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Fangz posted:If I was running Israel, I would allow Irving to enter. Short of actual genocide advocacy, few opinions are sufficiently bad, in my view, to justify state restrictions on individual travel. If you lived next door to a massively more powerful country that had occupied your for decades and had a habit of suggesting that your national sovereignty doesn't really exist you might have a different opinion.
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Aug 14, 2014 13:01
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Alchenar posted:If you lived next door to a massively more powerful country that had occupied your for decades and had a habit of suggesting that your national sovereignty doesn't really exist you might have a different opinion. Maybe, but don't forget that many of these countries have massive subpopulations with very different points of view. These countries need a national identity that is inclusive and forward looking. Instead it's bogged down in finger pointing.
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Aug 14, 2014 13:20
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Fangz posted:Maybe, but don't forget that many of these countries have massive subpopulations with very different points of view. These countries need a national identity that is inclusive and forward looking. Instead it's bogged down in finger pointing. A lot of those countries have those massive subpopulations specifically because of Russian resettlement policies aimed at eliminating them as a majority population in their own (relatively small) countries. Stalin's resettlement bullshit ran both ways. For every example like the Crimean Tatars there's a poo poo-load of ethnic russians flowing the other way to speed the Russification process. Ideally, yes, everyone could hold hands and forge a national identity based on inclusion, but there are a poo poo ton of people in those countries who don't exactly think they need what they perceive as a new national identity and are still bitter as hell that there is a large "foreign" population there. National and ethnic identity are probably the most dangerous topics there are and sit at the root of most of the uglier crimes in modern history. Logic goes right out the loving window and more often than not any level of compromise is seen and felt as surrender. gently caress, even for the notable examples of relatively successful multi-cultural societies the best case is multiple centuries of simmering social, cultural, and racial strife with occasional outbursts of violence.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:25
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Humanity is still pretty terrible.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:Humanity is still pretty terrible. Yep, looks that way.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:49
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SeanBeansShako posted:Humanity is still pretty terrible. On the other hand, that we see this and recognize it as wrong instead of as the natural and just order of things is probably an improvement.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:58
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Sadly not everyone seems to think that way. But at least we're trying dammit  .
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Aug 14, 2014 15:29
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HEY GAL posted:Even if? poo poo like that is never a proper response to science you disagree with. HEY GAL posted:Holocaust denial isn't science. Nenonen posted:Then Dyukov is not a scientist but a mere Stalin apologist. I probably shouldn't bother, but this just kind of stuck in the back of my brain and has been bothering me a tiny bit all morning. If I missed something obvious and I'm responding to nothing forgive me. That said, history is not science. Full stop. They are two different methodologies for expanding the scope of human understanding in two very different directions. They are both extremely valuable, both provide ways of examining issues that can not be approached by the other, and it is a disservice to both to conflate them. edit: I realize I'm being pedantic as all gently caress. Replace the word "science" with "scholarship" in the above quotes and I would have zero problem with them. I'm also in hard core editing mode so I may very well just be really, really sensitive to words and the general meaning of language right now. edit x2: as an example, I just edited this loving nothing post three times to make my language more precise, not counting this kinda-meta-edit. It might be time for a walk and a coffee break. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 15:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:That said, history is not science. Full stop. They are two different methodologies for expanding the scope of human understanding in two very different directions. They are both extremely valuable, both provide ways of examining issues that can not be approached by the other, and it is a disservice to both to conflate them. Social history is related to sociology and anthropology, which most people classify among the "soft sciences" or "human sciences;" what's the difference, except that our subjects are dead? We're still collecting evidence and responding to it.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:34
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HEY GAL posted:It's a science, I think. What I do, primarily, is examine data that I find and make judgements based on that evidence. It's not fiction--it's not even primarily interpretation, although there's a lot of interpretation in it. I don't think I'd call it one of the humanities--it's not as like philosophy or math, for instance, as it is like other things. It's not a science.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:47
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Rhymenoserous posted:It's not a science. Is anthropology?
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Aug 14, 2014 16:50
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Did you just lump math in with the humanities??? Like, I, from my totally not a historian no dog in this fight perspective, would not call history a science whatever okay, but math is the science de rigeur. What?????
