[HN Gopher] New Acquisitions: On the Wisdom of Noah Smith
___________________________________________________________________
New Acquisitions: On the Wisdom of Noah Smith
Author : Claude_Shannon
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-08-29 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| ivalm wrote:
| Doesn't seem that it addresses Noah's actual complaint:
|
| There is a claim that something in the past is in some way
| relevant to something now. This claim of relevance is typically
| somewhat specific (eg how democracy fails). Historians make these
| claims with verifying if such claims are valid.
|
| Noah calls these claims theories and says that therefore they
| need to be empirically verified. Many historians balk at the word
| "theory" (ok fine), while ignoring the actual complaint -- the
| need to verify if the claim made (that a historical example is
| relevant/is a tool for understanding of present) is correct!
|
| If there is no claim of relevance, then why are we discussing
| historical examples from the past instead of alignment of stars
| or the unfurling of tea leaves in a cup?
| jaccarmac wrote:
| Did you read TFA? How would one "empirically verify" the tyrant
| example explicitly treated there?
| ivalm wrote:
| By applying whatever claim system to past events and seeing
| how often the claim system produces the correct answer. You
| can compare it to marginal or other types of claims.
|
| Edit:
|
| More concretely for tyrants. Get a definition to classify
| example of who is a tyrant, get a definition to classify who
| is a democracy. Consistently apply to all historical
| examples. Given subset before target example evaluate what
| you expect to happen, compare to what happened. See if there
| is drift/etc. to be better: look at other confounders, etc.
| nightpool wrote:
| That's not empirical study, it's statistical analysis of
| historical data. Which is useful, certainly, but it
| shouldn't be treated as the same level of certainty as
| empirical study and it shouldn't be confused for it. The
| article makes the distinction between the two very, very
| clear.
|
| Economics _loves_ to play fast and loose with the
| definition of "empirical" tests, but almost none of the
| main theories of economics are empirically testable--
| because we simply cannot create new, controlled economies
| and run preregistered experiments against them. Instead, we
| have to make do with the data we have, and we can't
| generate more, and we have to deal with the amount of
| uncertainty that the analysis of existing data brings with
| it.
| ivalm wrote:
| Im not here to defend economists, but the historian
| argument is that because they can't verify if their
| arguments holds water robustly they instead don't verify
| at all. If everything is so subjective as to be
| unverifiable then why should we care about history at
| all? I think in reality history is much more tied to
| present and many claims can be verified to some degree
| (of not absolute) certainty.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| "Instead what he's actually suggesting isn't an empirical
| test at all: it is a quantitative, statistical test of data
| none of which can be empirically verified because it all
| happened in the past; only the statistical analysis is
| subject to empirical verification."
|
| Devereaux points out that that is not empirical
| verification. Past events cannot be sense-experienced.
| ivalm wrote:
| He claims that, but it's not a justified claim. As my
| edit show you _can_ do this analysis, it's a lot of work.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| Your analysis doesn't involve sense experience of
| tyrants. Doing the statistics makes it _sound_ empirical,
| but the choosing of the data will never be empirical.
| ivalm wrote:
| Presumably sense experience is one of many confounders?
| tuatoru wrote:
| The whole thing reads to me like Smith is click-hunting.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-29 23:02 UTC)