Soft Sciences Vs. Hard Sciences

[teo123]

OK, @brimstoneSalad, let's see what kind of claims did you make in this thread:

1. Claiming that some etymology can be known with reasonable certainty is comparable to theology and Flat-Earthism.

2. The assertion "I know what the government should do to improve our economy." is somehow more credible than the assertion "I know what 'Issa' meant in Illyrian.".

3. Something is not a real science if it's not doing, for all practical purposes useless, probability calculations. (If you really don't see why that's flawed, see the analogy with calculating the distance a ball will go without touching the ground without knowing if there is a strong wind where that ball is thrown, I've posted it in my last post here and you refused to respond.)

4. There is a general agreement among economists that the government should increase spending in the days of recession. (In spite of the fact that the most influential economist of today, Milton Friedman, explicitly stated he doesn't agree with that, with quotes like "Government spending means less money spent carefully and more money spent carelessly." and "But nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he does his own.".)

To many people, at least some of those are insane assertions, and they sound very anti-scientific. And we are wondering why people won't give up meat. That's partly because those who do give up meat believe weird things and are vocal about that.

[teo123]

If what you want are the Big-Bang-theory-like stories in linguistics, I happen to know a few. I have tried not to bring them up, because I thought they were not so relevant.

Ferdinand de Saussure predicted the existence of an old Indo-European language in which the long 'a'-s and the long 'o'-s in modern Indo-European languages corresponded to e+an-h-like-sound and e+another-h-like-sound or o+an-h-like-sound in it, and the short 'a'-s corresponded to an-h-like-sound+e, half a century before Hrozny rediscovered Hittite. So tell me that the Laryngeal Theory is less established than most of the theories in natural sciences!

Antun Mayer predicted, based on the toponymastic analysis, that Asseria was used as a watchtower decades before archaeologists confirmed that.

[brimstoneSalad]

Antun Mayer predicted, based on the toponymastic analysis, that Asseria was used as a watchtower decades before archaeologists confirmed that.

I mentioned that things like that can happen. The point is that they are rare. That's stuff that happens *all the time* in hard sciences; it's the norm in hard sciences, without which things aren't taking seriously. For softer sciences it's basically a small miracle.

OK, @brimstoneSalad, let's see what kind of claims did you make in this thread:

1. Claiming that some etymology can be known with reasonable certainty is comparable to theology and Flat-Earthism.

No, claiming that "reasonable certainty" means anything clear in a soft science is comparable to the category errors made in theology, flat-earthism, etc.

2. The assertion "I know what the government should do to improve our economy." is somehow more credible than the assertion "I know what 'Issa' meant in Illyrian.".

You need to re-read my posts.
I talked about the difference between description and prescription in economics.

Claiming to *know* precisely what needs to be done to improve an economy is highly dubious, particularly claiming to know the *best* way to do it, and it's not something most professional economists would claim. Likely, they'd talk about certain interventions that might or would probably help based on X Y and Z.

3. Something is not a real science if it's not doing, for all practical purposes useless, probability calculations. (If you really don't see why that's flawed, see the analogy with calculating the distance a ball will go without touching the ground without knowing if there is a strong wind where that ball is thrown, I've posted it in my last post here and you refused to respond.)

Probability calculations are not useless: if you don't understand that, then you don't understand how science works at all. They're essential to understanding whether the results of an experiment support the hypothesis or are more likely to be chance.

Calculating how a ball moves in an idealized world minus a bunch of variables is more of an educational exercise. At best, it's engineering. The science occurred when those equations were discovered, not in applying them.

You're confusing the scientific method and actual discovery with the application of scientific discoveries after the fact.

4. There is a general agreement among economists that the government should increase spending in the days of recession. (In spite of the fact that the most influential economist of today, Milton Friedman, explicitly stated he doesn't agree with that, with quotes like "Government spending means less money spent carefully and more money spent carelessly." and "But nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he does his own.".)

Unregulated free market didn't work, there was a resurgence of Keynesian policy after the 07 crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%8 ... resurgence

Friedman contributed a lot, but it seems he was wrong about a few things too. No surprise there.