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Aug 14, 2014 16:52
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Xiahou Dun posted:Did you just lump math in with the humanities??? No, math is a liberal art. Grammar, rhetoric, logic; math, music, geometry, astronomy. I included math because I don't think it depends on evidence in the same way that science does. There is no data gathering, you're trying to find...truths.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:53
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HEY GAL posted:Is anthropology? Just because something uses a science to information doesn't make all of what it does science. The study of history is not a science.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:53
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Rhymenoserous posted:Just because something uses a science to information doesn't make all of what it does science. The study of history is not a science.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:55
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HEY GAL posted:No, math is a liberal art. Grammar, rhetoric, logic; math, music, geometry, astronomy. I included math because I don't think it depends on evidence in the same way that science does. There is no data gathering, you're trying to find...truths. No no no no and your math teacher should be shot. Math is the Platonic ideal of science. The data gathering is cruft and has nothing to do with the scientific method. Like no. Full stop.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:58
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Here are some half sketched out thoughts on the matter that I have. I'm straight up just copy/pasting from a thinking document that I've got set up for a intro lecture to an intro course that I'm half-way through writing, which is why I was touchy about all that in the first place. I'm still feeling out around the edges of my own thinking on it, so forgive me if it's rough. That said: First off, what’s science? Science is the “intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical world through observation and experiment.” That last bit is the important part, as that is where a methodology - namely the scientific method - is implied. This is important, because it also limits the scope of what science can and can’t answer. Not everything can be investigated through direct observation and repeatable experimentation. One key example of this is events in the past. By definition we already have all of the evidence we ever will have about these events. Yes, in some instances we have misplaced this evidence and need to find it again, and yes our knowledge about these events increases as we re-discover this evidence, but we can not create new observations about it. Science is the direct opposite. If you have a question or a theory you can investigate it by conducting new observation, designing new experiments, collecting new data, and analyzing that to find your answer. A key component of the scientific method is the repeatability of findings. It isn’t enough that you just do it once, you need to be able to show that it is a thing that can be done over and over. Gravity works as a theory precisely because past observations, past experiments, can be repeated to verify them. Not so with history. We can interpret and analyze the evidence of the past that we have and re-analyze and re-interpret that same data until we are blue in the face, and in doing so we may come to a consensus on what we believe to a very high degree of certainty is what happened, but we can not create new data. Example: gay black hitler. We have all sorts of ways of showing that he was almost certainly not black or gay, but we have no way of directly testing that today. We can analyze the existing evidence until we are blue in the face, but we can't generate new evidence or design a repeatable experiment to show that he wasn't just a very pale african or a homosexual. We are left with analyzing and interpreting a finite set of data from the past. Even though we can say with an extremely high degree of certainty that approaches 100% based on a mountain of evidence that no, he was not black or gay, we can't answer "Pro Gay Black Hitler Skeptics" with new measurements and observations. This becomes even more obvious if you consider an example outside of living memory and before photography, such as gay black Napoleon or gay black Jesus. Both history and science are forms of scholarship. They just use very different methodologies to approach different types of questions. Historical methodologies are ill-suited for answering questions that involve phenomena that can have new observations made of them, while scientific methodologies are ill-suited for studying events that may never be replicated. As I said, it's still half-baked and needs expansion of lots of key areas, but I think that even in sketch form it does a good enough job for the purposes of this discussion of laying out the edges. edit: gently caress words, what that man said. VVVVVVV Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 17:06
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Rhymenoserous posted:Just because something uses a science to information doesn't make all of what it does science. The study of history is not a science. This. I probably wouldn't call history a science, nor would I call my own profession, engineering, a science; math is out too. Science to me is a very narrow field involving repeatable experimentation to investigate physical or biological phenomena. Which is not to say that history, engineering, and math, aren't scholarly disciplines, they just aren't science. Xiahou Dun posted:Math is the Platonic ideal of science. The data gathering is cruft and has nothing to do with the scientific method. Like no. Full stop. Data gathering is the heart of science and the scientific method. And Plato is overrated.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:08
