• RenegadeTwister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    Physics majors have every right to dunk on polisci. Too many majors throw around the word “science” to try to give their made-up voodoo legitimacy.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • stufkes@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

        • Donkter@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I think sociology is part of a field called “The Social Sciences” which includes sociology, psychology, polisci etc.

          • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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            5 months ago

            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.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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?

        • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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            5 months ago

            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.