Jared diamond questions

1. The dispute between Huntington and Lang is over the topic of soft sciences and hard sciences. Lang believes that Soft sciences should not be considered sciences at all.

2. Langs response to Huntington was to send out folders filled with documents from three different writers. He then asked that the receiver pay for the cost of the shipment of these documents to them.

3. The dispute between the two seems political because Lang has a history of involvement with politics that influenced the NAS. With this he can influence the vote over Huntington. Jared Diamond feels that “academic freedom” is that only scholars can question other scholars about his/her politics, whereas outsiders cannot.

4. NAS exists to extract the best people from each field of science. These attacks are peculiar because diamond has been a member for 8 years.

5. He finds fault in these tradition perceptions of hard sciences because most stereotypes of a scientist is someone in a lab coat working complex test tubes and equations. Also, these hard sciences have a traditional perception of producing hard evidence from highly controlled experiments.

6. Soft sciences are difficult to study because they aren’t something that is tangible or concrete. These sciences depend on conditions and patterns.

7. NAS changed in the early 70's by allowing scientists from all fields to be admitted. This decision was influenced by the government which needs competent advice about social problems.

8. The problems with operationalizing a concept are that there would need to be a series of experiments that yield suitable results. Another problem with operationalizing a concept is that sometimes there is no experiment that can be done.

9. How Jared Diamond illustrates operationalizing different sciences:

• Mathematics: without a proper number system, the idea of “many” cannot be argued or comprehended
• Chemistry: cannot speculate about matter unless you know how many materials there are.
• Ecology: operationalizing different habits
• Psychology: cannot operationalize a doctor.

10. The book by Huntington that provoked Lang's wrath discussed such operationalized concepts as economic well-being, political instability, and social and economic modernization

11. operationalizing is more difficult and less exact in the soft sciences because of the variables. In these sciences, there are more variables that need to be controlled in order to create an experiment.

12. Diamond believes that Lang might be ignorant because he does not know how social sciences make measurements.

13.diamond believes that the labels of science be could be changed from hard to “difficult” and from soft to “easy.” This should be done because some sciences are harder to comprehend that others, regardless of them being soft vs. hard.

14. Diamond believes that soft sciences are more important than hard sciences. i do not agree with this because soft science experiments can be done over and yield different results, having to keep improving the test and changing the scope of the experiment.