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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OK, so Pitt and Cyrano--would I be right in assuming that neither of you think any of "the soft sciences"/"the human sciences" are sciences at all? That in addition to the method which Cyrano mentioned (social and cultural anthropology can't create data, only find it), one criterion is that the subject must be physical or biological phenomena? Xiaohao Dun, it is true that vertically opposite angles are equal. There is nothing (within the context of Euclidean geometry) that can make it not true. It depends on no experiment. It pertains to no physical entities. It is true regardless of the physical laws of the universe. That doesn't feel like science to me. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 17:13
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PittTheElder posted:Data gathering is the heart of science and the scientific method. And Plato is overrated. Data gathering through experiment. Calling any data gathering a 'science' is so broad it becomes useless. Do they not teach the scientific method any more? edit: I'm agreeing with you, that's mainly directed at hegel.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:18
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PittTheElder posted:This. I probably wouldn't call history a science, nor would I call my own profession, engineering, a science; math is out too. Science to me is a very narrow field involving repeatable experimentation to investigate physical or biological phenomena. Which is not to say that history, engineering, and math, aren't scholarly disciplines, they just aren't science. No, it's just that experimentation/data-gathering for math is trivial so it's not a separate thing, barring some stuff involving lots of computation. I have no particular care whether you want to call history a science, but if you don't think mathematics is science you either 1) have never taken a high-level math class/actually talked to a mathematician or 2) fundamentally do not understand how science works. And the Plato was wrong == I said "Platonic" snipe was just bad rhetoric jesus don't be dense.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:24
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HEY GAL posted:OK, so Pitt and Cyrano--would I be right in assuming that neither of you think any of "the soft sciences"/"the human sciences" are sciences at all? That in addition to the method which Cyrano mentioned (social and cultural anthropology can't create data, only find it), one criterion is that the subject must be physical or biological phenomena? I don't think that physical or biological phenomena is a necessary part of the definition, but the ability to gather truly new data through observation and experimentation is pretty central to science as a discipline. I would actually argue that this is where the so-called "soft sciences" can make their claim to being sciences rather than . . . something else (types of philosophy maybe? doesn't really matter). A cultural anthropologist can make direct observations if what they are studying is a society that is still around today. I also don't claim that every single discipline can be neatly pigeon holed into a simple science/not science dichotomy. Cultural anthropology is a good example of one of those middle ground cases where a scientific methodology might work for one set of questions involving subjects that are still around to be observed, while a historical methodology would need to be applied to examining a dead society or the specific practices of a living one at a distant point in the past (say, English society in the middle ages). History, though, as a discipline exists to address questions which by definition can't really be approached via the scientific method. This doesn't make it a bad discipline, this doesn't make it somehow "not true knowledge," this doesn't make it poor scholarship, etc. it simply makes it a discipline designed to answer different kinds of questions from what science attempts to answer.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:History, though, as a discipline exists to address questions which by definition can't really be approached via the scientific method. This doesn't make it a bad discipline, this doesn't make it somehow "not true knowledge," this doesn't make it poor scholarship, etc. it simply makes it a discipline designed to answer different kinds of questions from what science attempts to answer. I also take issue with the implication behind your use of the phrase "direct observation." If I'm reading someone write down a thing they did (history) I don't see that as categorically different from listening to someone verbally describe a thing they did (anthropology). I don't even think it's that different from watching them do that thing. Even though it weakens my argument I'm going to say that you can get more information from watching people (duh), but I don't know if it's a different kind of information. I don't think it is. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 17:37
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HEY GAL posted:OK, so Pitt and Cyrano--would I be right in assuming that neither of you think any of "the soft sciences"/"the human sciences" are sciences at all? That in addition to the method which Cyrano mentioned (social and cultural anthropology can't create data, only find it), one criterion is that the subject must be physical or biological phenomena? I honestly don't really know, and it depends on what counts as a "soft science". I'd say things like psychology or even economics that allow for rigorous experimentation on humans and groups of humans, and have falsifiable predictions and such, probably count as sciences. Ultimately I think the distinction is pretty pedantic and unimportant, so I haven't given it all that much thought. Science is cool, so is History. The crackpot versions of both exist all the same, and both are equally dumb. Rodrigo Diaz posted:Data gathering through experiment. Calling any data gathering a 'science' is so broad it becomes useless. Do they not teach the scientific method any more? You are right of course.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:38