There are major practical questions as to what that money should be spent on, and *how* to get government to be more accountable. It's true that people don't tend to spend others' money that carefully, BUT this is also true of corporate CEOs who are spending the investors money... so it kind of goes both ways. Thus the need for regulation and bailouts when there are inevitable oversights.

Friedman was a big advocate for testing policies and judging by the results. Well, the results continue to come in favoring regulation and stimulus. So, that's where we're heading (even free market advocates have been coming around). There's likely an ideal middle-ground in there, but only testing policies will tell us where that is exactly.

No way to know if Milton Friedman would have changed his mind, doesn't really matter though since the evidence speaks for itself and science doesn't worship idols.

[teo123]

That's stuff that happens *all the time* in hard sciences

How do you know? It seems to me it could easily be an illusion created by the historians of science being biased towards that "knew it all along"-type-of-thinking. There are many more people educated in the field of astrophysics than in the field of Croatian toponyms, therefore, there will be a lot more potentially right educated guesses in the field of astrophysics than in the field of Croatian toponyms. The educated guesses that happened to be right are noted by the historians of science, and those that didn't happen to be are much less likely to be noted.

No, claiming that "reasonable certainty" means anything clear in a soft science is comparable to the category errors made in theology, flat-earthism, etc.

So, do you think we can't know with reasonable certainty that, for example, the Holocaust happened, just because it's a fact of history and not of physics?
Well, to be honest, I think there may be some truth to that. Not precisely to the Holocaust (since the evidence that it happened is truly overwhelming), but to, for instance, the Massacre Of Vukovar in 1991. I can't help but wonder where the evidence to justify punishing hundreds of people for that supposed event is. And the conventional story of how it happened doesn't make a lot of sense to me (How can we know for certain the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was even aware of that? Why it is exactly that the general Mile Dedakovic didn't receive the ammunition that the President Franjo Tudman supposedly sent? Could it be that at least one of them wanted the genocide to occur and made it look like they had no choice?), yet people behave and talk like we know for certain that it did happen and why it happened.

The science occurred when those equations were discovered, not in applying them.

OK, so, how do you estimate the probability that the Newton's Second Law is true? Doesn't make much sense to ask that, does it?
A world in which the Newton's Second Law is not true is not quite conceivable (unless we assume that's a world without any change in movement, which our world obviously isn't), since the mere definition of "force" relies on the Newton's Second Law to be true. So too does the mere definition of the language rely on the sound changes to be regular, because a language in which the sound changes weren't regular wouldn't be intelligible to other speakers of that same language, and therefore it wouldn't be a language. It sounds like circular reasoning at first, but it really isn't, it's more of a proof by contradiction.

Unregulated free market didn't work

How do you mean "unregulated"? We've never had those. OK, maybe the 1907 bank crisis happened in something reasonably close to that (which is perhaps why it soon went away), but the Great Depression and especially the 2007 crisis happened in a tightly regulated market. If thousands of pages of regulation didn't stop it from happening, new regulations probably won't either.

there was a resurgence of Keynesian policy after the 07 crisis.

If Keynes were here today, he would probably say something like "Huh! Maybe I was wrong about government spending being able to get a country out of a crisis, the government spending is a lot higher than it was in my days, yet the recessions still happen." and "How did the politicians manage to corrupt the word 'Keynesian' so much?! How does it follow from my work that you should pass hundreds of pages of regulation each year that do nothing but slow down the job growth? How dare you use the word 'Keynesian' to justify the policies such as the minimum wage? How can you let people vote on the economic issues? I explicitly said that the good economic policies are unlikely to be followed in a democratic society...".

this is also true of corporate CEOs who are spending the investors money

That's true to some degree, but the CEOs still get slightly more money if they invest the investors money in a good way. The government bureaucrats, on the other hand, are completely unaffected by how well they spend the tax money, they are always paid the same low wage. Also, the big corporations such as Microsoft probably wouldn't exist in a free market.

Friedman was a big advocate for testing policies and judging by the results.

Really? He was often criticized for relying on simplistic models (to explain, for instance, why the minimum wage can't work) and dismissing the empirical data.

[brimstoneSalad]

That's stuff that happens *all the time* in hard sciences

How do you know? It seems to me it could easily be an illusion created by the historians of science being biased towards that "knew it all along"-type-of-thinking.

