Lean Left

Posted in Politics | 6 Comments

6 Responses

1. on May 17, 2010 at 5:40 pm Judd

   I’m pessimistic. For this to be effective you’ll be relying on the part of the electorate who’s not very politically active (i.e.: more apt to be swayed by what they see in an ad) to not only notice the term “democratic dollar” but also to know what it means. For something like this to work you’d need a highly engaged and informed populace and if we had one of those we wouldn’t need the ads in the first place.

   
   
2. on May 18, 2010 at 9:01 am secretlivesofscientists

   I’m sorry, I read “political scientist” and fell laughing off my chair.

   
   
3. on May 20, 2010 at 12:27 am Dan M.

   Well, it at least passed the milk-out-the-nose test.

   The particular idea of “democratic dollar” having a positive association seems kindof implausible to me. Notwithstanding the issue of whether the electorate is even educated enough to know the difference between “democratic” and “Democratic”, it’s not like “lots of people with disposable income and an interest in using it to tell others what to think” necessarily correlates with the interests of most voters.

   I suppose that the assumption is that a lack of a single salient donor makes quid pro quo less likely, but that’s only true if there are also some guarantee that the “small” donations are in some meaningful sense independent of one another such that there is no central entity to pander to. That would require a major reworking of our media infrastructure, rather some lip-service to populism.

   That said, I’m all for strong disclosure laws, and if that takes the form of “you must state who your largest donor is unless you can instead say that your largest doner provided less than 10% of your total collections” that’s fine by me.

   (SB, you talk like you’ve never before heard the term “political science”. Or do you not think that there are people who study the mechanisms of politics?)

   
   
4. on May 20, 2010 at 8:32 am tgirsch

   I’m guessing that as a “hard” scientist, Barbie holds pretty much all of the social sciences in contempt. It’s rather like how a soccer player would scoff at a golfer who refers to himself as an “athlete.” It’s true in a very broad sense, but we’re clearly talking about VERY different things.

   
   
5. on May 20, 2010 at 12:41 pm secretlivesofscientists

   I don’t hold the social sciences in contempt. Psycology adheres pretty well to the scientific method. It’s just the game of “rag on the political science student who insists their field as a science” that I enjoy. It’s kind of a thing, you know? My best friend in college was a political-sci major and she and her fellow poli-sci students were frequently making cracks about it not reeaaalllly being a science. It seemed like there was an unwritten rule that if you study this field called “political science”, thou shalt be mocked by real scientists whenst thou callest thyself a “scientist”. Most poli-sci students I know openly joke about this, themselves.

   I wouldn’t say there’s no science *involved* at all in poli-sci, but studying the mechanisms of politics and making predictions doesn’t make something a science, in my mind. I think parts of poli-sci are tangentially related to parts of science, like statistical models, but to me it appears to far more resemble philosophy and history than science. IMO, poli-sci should be absorbed into sociology, since it’s pretty much the same thing.

   The way scientific hypotheses are formulated and tested are far different for “real” sciences than for political “science” studies. It’s not that the analysis and conclusions of poli-sci studies don’t make sense – they often do – but I just wouldn’t call them scientific. The requirements for population homogeneity, controls (i.e. negative controls, double-blind), and most of all, reproducibility are strict for “real” sciences, in accordance with the scientific method, but are pretty fuzzy when it comes to poli-sci. Science doesn’t tolerate “hand-wavey”-ness to the degree that it is present in poli-sci. Science requires a defined degree of precision, an exactness in the measurement process, and a robust proof or demonstration that poli-sci and many social sciences lack.

   We all know what happens when we drop a rock off of a bridge. To say “rocks fall to the ground” is a frequently made observation. To say “gravity will cause the rock to fall to the ground” is not a scientific statement either, it is still an observation, but one which doesn’t oppose something that is scientific, namely, gravity. A scientific statement would be “the gravitational field, g, will act on a rock, which is defined as a body of mass, and the result will be that the rock will fall to the ground at an accelleration of 9.81 m per square seconds, and this reaction is consistently shown to occur as stated with all similarly composed rocks dropped off of bridges within the specified gravitational field.”

   There are certain ab inito definitions that must be known, and the conclusions of a science must be consistent with the other laws of science that can be expected to act on the objects being studied. I don’t think it is possible to know enough about laws that must be obeyed in the systems studied by poli-sci to draw scientific conclusions. I don’t think the proper controls can be put in place to test the strength of the hypotheses in politcal science.

   
   
6. on May 20, 2010 at 7:16 pm Dan M.

   Okay, SB, actually I pretty much agree with you. Maybe it’s the paucity of a text medium, but your original comment sounded to me to be expressing surprise at the term, which is obviously a much more small-minded position than what you’ve said at greater length.

   
   

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