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Howdy, I'm defending my PhD in oceanography in a couple months, mostly lurk in this thread as I'm a history nerd, too. The scientific method produces and experimentally tests empirical, falsifiable claims. I think the problem history runs into if it tries to be a science is that much of is qualitative (untestable) instead of quantitative, and arguably it's not falsifiable. You're working with source materials and their interpretations, I'm not sure how you can independently and empirically test/verify any of that. Engineering I'd say is largely the application of scientific knowledge, but there's engineering research as well which is going to be empirical and falsifiable. Both disciplines can certainly make use of the scientific method and I'm sure there are good examples of true science being done in both, but by and large I'd argue history is not a science, no. Edit: HEY GAL posted:But the question I'm asking is "What was it like to be a soldier in 17th century Saxony?" That's barely even a historical question, it's pretty synchronic. It's qualitative, though. How do you test it? Dr. HEGEL, based on her research, asserts that being a 17th century Saxon soldier was all about dick jokes and fancy hats, while her academic arch-nemesis argues they were instead pre-occupied with personal hygiene and piety. Both are using the same or similar sets of primary sources. How can I as an independent researcher test their hypotheses empirically and falsifiably to determine who's right? I can't, because there aren't any 17th century Saxons around to observe independently. I cannot repeat their research independently to falsify their claims. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 17:46
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HEY GAL posted:
... So you have no idea what mathematics actually does as a field. Got it.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:49
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Why did we get into this argument? There is one single definitive answer as to whether history is a science. That answer is "um maybe".
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Aug 14, 2014 17:52
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Pretty sure that it had something to do with Dyukov getting deported. Unfortunately, this means he can no longer travel to Lithuanian archives to continue his research, and after this stunt, it's unlikely that anyone is going to pick up where he left off.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:54
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This was going to be an edit, but things have moved along so I'll make it its own thought. In full disclosure, my views on this aren't particularly original. It's basically just a poor re-hashing of the traditional division between the humanities and the sciences. This division is usually drawn over whether the discipline is based in empirical approaches or via critical and speculative means. Where we're getting bogged down is that a lot of people, whether they're aware of it or not, are still trying to squeeze modern disciplines into the old Trivium and Quadrivium of the classical seven Liberal Arts. I personally think this is silly, as while the basic distinction between empirical vs. critical approaches still holds we have long since advanced past the seven subjects of the classical curriculum and that doesn't render the disciplines we've developed since then somehow un-scholarly. HEY GAL posted:But the question I'm asking is "What was it like to be a soldier in 17th century Saxony?" That's barely even a historical question, it's pretty synchronic. I don't see that as different in kind from "What's it like to be a Nuer?"--but I do think it's different from questions pertaining to change and cause. That's a very historical question, and you do yourself a disservice by saying it isn't. The difference between your two examples is that in the case of the Nuer you can answer your question by going and observing them. There are any number of studies you could design to gather endless amounts of data based on direct observation - be it through actually sitting there and just watching them, or talking to them, or however else our theoretical scholar of Nuer society chooses to go about his business. In your case, however, it isn't that simple. You can't conjure a 17th C. Thuringian soldier to observe or interrogate. So you go to the archives, gather together bits of information about the past, and analyze and interpret them in order to draw conclusions about what life was like for them. The questions may be similar, but temporal realities necessitate methodological approaches that are very different. edit: goddamn my slowness: Pellisworth posted:It's qualitative, though. How do you test it? Yet again, this is the point that I was basically groping at. Thank you for more succinctly putting that than I could muster right now, Pellisworth. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 17:57
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PittTheElder posted:This. I probably wouldn't call history a science, nor would I call my own profession, engineering, a science; math is out too. The "soft sciences" like Economics, Anthropology etc can make predictions and carry out experiments but lack the ability to run control experiments, which kind of results in mess. My background is in Computer Science, which is kind of slapfighting with Geology to get itself recognised as the fourth main branch of "Science" but is, realistically, just a subset of the ur-Science: Maths.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:59
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On the subject of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons. Difficulty in cleaning up the resulting mess aside. Do they have differing "battlefield" uses? Is one better for defensive use? Offensive use? Is one strictly better for area denial? I know chemical weapons are really the only one to have seen any tactical use, but maybe there may have been experiments done that could have given the military some idea?