It's not a historical issue, this stuff happens every day. It's how experimentation works in the hard sciences. Sometimes not grand or interesting, mostly little stuff. The point is the pretty much undeniable confirmation of predictions.
Science is on a spectrum, as I said, so what we're dealing with is a matter of probability and frequency of those predictions being made and confirmed. When it drops too low, the noise takes over and the signal is nearly lost.

There are many more people educated in the field of astrophysics than in the field of Croatian toponyms, therefore, there will be a lot more potentially right educated guesses in the field of astrophysics than in the field of Croatian toponyms.

No, that's not the issue. You're missing the point. It's not about guessing and being right, it's about hypotheses that can reasonably be expected to be confirmed or disproved.

You'd probably want to look at a faster moving science, though. Today most astrophysicists are probably closer to very sophisticated cartographers. Discoveries are mostly application of known laws. There is still movement and experimentation, and discovery of new principles... just a little slower.

So, do you think we can't know with reasonable certainty that, for example, the Holocaust happened, just because it's a fact of history and not of physics?

You can look at specific claims, like that there were gas chambers at X location. You can test the rocks and get a very convincing p-value that yes these rocks were exposed to that poisoned gas.
Many specific claims about the holocaust were recent enough to be tested, and that gives the account credibility when all competing "theories" are ad hoc. Thus with no competing hypotheses offering evidence to support them, that's the one you should err on.

However, when we have pre-Photoshop photographic evidence and countless first hand accounts (in English and other living languages) that kind of testing is typically not even necessary to know.
In order for the Holocaust to be false there would have to be a grand conspiracy and cover up, and we can use statistics to roughly assess the probability of such a conspiracy happening and show how unlikely it is. Beyond a few dozen people that's virtually impossible. You can't predict the behavior of any one person easily, but as it scales up it becomes more reliable.

If you had somebody (or thousands) who actually lived through the adoption of those words and knew first hand the original meaning, and could tell us that in English, then that would be something.

This is why most history relies on direct accounts from ancient historians and writings from those periods: actual accounts.
We can also recover artifacts, but that's usually just to confirm the accounts.
When you start speculating and interpreting that's where it starts getting immeasurably uncertain.
This also applies to accounts that are in dead languages or dialects that have to be translated. The translation itself will always add a layer of uncertainty to the account. NOT just that the person was lying or mistaken (unlike for something like the holocaust, since we have few accounts of ancient history that's possible and even pretty likely), but also that we may have translated it wrong which becomes more probable the more distant the language is. The problem is, though, that we have no way to assess the probability of a mistranslation.

No P value = soft science. You have to guess at it based on your feelings.

You might devise a way to assess the probability of mistranslation based on a few variables like how long the language has been dead for and how unrelated it is somehow. That would be amazing and it would go a long way to hardening history and linguistics.
The point is that we don't have a lot of that now, so these are currently soft fields.

A soft science can become a harder science, but it's a difficult task. And for some where we're unlikely to ever find the hard evidence we need to reliably confirm or disprove prediction it might be impossible.

Well, to be honest, I think there may be some truth to that. Not precisely to the Holocaust (since the evidence that it happened is truly overwhelming), but to, for instance, the Massacre Of Vukovar in 1991.

Smaller events can be less certain. How many first hand accounts do we have confirming those facts?

How can we know for certain the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was even aware of that?

This is more complicated.

I don't know all of the details there, but speaking generally of blaming those in power:

We assume leaders are aware of what happened under them, because it's their responsibility.
Either they failed in their responsibility in which case they should be punished, or they knew... in which case they should be punished.
There's always some level of plausible deniability, but you can't allow leaders to escape punishment by scapegoating others and claiming ignorance.
Without punishment, rulers will correctly assume they can do whatever they want and get away with it.

It's unfortunate if a few innocent morons get their heads put on the chopping block, but even if somebody was innocent of the act (and only guilty of stupidity) it's important to establish a precedent that those in power be held accountable for abuses that happen when they're in power. They all need to know that the sword of Damocles is hanging over them, and that they can't get a pass by turning a blind eye to abuse and being technically ignorant.

OK, so, how do you estimate the probability that the Newton's Second Law is true? Doesn't make much sense to ask that, does it?

