Jarred Diamond Questions

1. Please describe the background of the dispute between Dr. Samuel Huntington and Dr. Serge Lang.

- Samuel Huntington is a political scientist, and Serge Lang is a mathematician. They are having a debate over whether Huntington should be admitted to an academy of which Lang is a member of. Huntington is currently loosing.

2. How did Lang respond to Hunington's "pseudo mathematics?"

-Lang sent all of the members of the NAS mail against Huntington, with photocopies of letters sent from scholar to scholar.

3. What aspects of the dispute between Lang and Huntington are "political?" How does the author, Jared Diamond, feel about "Academic Freedom?"

-Huntington recieved support from the CIA do conduct research for a study on the State Department in 1967 on political stability in South Vietnam. It was also found out that he was an early supporter of the Vietnam War. He says, "American academics are virtually unanimous in rushing to defend academic freedom whenever a university president or an outsider criticizes a scholar because of his politics."

4. Why does the NAS exist? Why does this make that attacks against Huntington seem peculiar?

-It was originally established by the congress to act as an advisor to the US government regarding issues with science and technology. Huntington tried doing what was supposed to be done, advising the government, but the people held that against him... which leads us to question how much of a role politics played in the election.

5. Why does Diamond find fault in the traditional perceptions of the hard sciences?

-Because people tend to believe that this is the only type of sciecne out there. However, that is not the case, because sceince is actually just the explaining and predicting of natural phenomena by testing one's theory over and over again.

6. Why are the soft sciences difficult to study?

-Well, you can't start and stop an experiment whenever you choose, as you could do with a hard science. You can't control for all variables, and it may even be hard to pick what a variable is.

7. How does the NAS need to change in the early 1970s?

-They were asked to offer advice about social problems. (need for social scientists)

8. What are the problems in operationalizing a concept?

-Well, you are simpoly measuring your theory or concept. I know that we had to do this in psychology last year, I specifically remembering talking about how you operationalize trust. So if you're conducting an experiment, you would say that "trust is noted by these behaviors." The rest of your experiment would have to include those exact behaviors, because trustitself isn't something thatis measurable. This poses problems because everyone operationalizes things differently from one another, so two experiments testing the same thing could be completely different depdning upon how one person operationalizes the word trust.

9. Briefly describe how Diamond illustrates operationalizing in:

-Mathematics: Well, there is a problem with using words like "many." He uses the example of two cave women going out to pick bananas, and one says to the other lets go pick bananas off of that tree, because it has many. There is no real way of knowing which has more though, because many is a word that needs to be operationalized.

-Chemistry: I really don't understand what this one is saying.. but it says, "Ancient philosophers speculated about the ingredients of matter, but not until the eighteenth century did the first modern chemists figure out how to measure these ingredients. Analytical chemistry now proceeds by identifying some property of a substance of interest, or of a related substance into which the first can be converted. The property must be one that can be measured, like weight, or the light the substance absorbs, or the amount of neutralizing agent it consumes."

-Ecology: He discusses the problem of identifying the complexity of a habitat.

-Psychology: He talks about measuring the attitudes of patients towards death, which is similar to what i talked to about in the previous question regarding truth.

10. What were Huntington's operationalized concepts that provoked the wrath of Lang?

-Economic well-being, political instability, and social and economic modernization.

11. Why is the task of operationalizing more difficult and less exact in the soft sciences? Why does it lead to the ridicule of the soft sciences?

-Because they're familiar concepts, so we all think we are experts on them. Therefore, we will always think that our opinion of what something is is correct. Therefore, the terms that are being operationalized are much harder to agree on than hard sciences, because they usually involve emotions.

12. Why does Diamond believe that Lang might be ignorant of the measurements taken by social scientists like Huntington?

- Because it is a bit different measuring things that are not tangeable, like for instance, in psychology emotions. It is much simpler to measure the temperature of something, rather than measuring how angry a person is.

13. Does Diamond believe the labels associated with the sciences can be replaced? Explain.

-Yes, he thinks that they should be referred to as hard and easy sciences. He believes that social sciences are much more difficult than the hard sciences like math or chemistry.

14. Does Diamond believe the soft sciences to be more valuable than hard sciences? Do you agree? Explain.

-Yes he does believe this, because he says our society will die off if we don't figure out how people work. I guess that I agree with this to an extent, but I mean I think hard sciences are just as important, to control things like global warming. I think it is completely important to study human behavior though at the same time.