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Aug 14, 2014 18:21
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I guess if you had a force that was very well protected from NBC attacks (like the Soviets did), you could nuke/poison/infect the enemy's front lines, punch through them with a group of NBC protected T-55s before the enemy recovered and go on a rampage behind enemy lines.
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Aug 14, 2014 18:27
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With chemical warfare you also have the added bonus of knowing when the chemical agent you've deployed isn't effective anymore which is useful since fighting in cold war chemical gear is difficult at best.
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Aug 14, 2014 18:32
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KildarX posted:On the subject of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons. Difficulty in cleaning up the resulting mess aside. Do they have differing "battlefield" uses? Is one better for defensive use? Offensive use? Is one strictly better for area denial? I know chemical weapons are really the only one to have seen any tactical use, but maybe there may have been experiments done that could have given the military some idea? Biological weapons are mainly terror weapons or at best strategic or theater level ones to tie up resources dealing with whatever issue theyve caused. (Note Im including the failed 'gay bomb' in this group despite it being a chemical weapon since most other chemical weapons are explicitly weapons meant to harm or disable soldiers very soon after direct contact, contrast with the 'disorder' goal of the gay bomb. As for nuclear there are tons of examples covering theater down to squad level, though it was mainly Russians who kept nukes for use on anything between strategic and squad. It was the Americans who used squad level nukes, gonna try and find the article about SF squad whose job was to infiltrate enemy territory with a man portable nuke and destroy critical infrastructure.
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Aug 14, 2014 18:35
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There's a gay bomb? How gay was it?
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Aug 14, 2014 18:38
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HEY GAL posted:There's a gay bomb? How gay was it? Referring to this I believe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb Short answer: Theoretically, pretty gay. Defenestrategy fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 18:39
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KildarX posted:Referring to this I believe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb
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Aug 14, 2014 18:50
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You know, it's weird to check back on the thread and suddenly see an episthemological slapfight. Pointy: We have stuff that the people that came before us left behind (like codpieces) and we have stuff that they have written down about stuff that they think had happened. Neither does constitute a fact or usable data by itself and we have to make sense of it (Ok, this is the case with basically any kind of data, but since we're dealing with stuff that is based on people's ideas or thoughts, things get very complicated). What we're really doing is to try to reconstruct what people did or thought. Perspective is the right word. Try to remember what you did or thought a year ago, on this day. How did people 300 or 1.000 years ago perceive the world that they lived in? So we have to ask ourselves what would be the best way to do that? Like, what's the best tool for the task that you set out to do. Even if there are no repeatable experiments, the question is still valid. It may not lead to definite answers, but it has still a valuable story to tell, and in most cases, the things that we find out tell us more about our current paradigms.
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Aug 14, 2014 19:17
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Arquinsiel posted:You missed a good "incendiary" joke there. If only we'd used these on Dresden and Tokyo instead.
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Aug 14, 2014 19:19
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So, question. Modern mythology has it that the gun bought about the death knell of the knightly, aristocratic class by allowing a half-trained peasant to regularly take on and defeat a highly elite, well-equipped and well-trained warrior. When did this view of the gun first arise and gain traction amongst society, though? Did people start seeing it that way the moment the first handgun was developed, or did they just consider it a useful tool to wage their dynastic struggles with? Was it developed in Victorian times to explain how modern progress is so much better than stinky medievalism? Was it something that only really cropped up in the 20th century to show how technology was a tool of democracy? For that matter, is the idea fundamentally a true one - that guns directly led to the decline of the aristocracy? Given that England still has a House of Lords I'm inclined to say no, but maybe guns DID significantly reduce the relative power of aristocrats compared to their power in the Middle Ages?
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Aug 14, 2014 19:35
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