You don't really do that after the fact.
You look at experiments. You could do a new experiment and look at the probability of the outcome proving the law. The larger the experiment, the higher the chance you proved it.

Now if you wanted to, you could do a meta-analysis of ALL of the experiments to ever be done on it and find the probability based on historical experiments, but that risks selection bias.

A world in which the Newton's Second Law is not true is not quite conceivable (unless we assume that's a world without any change in movement, which our world obviously isn't),

Previous results could have been due to inaccuracies in measurement. This would just be astronomically unlikely.
However, perhaps we could conceive of a world where mass doesn't influence it, but instead it's volume (for some reason).
You can create alternative physics, even make a simulation with them. Video games often function on alternative physics.

since the mere definition of "force" relies on the Newton's Second Law to be true.

It would just mean something else.
Yes, all physics is intertwined, so a change in anything would have huge ripple effects. The point is that these experiments can and do have p values.

Often in physics, though, because it is a very very hard science, those p values are so extreme that probabilities approach 0% or 100%. It's basically yes or no.
The more dichotomous results are, typically, the harder the science.

When you hit probability of 50% when there are two plausible alternatives, you're down to a guess.

So too does the mere definition of the language rely on the sound changes to be regular, because a language in which the sound changes weren't regular wouldn't be intelligible to other speakers of that same language, and therefore it wouldn't be a language. It sounds like circular reasoning at first, but it really isn't, it's more of a proof by contradiction.

You're going to have to state that more clearly, because yes that does sound like nonsense.

Language is merely the meaning we give to abstracted representations to communicate ideas. Symbols, sounds, etc.
The point is that those things have no inherent meaning, but are interpreted by the receiver to have a meaning which is close enough to the meaning the originator had in mind when creating the abstraction that they can understand each other.

A big problem is that "understanding" is hard to measure.

But there's nothing in the nature of language that says anything about sounds or how they change over time.
A language could be a random combination of sounds assigned to each concept, as long each party has the same set and as long as that combination was stable between the time the speaker and listener learned it and the sound was exchanged and interpreted.
You could have a language where each person gets a memo every day for the new sounds for each idea, randomly generated for the day (but they all get the same memo). It would be very inefficient, but it'd still be a language.

It's plausible that there's something in human psychology that makes languages change in consistent and predictable ways so that people from different regions will not quickly lose the ability to communicate with each other due to drift. It's a tendency you'd have to prove, though, and show the probability distribution for.
Could even be mere physiology. Again, needs evidence.

If thousands of pages of regulation didn't stop it from happening, new regulations probably won't either.

The thing that went wrong was the thing for which there was no (or inadequate) regulation. Now we have regulation on that thing, and the exact same thing can't go wrong again in that way.

The issue is that regulating an economy is kind of a game of whack a mole. People only admit a problem and regulate for it after something goes terribly wrong.

Can we foresee problems and regulate before they happen? In theory, sure. But in practice we can not because there's not the political will to do so.
Kind of how the current U.S. measles epidemic is going to keep getting worse until people realize these ideological vaccine exemptions are a problem and the loopholes are finally fixed. It'll have to get really bad before there's political will to do anything about it, though.

That's a big problem with the political systems in place today: they tend to react after the fact.
Same thing with 9-11, etc. There was intel, it was just a mess and people didn't take terrorism seriously despite warnings.
Same thing, on a personal level, with somebody who eats junk all of the time and doesn't clean up his or her diet until he or she has a heart-attack scare.

This comes down to human psychology. Not what government should do, but what it will do because it's run by human beings who are VERY bad psychologically at risk assessment and don't trust numbers or experts until they feel it personally.

If Keynes were here today, he would probably say something like "Huh! Maybe I was wrong about government spending being able to get a country out of a crisis, the government spending is a lot higher than it was in my days, yet the recessions still happen."

It's a CHANGE in government spending. Stop being an idiot.

How does it follow from my work that you should pass hundreds of pages of regulation each year that do nothing but slow down the job growth?

Regulations don't do nothing put slow down job growth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYotqgekKtU

Stop being an ignorant moron. You do not understand what these regulations do. You do not have the education or experience to assess them.
If you worked in the industry, maybe you could start criticizing the regulations relevant to your industry. For sure, there are some less productive regulations, even some bad ones, but regulation is also vitally important to protect human life and investment.

