US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3873

On May 24 2016 07:14 LegalLord wrote:

Secretly I'm hoping Trump will say something provocative enough in the next few hours that this discussion becomes sidelined in the process.

On May 24 2016 07:54 Lord Tolkien wrote:

It is. It's being increasingly adopted in biology, ecology, and environmental studies to better understand epidemics, invasive species, etc, but I mostly mentioned it because as a statistical model and analytical tool, it was originally pioneered by social science departments (to dispel the notion that social sciences are not empirical).

A public records request from Oregon Public Broadcasting reveals that Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy's defense lawyer tried to get the Koch brothers to help cover Bundy's legal bills.

According to the e-mail obtained by OPB, Bundy's lawyer Joel Hansen reached out to Republican Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, a mover and shaker in the transferring federal lands movement. Ivory sponsored legislation that became law in 2012, which transferred Utah fed lands back to the state although the lands still remain in federal control today. Hansen asked if Ivory might be able to reach out to the Koch brothers and see if they would be interested in helping pay for Bundy's legal defense.

"I cannot represent Cliven for free. I'm not independently wealthy," Hansen wrote in the e-mail to Ivory. "I understand from news articles that the Koch brothers are helping to fund Cliven's efforts to return our lands to the states. I would like to speak with someone about helping to fund the legal fees associated with this case."

Hansen is a Nevada-based lawyer who says he has been friends with Bundy for years and has worked in the state for 38 years. He's been active in land disputes with the federal government before, defending Cliff Gardner, another Nevada rancher who went head to head with the feds over grazing his cattle.

Hansen went on to say that the case would "be huge" and that the "legal fees will not be insignificant" as there are to be 19 defendants.

Bundy currently faces charges from his 2014 armed ranch standoff in Nevada.

On May 24 2016 07:44 Lord Tolkien wrote:

As noted, I have not seriously studied in the field, but I have examined, for instance, Latin American history through a feminist/gendered lens to understand societal constructs of the time. It was quite useful as a added mode of analysis in that history/humanities course.

I have no comments on it's value as a social science.

On May 24 2016 08:31 WhiteDog wrote:

Yes you understood me. Recent epistemology view social science as sciences oscillating from quantitative thinking (and every equal abstractions) to historical analysis (and contextualized assertions), never entirely pure. They rely on incomplete abstraction/concepts that are never entirely anhistorical nor entirely refutable.


Modelization in economy is largely above my head, but from my understanding it is all very limited. Agent based modelling have very weak prediction capacities, but the guys who use them tweek them each time they fail until they match reality. They are also individualist. Economists like those models because they can give good enough result with still having micro economic foundation, which is the big game since Lucas' critic. Most impressive work I've seen on models are based on differential equation inspired from meteorology (things like Lorenz's model on climate) :
+ Show Spoiler +

Really seducing from my point as it leads to various unstable equilibriums (but that does not break down). Here is an exemple with Keen's model, based on Minsky's work on debt :

http://keenomics.s3.amazonaws.com/debtdeflation_media/papers/Keen1995FinanceEconomicBreakdown_JPKE_OCRed.pdf

I'm sure many people in TL are better at math than I am, I don't understand much at all this anymore. I value those model for those result.

On May 24 2016 05:56 Lord Tolkien wrote:

First and foremost, that is a blog (and an opinion piece) and not a published article. The argument is noted, and the blog even offers an interesting view (social engineering as opposed to social science), but the premises are flawed. First, that it presupposes that science is about finding absolute truth: the fundamental basis of western scientific epistemology is that, in no case, can any scientist claim to have discovered absolute truth, as to do so would invalidate the entirety of the epistemology (and the scientific method) they have based their research upon. The best they can claim is, under our best models and theoretical framework, and using the following data and conditionals, we arrive at X conclusion.

