[HN Gopher] The world needs computational social science
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The world needs computational social science
Author : Anon84
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-10-02 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petterhol.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (petterhol.me)
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Was that written by AI? Because I have no idea what the author
| was trying to say, and I'm not sure they were saying anything at
| all. The confused haircut metaphor did not help.
|
| Quantitative social science exists. What is the big revelation
| here? What makes it computational? I don't understand. Can
| somebody enlighten me?
|
| If you want to hybridize computer science and social science,
| I've got some good news for you. The ranks of data scientists
| across the corporate world are filled with ABD grad students from
| a range of quantitative fields, who applied their own problem
| solving skills to the question of "how do I turn my skillset into
| money." And in that regard, maybe computational social science in
| a broader sense is the art of converting quantitative social
| science into profits for major corporations. The utopia that CSS
| aficionados longed for is already here.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Going through Petter's archive it doesn't feel like it, writing
| about the topic for some time.
|
| I gathered the grooming metaphor referenced how it's time for
| the CSS practitioner to don the complete methodological anarchy
| that once dominated the field, while remaining open to
| disruptive changes coming out of CS or elsewhere.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| Well for one thing, the need for better consensus, conflict
| resolution, and fact (or dictionary) propagation in society is
| obvious and likely never-ending, considering how many corners
| of life it's applicable. I've been considering trying to find a
| way to study sociology/computer science fusion in grad school
| for a moment now myself.
| [deleted]
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational
| social scientist should know [and] do
|
| It doesn't seem to do any of that. There's nothing actionable
| here AFAICS.
| qaq wrote:
| Psychohistory ...
| dmvdoug wrote:
| > It should do that in total epistemological freedom, being
| informed by everything from the latest in ML to the oldest in
| sociology and not bound by conventions of what constitutes a
| scientific explanation, etc.
|
| So the author wants all the shine that being labeled a science
| brings without any of the heavy-lifting that science requires
| (i.e., following the "conventions of what constitutes a
| scientific explanation").
|
| I can play this game too: my life is evidence-based and data-
| driven, by which I do not mean that I gather and use data to help
| decision-making like crusty old "data scientists" learn to do nor
| do I follow any accepted standard of evidence, because I am an
| epistemological anarchist! My data is my experience and my
| evidence is how I feel in any given moment. I should get grants
| from grant-making agencies just for existing!
| [deleted]
| hotnfresh wrote:
| If I've read the article correctly, all that stuff seems to
| have mainly to do with avoiding becoming tied to the
| particular, distinct norms, methods, and standards of the
| various disciplines CSS might touch, interact with, or be
| applied to.
|
| It explicitly opposes having _no_ norms or standards. It
| appears to be intended to stake out CSS as an independent
| discipline, rather than a study of pure methods that can end up
| "living under" any of several other academic areas, with
| mutually incompatible norms and cultures. (I've no idea whether
| that's, in fact, a good idea)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Things like total epistemological freedom always end up being a
| euphemism for chasing fashions.
| barryrandall wrote:
| I always took it as a warning that you're about to be asked
| to make a gigantic leap of faith.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have often banged on about "MOOP" - massive open online
| psychology. The idea is a form of behavioural epidemiology - we
| can watch through smartphones and other devices people at
| enormous scale - and answer questions like "do people who save
| 10% of their income in index linked isas have less stress /
| better life outcomes" or "do people who meet a mate for a drink
| each week live longer" ...
|
| The answers may well surprise us, but at some point the answers
| will also benefit us.
| wufufufu wrote:
| Don't we already have many answers? -- We just do nothing to
| address the problems.
| ancorevard wrote:
| Why would anyone would want to corrupt anything with the anti-
| science that Social Science is today unfathomable, unless
| corrupting another field is the goal.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| I have absolutely zero sense of what this actually is.
|
| All kinds of economists estimate models on very large data using
| computers. Does that count or not?
|
| What good is it specifically to "know habermas as well as feature
| selection" ? What problems are you solving?
|
| Maybe "the world needs an explanation of what you mean when you
| say computational social science" would make a nice follow up...
| chaostheory wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one who felt this way, given all the
| vagueness.
|
| At the moment, social science is an oxymoron.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| I worked with a sociologist on a variety of projects which used
| sensors and cellphones to do computational social science. In
| the past, sociology was based on observing people, writing
| those observations down, and then thinking about them. Some
| statistics were gathered, but it was a very fuzzy science. Now,
| electronic devices and networks have made detailed big data
| about people available and sociologists are using it.