Like with anti-vaxxers lack of experience with disease, you've just lost touch with the experiences that taught us why each regulation was important.
YOU didn't experience the problems, so you doubt the importance of the regulation. It's a profound ignorance coupled with arrogance.

How can you let people vote on the economic issues? I explicitly said that the good economic policies are unlikely to be followed in a democratic society...".

Yeah, people are pretty dumb, which is why regulations only tend to go into effect after something bad happens... as I explained.
They don't prevent all the bad things because democracy requires a tragedy to get off its ass and pass regulation to prevent future ones of the same time. And hopefully idiots like you don't undo the regulations the next generation because they couldn't be bothered to try to understand why those regulations went into effect in the first place.

That's true to some degree, but the CEOs still get slightly more money if they invest the investors money in a good way.

No. Stop being an idiot:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html

The government bureaucrats, on the other hand, are completely unaffected by how well they spend the tax money, they are always paid the same low wage. Also, the big corporations such as Microsoft probably wouldn't exist in a free market.

Not really true; many have ambitions to move up, and saving money can be a good way to do that. Even enter politics. Many political campaigns run on that.
Where it doesn't tend to apply is in military spending... I'm pretty much with you if you want to mostly abolish that.

Some of these companies need to be broken up because they've effectively established monopolies. There are some issues of money in government reducing the ability of politicians to break them up. However, that's a failure of regulation to be employed, not something that's bad about regulation in principle- we're not better off without the laws that break up monopolies just because they aren't always used.

Friedman was a big advocate for testing policies and judging by the results.

Really? He was often criticized for relying on simplistic models (to explain, for instance, why the minimum wage can't work) and dismissing the empirical data.

No surprise. Confirmation bias, of course.
Don't make the same mistake.

[teo123]

You're missing the point. It's not about guessing and being right, it's about hypotheses that can reasonably be expected to be confirmed or disproved.

I don't think I am missing the point.
First of all, there is a big difference between an educated guess and an uneducated guess.
Second, more important, Ferdinand de Saussure, when he said that an Indo-European language in which the Laryngeal Theory was evident very likely existed based on that and that, he had no way of knowing whether such a language had left a trace. Around fifty years later, such a language was found attested. That strongly suggests the Laryngeal Theory, along with other de Saussure's assumptions, are mostly true, regardless of him having no way of knowing such a language was indeed attested, right? Similarly, Antun Mayer, when he postulated, based on linguistic evidence, that "Asseria" meant "watchtower" in Liburnian, he had no way of knowing that watchtower in Asseria left any traces that would be found decades later. Yet, the fact that they were found strongly suggests his assumptions behind that prediction were true to a high degree, right? What, do you think they were wrong to make such predictions even though they didn't know if they would ever be proven or proven wrong?
Third, I hope you agree, the guy who postulated the Big Bang Theory had no way of knowing that, 100 years later, there would be the equipment that would accidentally (I believe I have read Stephen Hawking say it was made to communicate with the satellites, and that the discovery of the background radiation actually came surprisingly.) prove his theory.

You'd probably want to look at a faster moving science, though.

What would be an example of a fast moving science according to you?

This is why most history relies on direct accounts from ancient historians and writings from those periods: actual accounts.

Accounts do play a role, but they are not being completely trusted. There are books written about the Exodus, but they were all written centuries after the supposed event. And the contemporary accounts make no mention of it. That's why those books (apart from making countless supernatural claims) aren't considered trustworthy. Also, the accounts of the 11th-century Croatian king Zvonimir being murdered by a conspiracy of his soldiers have also been rejected by any serious historian since the 17th century, because the contemporary accounts make no mention of the story and all the accounts that mention it were written more than a century after the supposed event.
But sometimes even there being no accounts against a claim some historical account makes doesn't mean it should just be accepted, as if the only way to know about history was to trust the accounts. For instance, Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote that "Croat" meant "one who has a lot of land" in Old Croatian. Do you have any doubt in your head that's not true? Similarly, Strabo wrote that the name "Issa" comes from the name of the Illyrian ruler Ionios, and that the name "Pharos" comes from the name of the Greek island Paros. Those claims are rejected for similar reasons.
Oh, yeah, and the story of the Tower of Babel...