For instance, let's use physics. Newtonian physics is fundamentally wrong. The theoretical framework that Newton's theory of gravity, and the various laws and equations that are derived from it, falls apart upon the introduction of relativity. An yet we still teach and utilize Newtownian physics, and the equations ultimately derived from an incorrect model, for remaining highly useful in the vast majority of non-relativistic cases. Meanwhile, we are still attempting to reconcile the relativistic model with quantum mechanics and string theory. Nonetheless, we still utilize these models knowing full well that they contradict (and have yet to reconcile them). Right now, it doesn't matter at all if they're true, only that they work.

Secondly, he makes the claim that in the social sciences, nothing can possibly be proven because all human beings are different. This is, quite frankly, highly suspect reasoning at best, and utter hogwash in all reality. Can we not say the same thing about animals ultimately being all different and having different life experiences? Unless the argument is that humans are special and human behavior cannot be modeled like animal behavior in ecology/biology in large sample sizes, this line of reasoning is, really, highly specious. Moreover, we need simply look at string theory at fields of "hard" science for fields that almost entirely theoretical, with none/little observable basis to back up the existence of such a framework besides a lot of computers doing a lot of maths.


I am asking you to define what constitutes a "true" science, not give long out-dated soundbytes of pithy yet unproven statements and, ultimately, deflections.

In essence, I'm asking you what a science is (or fundamentally, what is scientific epistemology), and, from that starting point, hope to logically derive the view that "social sciences" cannot be considered a science from it.

An application of the Socratic method.



So we cannot use cell theory or germ theory, for instance, as the basis of our understanding and modeling of, say, vaccine creation? Theories and frameworks form the fundamental basis of all scientific knowledge, to exclude it as part of a definition of science, when the goal of science is to establish working theoretical models to understand phenomena (natural or human), seems dangerous.

In any event, under this definition, most (if not all) social sciences fall under the category of science nowadays. Economics especially (and indeed the primary criticism of the field by the heterodox schools is that mainstream economics is far too empirically minded), but sociology. psychology, etc. all at present work empirically. Good sociological studies follow the scientific method as scrupulously as possible. Indeed, a reading of Durkheim's Suicide should dispel the notion that sociology can't readily follow scientific epistemology.

It is social science (well, specific economics) departments which are currently innovating new applications of statistical approaches and analysis, after all.




Honestly, all I can think of every time people make this claim is this comic:

https://xkcd.com/435/

I would also advise anyone who seriously considers this topic a relevant distinction to make to revisit the philosophical underpinnings of science itself, and that the basis of science and mathematics is entirely theoretical and non-observable in the physical world.



EDIT:

Are you going to provide an example or show that this is either limited to social science as a field or that this is necessarily indicative that a field is not science?

On May 24 2016 08:42 WhiteDog wrote:

Yes, there are a lot of economist that tries to do just that (creating experiments in labs to see the behavior in people before specific problems and all), but the problem is that you can't reproduce a specific historical context in a lab.
Because of that, it is better to create model with specific hypothesis on the behavior of agents / groups and see if it has any help to understand reality. I believe reliable prediction in economy is very shaky at this point.

On May 24 2016 09:05 WhiteDog wrote:

But most economist who came from a math background (like Keynes) believed estimations had very limited use for economy due to the radical uncertainty of economic phenomena.
In modern economy, this leads to various mathematical tools : the evaluation of the skewness of datas to evaluate the lack of symmetry of the distribution ; the evaluation of the kurtosis to see if the datas are fat tail or heavy tail (especially in regards to finance ; for exemple, we used to believe, for hundred years, that price in finance followed a normal distribution, only to see that it actually vary a lot more than that) ; the idea that some phenomena are completly impossible to evaluate from a statiscal point of view (what economists call knightian uncertainty), etc.

A US appeals court on Monday reinstated a civil lawsuit accusing 16 major banks of conspiring to manipulate the Libor benchmark interest rate. The ruling, which overturns a 2013 decision, could bankrupt the institutions, the judges warned.