| Electronic surveys have replaced paper surveys and greatly
| increased scale. This happens mostly behind the scenes, such as
| research on the use of electronic medical records, marketing,
| employee motivation, etc. Take a look at her research projects
| here (and look up the people she worked with to see what else
| they are working on):
|
| https://sph.umich.edu/faculty-profiles/anthony-denise.html
|
| One of the things we did was build survey apps for phones which
| would sense activity and only pop up a question when a person
| wasn't doing much. The sensor data would also serve as a ground
| truth, telling us for example how much activity a person really
| did, versus how much they think they did. One early result from
| such research was that people think they are always doing
| things, rushing around, when the truth is they are sitting
| doing little for 95% to 99% of the day. We used the survey app
| to build a system to train a gait recognition machine learning
| algorithm for user authentication, where the survey app
| collected both sensor data and quick answers about what a
| person thought they were doing, where they were, were they
| walking, where they were... A lot of todays AI projects are
| essentially computational sociology, algorithms trained on
| peoples behavior that is used for predictions.
|
| Business has bought up a lot of the sociology talent, to work
| with marketing, motivating employees, and changing peoples
| minds (somebody had to design those motivational posters in the
| hallways and some of them were based on sociology, lobbying
| campaigns to change public opinion are based on sociology,
| political campaigns use sociologists work).
|
| I have a strong suspicion that all the Big Tech companies that
| collect lots of intimate data about people are employing
| sociologists to analyze that data and use it for many purposes,
| mostly related to advertising and motivating people to buy
| stuff, but also swaying opinion, making market decisions,
| investing, hiring and firing, and more. A common refrain in
| economics is that markets are unpredictable because you can't
| know what all the individual players are thinking, well now you
| can measure them and build models/AI. Big computational social
| science already exists at scale. I wonder what is being done
| with the health data from fitness trackers.
|
| Similar things have been happening in economics. Unfortunately
| in both cases the data is being used mainly to gain special
| private knowledge about the social behavior of people, rather
| than informing the public or public policy. Because money.
| There are a few researchers who are more interested in the
| public good though.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| My gist was that the author wants the data vacuumed up by big
| tech to be used to continue analyzing the questions posed by
| social science, why do we have inequalities, why do we have
| class division, that sort of thing.
| dleeftink wrote:
| I don't think it's a matter of whether a certain project falls
| under the CSS nomer depending on the scale of the data and
| methods employed, but that there is as much 'sociality' to
| computation as there is 'science', and that studying both
| social and computational aspects of contemporary society and
| their interactions can broach insights into the 'digital stack'
| modern life is folded into.
|
| I gathered the quote is not about Habermas and feature
| selection per se, but a platitude about bridging theory and
| practice--both social _and_ computational theories and
| practices. Knowing when, for instance, not to divvy up social
| features that may constitute a larger (digital) public, or
| conversly combining /throwing away features that may in fact
| constitute multiple publics or subject groupings, paves the way
| for building more accurate or generalisable computational
| social science models.
|
| Why would we want such models? Perhaps to map 'hunches' about
| social life that were previously only in the realm of rhetoric
| or simply too difficult to map before the advent of large scale
| data collection and computation.
| jeron wrote:
| I got my degree in Computer Science and Anthropology which in my
| opinion quite fits in line with "Computational Social Science".
| That being said, it feels that the more applied aspect of
| computer social science often ends up being human computer
| interaction or UI/UX design
| water9 wrote:
| If the world needs it, it'll be there. Subsidizing it does not
| suddenly make the world need it.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| I believe shopping this assertion around a social science
| department (or economics, if we're not calling that social
| science) would yield a rather more nuanced view.
| stevenally wrote:
| The internet was subsidized....
| hcks wrote:
| "The world needs another field where nothing replicates and those
| main function is to produce fake results for airport books aimed
| at management consultants"
| [deleted]
| masswerk wrote:
| I wouldn't be too happy about such a divide into high-level
| analysis and interpretation on one hand, computational social
| science, on the other hand. A certain degree of intimacy with
| your data is essential. There are even cases, where high-level
| descriptors would suggest one thing, while in the actually data,
| there emerges an entirely different picture.
| atemerev wrote:
| But we do have computational social science. Simulations,
| interaction networks, opinion spreading models, voter models etc.
| Quite an interesting area of research (and practically useful).
| Frost1x wrote:
| There aren't a lot of people being paid to do this type of work
| though and social science tends to lag behind on the technology
| front because people with said skills tend to find more
| lucrative venues.
|
| I've worked with a few computational social scientists.
| Personally I've always found the area a bit fascinating.
| There's lots of agent based models, tie ins with economics,
| social models, etc. trying to determine how groups of people
| will behave and interact. Lots of understanding behavior and
| exploring implications policies may play on behavior from a
| governing standpoint or how things naturally occur.
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(page generated 2023-10-02 23:00 UTC)