A big problem is that "understanding" is hard to measure.

Actually, it isn't. There are countless studies doing exactly that, and they are, as far as I am aware of, not at all controversial.
https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual ... vic_Family

You might devise a way to assess the probability of mistranslation based on a few variables like how long the language has been dead for and how unrelated it is somehow.

I don't think that's possible. To determine how related a language is to some known language, it has to be at least partially translated. Even then, quantifying the language relatedness is almost impossible. There have been many attempts to do that, they are called glotochronology, and they are considered controversial at best and pseudoscience at worst.

How many first hand accounts do we have confirming those facts?

Quite a tough question, the supposed evidence is usually presented in the form of people missing in Vukovar and their bodies to never have been found, implying they were burnt in the Massacre. Though there were people claiming to have witnessed the Massacre, perhaps... tens of them? There were also quite a few people who supposedly participated in it, but later denied that.

You could do a new experiment and look at the probability of the outcome proving the law.

I just don't see how to do an experiment proving the Newton's Second Law. If a body doesn't accelerate at a constant rate, then, by definition, the force acting on it wasn't constant, and the experiment design was, by definition, invalid.

However, perhaps we could conceive of a world where mass doesn't influence it, but instead it's volume (for some reason).

That would simply mean all the bodies have equal density, not that the Newton's Second Law doesn't hold. That is, then there will be no way to measure the actual mass of bodies, since the only way we can measure a mass of a body is by applying a force to it.

You could have a language where each person gets a memo every day for the new sounds for each idea, randomly generated for the day (but they all get the same memo).

OK, but that's now obviously not how languages work.

Now we have regulation on that thing, and the exact same thing can't go wrong again in that way.

OK, what do you think caused the '08 depression? What makes you think economists agree on that? What kind of regulation do you think can solve that? What makes you think economists agree on that?
And, let's face it, the solution the government proposes is often worse than the disease it's supposed to cure. The Federal Reserve was established in the response to the 1907 baking crisis. Then the bad monetary policy of the Federal Reserve caused an even worse banking crisis leading to the Great Depression, at least according to Milton Friedman.

It's a CHANGE in government spending. Stop being an idiot.

I don't understand. What do you think the Keynesian economic theory says?
The basic idea behind the Keynesian economics is that the depressions are caused by the supply not being equal to the demand because of the price and wage stickiness. For instance, the massive unemployment during the recessions is caused by the actual price of labor dropping (because of the demand falling) way faster than the wages can adjust, thus those sticky wages creating a form of a de-facto minimum wage. The solution Keynes proposed was to greatly increase the government spending during the recessions to slow down the fall of the demand and thus letting the prices and wages to adjust. This is in contrast to the Monetarist economic theory (supported by Milton Friedman and others), that says that the government spending shouldn't be increased unpredictably during the recessions, but that there should be a slow and predictable increase in the money supply preventing the recessions from happening.

Regulations don't do nothing put slow down job growth.

Oh, you are quoting Joe Rogan? That guy who pushes myths about nutrition to support the paleo diet? Why should I even bother to listen to what he has to say about economics?

If you worked in the industry, maybe you could start criticizing the regulations relevant to your industry.

Like, for instance, that the history of computer science is full of evidence that the copyright laws do way more harm than good? If there were no proprietary software, there wouldn't have been the Browser Wars that made web-development hellish all until until the proprietary browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape) stopped being popular, and the open-source browsers (Chrome, Konqueror and Firefox) came into play. Almost all the innovation in the Internet technologies today comes from the free and open-source browsers, the proprietary browsers can't even catch the development now, yet alone innovate. That's obviously because of the copyright laws. And they don't just hold particular browsers behind, they make the entire Internet lag behind. The reason why it took so long for the useful technologies such as SVG and HTML5 Canvas to become available to the web-developers is because Internet Explorer, the proprietary browser that held a monopoly on the Internet for almost a decade, came to support them almost a decade later than all other browsers.
And, I am sure you know, the Internet is significantly worse in countries that regulate it than it those that don't. US has very few regulations about the Internet, and the Internet works very well there. EU has slightly more, and the Internet is a lot slower here. And China has a lot more, and the Internet is not only a lot slower, but many foreign websites are completely inaccessible.