A lower court judge erred in dismissing the antitrust portion of private litigation against Barclays, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, UBS and others on the ground that the investors failed to allege harm to competition, according to the US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan.

Libor, or the London interbank offered rate, underpins hundreds of trillions of dollars of transactions and is used to set rates on credit cards, student loans and mortgages. It is calculated based on submissions by banks that sit on panels.

In litigation that began in 2011, investors accused big banks of suppressing Libor during the financial crisis in order to boost earnings or make their finances appear healthier.

Back in early 2013, Manhattan federal district court judge Naomi Reice Buchwald dismissed the claims filed by private plaintiffs. According to her 161-page decision, the banks did not violate antitrust laws when they colluded to manipulate the Libor benchmark interest rate and that the plaintiffs failed to prove harm from such collusion.

Buchwald’s 2013 decision surprised some, as at the time Barclays, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland had already settled cases with more than $2.5bn in penalties. Since then penalties in Libor-rigging probes have climbed to roughly $9bn, including a penalty of $2.5bn against Deutsche Bank.

More than one-third of North America’s 1,154 native bird species are at high risk of extinction due to climate change and other manmade factors, a new report found.

Thirty-seven percent of the continent’s bird species across 10 different habitat types need “urgent conservation action,” the North American Bird Conservation Initiative said in its annual “State of the Birds” report released Sunday. Forty-nine percent were identified as having moderate risk, while just 14 percent were marked as low risk.

Researchers categorized bird species based on their population size, population trends, population distribution and threats to both breeding and non-breeding members of the species.

The decline of bird species is most pronounced in ocean and tropical forest habitats, where more than half were identified as having a high risk of extinction and are on the organization’s “Watch List.”

“The outlook for oceanic birds — including seabirds and a group of landbirds found only on islands off the Mexican coast — is the bleakest of any North American bird group,” with 57 percent of species in the “high risk” category, the report found. “Small and declining seabird populations are severely threatened by invasive predators on nesting islands and accidental bycatch by commercial fishing vessels, as well as overfishing of forage fish stocks, pollution, and climate change.”

Some of the most threatened oceanic species include the Black-capped Petrel, the Fea’s Petrel and the Bermuda Petrel.

J.D. Bergeron, the executive director of International Bird Rescue, said these findings were consistent with his organization’s observations.

On May 24 2016 07:59 Introvert wrote:


We could joke that the Virginia gov moved to give voting rights back to felons because he knew he'd be joining them.

The New York city council is poised to pass a series of criminal justice reforms that would sharply curtail the punishments for low-level offenses such as littering and peeing in public, an overhaul intended to help unclog the courts and jails of the nation’s largest city.

The Criminal Justice Reform Act would alter the penalties for certain offenses, including possessing an open container of alcohol in public. Though the offenses would remain illegal, the legislation would steer them to civil court rather than criminal court.

Public urination and most offenses in public parks would be downgraded from misdemeanors to violations, and the council’s plan would reduce the available jail penalties to just one day for violations. Currently, jail time could stretch up to 90 days for such offenses.

The package of bills was unveiled by city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito on Monday and will be voted upon by the entire city council on Wednesday, when it’s expected to pass.

“For too long, New York’s criminal justice system has been broken – it’s time we fix it,” Mark-Viverito, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The Criminal Justice Reform Act is going to continue to keep New Yorkers safe while also creating a more fair and just system that will ensure the penalties fit the crime.”

The plan has the support of the New York police department and first-term Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, who is expected to sign it into law in the coming weeks.

Council staffers estimate that the plan would divert more than 100,000 cases from the criminal court system every year, avoid the issuance of 50,000 warrants annually, and prevent nearly 10,000 people annually from having permanent criminal records. There are currently 1.5m open warrants in the city, which has about 8.5 million residents.

On May 24 2016 12:00 SK.Testie wrote:
Is... is that a good thing overall?