Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis’ New York Times op-ed, “Let’s Shake up the Social Sciences.” Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators provide convincing rebuttals to Rojas. Once again, I suspect reactions to the column are driven by homophily rather than network effects. But all this aside, Christakis makes an interesting claim about the evidence for stagnation:
In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.
Instead, we should provide more funding for people like Christakis create departments that reflect the “cutting edge” of interdisciplinarity:
It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance.
Some recent examples offer a glimpse of the potential. At Yale, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs applies diverse social sciences to the study of international issues and offers a new major. At Harvard, the sub-discipline of physical anthropology, which increasingly relies on modern genetics, was hived off the anthropology department to make the department of human evolutionary biology. Still, such efforts are generally more like herds splitting up than like new species emerging. We have not yet changed the basic DNA of the social sciences. Failure to do so might even result in having the natural sciences co-opt topics rightly and beneficially in the purview of the social sciences.
This sort of stuff is basically pastiche disruptive-innovation talk, of the kind so popular in the edutainment-meets-business circuit. But here the metric of “innovation” is of the most superficial variety: the names of disciplines, as if what we call, for example, “Political Science” in 2013 is the same basic animal as it was in 1923, 1940, 1955, or 1964, or as if the proliferation of areas of research and methodologies within social-scientific disciplines didn’t render deeply problematic the distinction between inter– and intra-disciplinary study. Meanwhile, Christakis provides a list of cross-fertilization, collaboration, and borrowing that merely reinforces the suspicion that there’s not much of an actual problem to address.
Gelman is just giving an off-the-cuff reply to a couple of particulars in the op-ed, rather than what it deserves: a scathing rebuttal of the fundamental assumptions behind it (“scoring” this “debate” is a pretty silly exercise).
The op-ed is yet another example of a myopic view of other fields of study from a privileged vantage point. What’s wrong with the social sciences? Well, they’re not like the physical sciences (see also: “quantitative” methodologists who argue that “qualitative” methodology should be exactly the same). Clearly we should have undergraduates running experiments on each other (because THAT’S going to turn out well – has he ever done an IRB?), since experiments are the only way to produce knowledge. But the deeper problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between disciplines and interdisciplinarity. Foundational knowledge in disciplines can enable cross-disciplinary work (although it can also create siloed knowledge), but without continuing work in them, there’d be nothing left to connect together. The idea that social science fields contain nothing but solved problems that can be curated by a few guardians is jaw-droppingly naive. His suggestions for hybrids are more-or-less like Christakis played Mad Libs, combining social and natural sciences together haphazardly, rather than actually thinking about wider implications of mashing together social and natural sciences to create hybrid disciplines, which are more likely than not to result in the social being relegated to explaining residual variation. He doesn’t even seem to understand the state of affairs in natural science (Or natural science itself, e.g., his terrible metaphor of “taking a page from Darwin”). Clearly, the natural sciences are much more responsive to changes, as is evidenced by the death of physics, chemistry, and biology departments everywhere.
So enough with the new social physics already. A call for more interdisciplinarity is laudable. But superficially trashing the social sciences for a supposed lack of innovation and a lack of “experiments” only demonstrates ignorance.
@AHM, I agree with your criticism of the op-ed. The deeper challenge is that as knowledge production becomes more and more specialized — knowledge (and disciplines) will become more siloed. This is going to make interdisciplinarity more difficult and create problems for knowledge transmission – especially in liberal education which tries to maintain a balance between breadth and depth. Unfortunately, these questions get bypassed for the simplistic takes like Christakis’
I think there are problems with Christakis’s argument, but they aren’t just the ones that Gelman points out. It’s certainly worth pointing out that social sciences are largely contextual disciplines, affected by culture such that “closing the book” on certain topics doesn’t work in quite the same way as physics and chemistry (which has some real implication for his solution to just start new departments). But if we’re trying to advocate real change, why choose are the unit of analysis the “department” – a sort of bureaucratic/political historic holdover from and era when scholarly collaboration and only worked when your collaborator was right down the hall? Here’s an thoughtful response to the article along those lines:https://bit.ly/19ch1gO