No. Stop being an idiot:

I don't know what's going on, I just can't open that website neither from my mobile phone (T-COM ISP) neither from my laptop (Croatian Crisis Connection ISP). I keep getting the "Can't connect to the server" error (on my mobile phone) and "Can't establish a secure connection" error (on my laptop).
I could probably access it by setting up my computer to use a free proxy, but I am not particularly willing to read about economics from New York Times, a newspaper that called for doubling of the minimum wage.
If you think there is something relevant there, please copy it here.

Not really true; many have ambitions to move up, and saving money can be a good way to do that.

Seriously? From the perspective of the bureaucrats, saving the government money is making their fellow bureaucrats loose their jobs. That's why Donald Trump isn't doing what he promised.

Don't make the same mistake.

And how do you know that's a mistake? If a Nobel-prize winning economist was doing that, perhaps that's the best thing to do in the science of economics.

[teo123]

Also, don't you think that mentality, that it's a good thing to attempt to harden soft sciences, is the mentality behind many pseudosciences?
For instance, the Fomenko's New Chronology, where he tried to apply (in a flawed manner, although he happens to be a professional mathematician) statistics to the chronology of the Middle Ages and Classical Antiquity. It's a failure, and it's beyond the debate.
Or, for instance, as I mentioned in my last post, glottochronology. It's also a very controversial (not as much as the Fomenko's New Chronology, but still very likely yet another failure) attempt to apply statistics, this time to historical linguistics. It could easily be motivated primarily by this "let's harden the soft sciences"-type-of-thinking, don't you think?
And the Keynesian economics, also an attempt to harden a "soft science" using mathematics, appears to be, at least given what I know, a failure.

[Red]

Also, don't you think that mentality, that it's a good thing to attempt to harden soft sciences, is the mentality behind many pseudosciences?

We SHOULD be hardening the soft sciences, but this is nearly impossible to do. In the soft science fields, it's hard to differentiate pseudoscience from real science. In the hard sciences however, if you know the subject material, it's easy to separate myth from reality.

If we were to take a pseudoscience, like, say, flood geology, and harden it, it would be radically different from its original form. Just because you want to harden a soft science doesn't mean that it'll still be the same in its nature. I'm not sure how far this extends to other fields, since some are just blatantly wrong.

[teo123]

Also, don't you think that mentality, that it's a good thing to attempt to harden soft sciences, is the mentality behind many pseudosciences?

We SHOULD be hardening the soft sciences, but this is nearly impossible to do.

I think you are getting the point. Yes, it would be great if there was some mathematical formula that describes how languages change probabilistically, yet alone exactly. But, if you think you have found one, you are more likely to be crazy than to have actually fond one.
How can anybody honestly expect such a formula to exist? I mean, think of, for instance, the Dirac's equation in physics. It correctly predicts how the electron in the hydrogen atom is likely to move and how likely it is to absorb and emit photons with certain energy. But, add another electron, and this is where the theory breaks. What could possibly be the hydrogen atom in linguistics for us to be able to test such a theory once it's developed?

[Red]

I think you are getting the point. Yes, it would be great if there was some mathematical formula that describes how languages change probabilistically, yet alone exactly. But, if you think you have found one, you are more likely to be crazy than to have actually fond one.
How can anybody honestly expect such a formula to exist? I mean, think of, for instance, the Dirac's equation in physics. It correctly predicts how the electron in the hydrogen atom is likely to move and how likely it is to absorb and emit photons with certain energy. But, add another electron, and this is where the theory breaks. What could possibly be the hydrogen atom in linguistics for us to be able to test such a theory once it's developed?

Mathematics doesn't have to be applied to something for it to be considered a hard science (or at least applied to a great extent like in physics). Biology doesn't really rely on Mathematics often, yet that's a science we would consider hard (or, at least, harder than social sciences). Darwin actually tried to steer clear of that stuff in Biology (Biology and most social sciences often rely on Statistics, but something like economics has reliance on calculus).

And of course, you can't really apply mathematics to linguistics, but there is probably a method or two you can apply to make it harder. What those methods are, I don't know.

Teo, maybe you can dedicate your PhD thesis to this? You might get a Nobel Prize.