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Political Science is the study of political systems and behaviours employing the scientific method. It’s a sub field of social science and a very new one, at less than 150 years old. Political philosophy is of course much older.
employing the scientific method
Really? They have control groups? Blind and A/B testing? Hypothesis that they set out to reject?
I’m sure they have methods but are they scientific?
The answer to all your questions are
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes - Whatever goes against my political allegiances.
Yes - They all just have an n < 50.
The issue with considering these to be anything like the ‘hard sciences’ is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.
God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It’s important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don’t get me wrong, but they’re pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.
Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.
Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven’t been falsified.
Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.
And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that’s completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It’s not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.
Emergence in action.
Wdym
Emergence. As in when something becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts. Sapience. Life. Consciousness.
Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.
Isn’t one of the point of all those telescopes we built in space and on earth to prove or disprove our hypothesis regarding astronomy? Is that not experimentation?
No, it’s observation. An experiment involves manipulating an independent variable while controlling other variables. There’s none of that in space, not counting the ISS and Apollo. That said, you can still test hypotheses using observation. And that’s equally true in both astronomy and in social sciences.
You make those claims without ever having looked into polisci studies. Not really looking to reject your own hypothesis.
A literature review comes first in science. I asked questions. I did not make claims.
it should be a sub field of sociology instead of science.
Sociology isn’t called social sciences, though arguably you could call it that.
I think sociology is part of a field called “The Social Sciences” which includes sociology, psychology, polisci etc.
The issue with considering these to be anything like the ‘hard sciences’ is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.
God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It’s important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don’t get me wrong, but they’re pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.
Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.
Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven’t been falsified.
Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.
And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that’s completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It’s not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.
that more broadly would make sense to me. But i still wouldn’t consider polsci to be polsci, i would consider it to be a sub set of sociology.
It’s all kind of a subset of sociology. Why do groups make decisions? It’s down to individual psychology. But that’s similar to saying all science is derivative of physics. It’s technically true, but it does us more favors to split it up.
i think calling it “political sciences” is probably reasonably accurate.
But yeah. Naming is just hard.
It’s mainly called social science in my country.
Yea computer “science”? Bitch you mean programming?
Depends. A proper computer science course is basically math with machines. At the highest level, it may have zero programming at all, and the machines in question are entirely abstract.
Software Engineering is, well, engineering (setting aside the whole debate on what makes a “real” engineer).
It used to be that universities crammed both under “computer science”, and you had to look at the curriculum to figure out which one they were actually teaching. They tend to separate the two more clearly these days. Neither is really “science” in the strictest sense, but the term stuck now.
math with machines
so computer engineering?
No, the machines tend to be abstract. Such as an infinite paper tape that can manipulate symbols.
That experiment must be ludicrously expensive
This just in: theoretical physicists are not scientists.
No, that’s machines with math
No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.
When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.
Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.
Think of it more like programming without electricity.
My geophysicist friend laughed at me for a little long when I said “I’m a computer scientist”.
I never took that degree/job position or whatever seriously anyway. I’ve always giggled at software engineering too. I just call myself a programmer.
One is your education and one is your job. It’d be like me chirping someone with a geophysics degree who’s working at Starbucks.
lol, okay that made me chuckle … I liked that.
Although, we both eventually got into the jobs for what we studied for. We’ve made that jokes both in university and when we got into respective fields.
That’s why informatics is by far the superior term. Computer science is such a boring terms anyways, you don’t call maths “number science”, biology "living beings science " or chemistry “atoms science” either.
All of thoose are different. Computer science, computer engineering, software angineering and informatics are all different conceptually
Accordingly, universities in continental Europe usually translate “informatics” as computer science, or sometimes information and computer science, although technical universities may translate it as computer science & engineering.
informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession,[3] in which the central notion is transformation of information.
^From the same link. Central notion is transformation of information
Now,
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation.[1][2][3] Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software).[4][5][6]
Also
Software engineering is an engineering approach to software development.[1][2][3] A practitioner, a software engineer, applies the engineering design process to develop software.
Yeah, polisci has gotten as far as the “observation” part of science and kinda has to stop there for moral reasons.
Same with Astronomy.
What’s voodoo about political science?
“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That’s pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical?
Same thing astronomy did.
Astronomy has roughly a 400 year head start on most of these. Thousands of years if you’re counting astrology (which was good observations mixed together with nonsense).
That’s irrelevant. Astronomy and polsci can both only test their hypotheses through observation.
And Astronomy has had much, much longer to make those observations. They can also gather potentially millions of data points instead of five.
But it’s the physicists’ job to find this stuff.
Yeah, it’s not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers. Get your shit together physicists.
it’s not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers
show me Pi then
More astrophysicists
Have they tried looking between all the couch cushions? Those tend to hide a lot of stuff.
Actually saying that socks and remote controls can sometimes turn into something that doesn’t interact with the EM force would explain a lot.
As someone who spontaneously decided to study history / political science instead of physics, although I have been preparing to be a physicist the entire time, I can proudly say: At least I am happy. I spend most of my time doing fun and fulfilling things, instead of showing up at uni at 8 in the morning and arriving home at 8 in the evening just to work on homework. All my friends went into mint and they are stressed, don’t have time to do anything and just seem the worst i have ever seen them.
Mint? Like Linux Mint?
Math IT Nature Technology I’m not sure if this is germany exclusive
Usually STEM is used
Yup, that’s what I found too, in germany it’s usually valled mint
Oh shit yea it’s stem in English. Wupsies
summoning linux mint cult
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Yes, Physics majors are a bit too hierachical with science like there were not doing non-rigorous math themselves but let’s be honest: on the other spectrum of real/fake science it is very very hard to find actual people seriously studying the field, like you have to go up to doctorant to find the kind of serious study you find in physic undergrad.
Science politics.
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