mantle. I condemn them to the extent of my knowledge and not an inch farther. That is quite sincerely the best I can possibly do. We disagree only about the extent and quality of my knowledge, not whether or not it is necessary to issue complaint. If you think this is all for show, then PM me and I will give you my email.

Woot, one of my favorite topics.  Now I’m sorry I’m not familiar with this show.  Where is it?

I think Zimbardo claims they tested out as pretty normal people using the standard tests available at that time.

Yes indeed.  Baselines all around.

I just had to stop in and post a link to the real classichttp://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=self0fe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0684852667 in the field.  Fascinating stuff.

I find Dr. Oakley a bit ideological.  It seems she is more concerned with politics than science. Listen here: http://www.equaltimeforfreethought.org/2009/07/05/show-310-social-science-under-fire/