Aaron Swartz on Social Science
Scientists — even the hardest of scientists — fabricate data, fabricate studies, fall prey to fads, and otherwise get things wrong. But more relevantly, they just don’t know that much. We have very little idea of how the body works; the pills we take are made through the bluntest of means. We don’t know how to calculate very simple things, like the dispersion of milk in a cup of coffee. The illusion that social science is ineffective can only be sustained by ignorance of such ineffectiveness of hard science. The upside of all this is that there is hope for social science.
Many people have written and spoken much more poignant words about Aaron Swartz's passing over the weekend. I never knew him, and was only familiar with his work in passing. But, for good reason, I found myself reading a lot about him over the weekend and I found this article from 2005 on his website particularly compelling.
For such a short piece about the nature and state of the social sciences, Swartz really packed a punch. These are thoughts that I've thought and talked about many times before, but this piece is a great articulation of them.
In an effort to not mystify Aaron's work and contributions, I find this sort of thing to be something I can do to help. I can look through his body of work, look up to his example and do my best to find my calling in the quest to bring the social sciences, and specifically the empirical social sciences, to serve society. Rest in piece Aaron.
Junot Diaz - as impactful when he speaks as when he writes
Junot Diaz, author of the highly acclaimed Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the recently released This is How You Lose Her, is amazingly eloquent as a speaker. He carries over his intelligence, charm, wit, humor, empathy and insight from the page to the interview set quite seamlessly.
I have watched a handful of really interesting interviews with Diaz discussing his experiences as a writer, an academic, a cultural critic and all the various roles he has taken on in his life. A common thread between all of the clips is his ability to construct a thought with precision and insight that is emblematic of a highly matured thought process. He hardly fails, even in sentences that seem to be off-the-cuff or filler, to convey a cogent and considered thought. After spending a year surrounded by mainstream political rhetoric, which even at its finest can be less than evocative and often repeats familiar patterns, I am perhaps more impressed than an average viewer with Diaz's oratory. It also doesn't hurt that I've devoured his writing in the last few years and thought highly of him as a cultural icon for hyphenated-Americans.
None the less, I hope to learn from him. Learn to speak as deeply as I think. Maybe I should start by thinking deeply first.
Causality in Political Networks
A 2011 paper in American Politics Research titled "Causality in Political Networks" discusses some important concerns about assigning causality to social network analysis studies, especially when it comes to political behavior and preferences. The basic definition of causality adopted by the authors is one put forward by Henry Brady in 2008 that basically says:
causal arguments are stronger to the extent that they demonstrate our elements: (a) “constant conjunction of causes and effects”; (b) No effect when the cause is absent in the most similar world to where the cause is present”; (c) “An effect after a cause is manipulated”; and (d) The identification of “Activities and processes [i.e., mechanisms] linking causes and effects”
The authors then go on to discuss, in five short essays, how causality may be assessed through social network analysis. From survey data, field experiments, socio-centric data to measurement errors and study-design, this paper is a pretty good place to start when thinking about how you can move past descriptive analysis to something closer to causal inference in social network analysis.
For the sake of disclosure: one of the authors of this paper is my former graduate advisor. Another was a professor during graduate school.
Citation: Causality in Political Networks. Fowler et al. American Politics Research 2011 39: 437.
Drew Conway on the intersection of Data-Science and Social-Science
Drew Conway (hacker, data-scientist, political-scientist, and pseudo-data-celebrity) gave this great talk recently at a conference that I enjoyed. He talks about the intersection of the data-sciences (hacking + statistics) and the social sciences. Drew, whose book Machine Learning for Hackers, I enjoyed a lot is a great example of someone who is bringing the tools of computer science and data-science to bear on an unrelated (at first glance) field, the social sciences.
David Foster Wallace on Kafka's Humor
In Consider the Lobster David Foster Wallace has a short essay titled "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," in which he presents his case for reading humor in Kafka and how he tried to teach his students to do this when teaching Kafka. I liked this passage at the end and wanted to share it
It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get - the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really center Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
The rest of the essays in the collection are great too. Some personal favorites include "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," "Authority and American Usage," and "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think."
Bayesian methods in applied econometrics
Christopher Simms, of recent Nobel fame, has a presentation [pdf] up on his website from 2007 that is a pretty good introduction to the difference between frequentist and Bayesian approaches to economics, and ultimately why a Bayesian approach is most prudent for economists.
This from his introduction sets up the basic premises of his presentation -
Introduction
- The first part of the talk makes some unoriginal claims about the role of Bayesian thinking.
- Despite being unoriginal, and obvious to me and to a minority of econometricians, they are unfamiliar, thought-provoking, or outrageous to quite a few econometricians.
- A summer seminar talk seems a good place to restate claims that are both obvious and outrageous and that therefore (for one of these reasons or the other) are usually excluded from journal articles.
- The latter part of the talk discusses some areas of econometric application where frequentist asymptotics seems particularly persistent and suggests how Bayesian approaches might become more practical and prevalent.
Pessimism (but not what you're thinking)
While perusing my subscriptions on Google Reader yesterday (which is something I do entirely way too much during my waking hours), I ran across this blog post at Modeled Behavior about a new book entitled "The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope." In it Karl Smith quickly points to and adds his thoughts on pessimism and aiming for rational progress. (Tyler Cowen also pointed to the same book over at MR)
While reading the post, I was reminded of a quote from Albert Camus - "Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is." Camus was alluding to the idea that by recognizing who we are (including our many limitations) we can successfully be something more, something better.
It's is a worthwhile proposition, in my opinion. I come from a mentality of shying away from pessimism, from turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to it. I have long considered pessimists to be nihilist, defeatist in their approach and to have a misappropriated lack of vision. However, in allowing myself to review my own biases, I think it is important to consider the utility of pessimism.
In reference to the book and the commentary by Smith and Cowen, I find great merit in using pessimism to revise institutions, actions, and traditions. These reviews must be grounded in reality, which author Roger Scruton believes eludes optimists through their denial of the confounded and manipulated realities of humanity.
As a believer in the progress of our human kind being almost completely based on the random filtering of an unbelievable amount of inputs (speaking evolutionarily), I think it falls in line for me to believe in the merits of pessimism since not all but only a few selected inputs brought us where we are today, and not all but only a few selected inputs will move us forward.
Blogging as a bridge between academia and public sphere
Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt wrote an essay on the role of international affairs academics in the public sphere. Not the first of its kind of course, but this essay is a pretty thorough description of the state of the two arenas (academia and policy/public sphere) and how they do not co-exist nearly as much as they should. Walt is speaking as an international relations scholar, but his complaints and recommendations could probably span across academic disciplines (perhaps with the exception of the natural sciences, since people don't have as many intuitions about how quantum mechanics or gene therapy works on which to base their biases).
The essay is worth a read, if for no other reason, to get an idea of the relationship between the academy and the public sphere over the course of modern history. Among the many suggestions Walt outlines to remedy this broken relationship, he suggests that popular writing (op-eds, articles in newspapers and magazines, blogs, etc) should not be looked down upon within the academy. On the suggestion of blogs, this working paper [PDF] by the World Bank comes to mind. In it, the impact of popular economics blogs is assessed through various experimental and non-experimental means.
The paper offers 3 main take-aways:
- Links from blogs cause a striking increase in abstract views or downloads of economics papers.
- Blogging raises the profile of the blogger (and his or her institution) and boosts their reputation above economists with similar publication records.
- Blogs can transform attitudes about some of the topics they cover.