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Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money. There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.


Wow. I disagree with your position on the merits and read through your replies to see if someone had provided an effective counterargument, but you really touched a nerve: it's straight ad hominem snark all the way down. So I guess I'll give honest engagement a shot.

> I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a counterargument.

There are some fields that study universal facts about biology or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these will largely yield similar results that can be applied anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating research done in one population on a different population, but humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly necessary.

On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.

This means that even if the net return on investment for medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their own medical research. They can always take advantage of what others are learning about biology, but if they don't research the way that New Zealand works then no one will.


Your argument about knowledge being lost is probably valid but I am not sure it's convincing. If your research creates results that result in products being sold elsewhere, like say in medicine, that will mean patents and local opportunities for high value export oriented business like pharma companies. Which could bring in much needed foreign currency for the new zealand economy and help boost it's GDP per capita. Which right now in ppp terms is more at the level of Eastern Europe than the west. In other words new zealand has some catch-up to do.


In theory what you say sounds great, unfortunately in practice, many fields have become far from objective and “peer reviews” seem to be more of “peer support”.


This is baby-with-the-bathwater logic. Because there are flaws in the system (which are flaws in all of academia, not limited to the social sciences) we should defund the programs entirely and give up on whole fields of endeavor.


> There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science.

Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the chance.


Fwiw, I took psych101, sociology101 , and minored in philosophy.

I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.


I'm surprised you didn't get anything out of psychology. The psych I took as an undergrad has been quite useful in my daily life.


How so?

Philosophy helped me to think critically and find edge cases. Psych taught me about different parts of the brain and their functions. Soci taught me my professor was a giant fraud and the entire discipline was a 'solution' looking for a problem.


We should scrap economics?


TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political science to make a lick of sense.


> western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences

Rejecting empirically-proven supply-demand pricing models (no DSGE, I’m talking supply chain models that predict end prices) because it’s politically inconvenient is exactly the sort of nonsense the social sciences are criticised for.


> Rejecting empirically-proven

I thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume.


> thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume

It's pointed phrasing, but it works. When we have overwhelming evidence for a phenomenon that has solid theoretical foundations, it's fair to say it's empirically proven. Not absolutely or mathematically proven. But if you've read Hume or even Popper, you already know that.

The core point remains the case: a lot of economics is uncomfortable for some people (there isn't a strong partisan leaning to this tendency, in my experience) and so they come up with elaborate arguments for why that evidence should be discarded. The top comment illustrates this [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408895


Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the research results produced by economists aren't necessarily wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research anyway then what's the point of funding it?


Let’s peel away facade of the rhetorical questions here and look at what you’re actually saying. Now, a massive, MASSIVE [[citation needed]] is in order.


That's not how this works. The questions I asked were not rhetorical and almost entirely subjective. Citations aren't necessary.


[flagged]


But somehow it's the physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who are doing something about it, not the social scientists (or whatever the term is).


That's just gibberish.

Physics, medicine and so on are full of fraud. It's rather common in academia. The social sciences can tell you why, math can't.


The "why" is utterly irrelevant if you can't then do anything about it. It also seems like some of that "why" research was fraud too, so they couldn't even answer that.

Meanwhile the hard science guys are forcing retractions.


Let me introduce you to one of the main driving forces behind retractions, PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/


..and?


I think it's sprinkled all over this thread.

Social science can tell you why, absolutely. But then can't replicate it.


The "replication crisis" reaches way beyond social sciences, and not all scientific epistemologies are founded in so called replication.


Ok.


you know the replication crisis in pretty much every discipline of science right? esp our industry’s pet fav machine learning


"hard" science without social disciplines gave us Nazism


Paying tax is normal for most companies. I am not sure why the us is being the slave of these companies and threatening retaliation. Apparently it wants to be the only one to take a cut (despite money being made from Italians). That's extreme. If NATO is a family of mobsters, then this is not how things are done within the family. I know we're not supposed to anger the us as they are the best guarantor for European security and freedom but such bullying tactics, effectively making Italy pay a tribute like a vassal state, does make me question whether we can be independent and guarantee such things ourselves.


I dont think it's going to be that important. Different people have different learning styles but also vastly different capacities making this really difficult to research accurately. People claim to find the secret sauce from time to time. They're most likely wrong.


the American justice system is flawed. It's mob justice that was only fit for the 1700s when there was nothing better. Or maybe there was,I wasn't around. Untrained people can't decide on guilt or innocence. They can't judge evidence. They allow themselves to be swayed by beauty or likeability to greater extent. They're lives are no good, on average. This makes most of them mean and vindictive. If they can allow someone to suffer like they have, it feels good to them.

I'm not sure whether it's racism. It's the usual explanation for this phenomenon. I can understand racism. I don't believe in opening the floodgates. it sounds more like plain bloodlust. Because blood is what you're going to get if you go on this way.


Sounds like you have been to the Rijks and nowhere else. Lots of old paintings of all kinds of scenes hang in lots of museums all over this country. Not a huge museum goer but this lacks nuance.


Rembrandt did not work in this resolution so i think zoomed in it will just be a bunch of random noise.


I thought the same. But try to zoom in on the eyes, you’ll notice fascinating details.


Some of the magic happens at a distance


This is true for a great many things


I guess this does give some insights. Using a more space efficient language for your codebase will mean more functionality in the ais context window when working with Claude and code.


It's a really expensive piece of software. They do not publish their prices because of it. I don't think it's reasonable to market such products onto your average dev because of it. Anyhow Cython and a bunch of others provide a free and open source alternative.


the only thing that is evidence of is that people never wanted to die.


Basically they did about a thousand things and it resulted in some very real improvements. Their view is that there's no single cause but many and each cause needs to be addressed individually. Which seems realistic. But it doesn't help us see what does what exactly.


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