Diamond Questions

Laura Fenney
Theory of Knowledge

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

Lang attacked Huntington regarding social science in NAS. Huntington and Lang’s dispute comes down to one science question: Do the so-called soft sciences, like political science and psychology, really constitute science at all, and do they deserve to stand beside “hard sciences,” like chemistry and physics?

2. How did Lang respond to Huntington’s “pseudo mathematics?”

Lang sent all NAS members several thick mailings attacking Huntington, enclosing photocopies of letters describing what scholar A said in response to scholar B’s attack on scholar C. Lang also asked members for money to help pay the postage and copying bills.

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

The political aspect is how Huntington did several things that are now anathema in US academia: he received CIA support for some research such as doing a study for the State Department in 1967 on political stability in South Vietnam. He is said to have been an early supporter of Vietnam. Election to NAS is supposed to be based only on scholarly qualifications, but not political views. Diamond says, “American academics are virtually unanimous in rushing to defend academic freedom whenever a university president or outsider criticizes a scholar because of his politics.”

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

Congress established the academy in 1863 to act as official adviser to the US government on questions of science and technology. NAS established the National Research Council or NRC. NAS and NRC committees still provide reports about a wide range of matters from nutrition to future army materials. Attacks against Huntington seem peculiar because he did exactly what NAS was originally made to do: advise the government. However, NAS members still wanted to tear Huntington down.

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

Diamond says that there are many stereotypes regarding hard and soft sciences. Hard sciences have a better reputation because they use firm evidence that controlled experiments and highly accurate measurements can provide. However, people today only view “hard sciences” as the only types of science. “Soft sciences” can not be measured by decimal places, but they are important to understand such as: animal behavior, psychology- human behavior, cultural anthropology, economics, history, and government. The difference between hard and soft sciences is usually misunderstood by hard scientists, who usually tend to look down on soft sciences and reserve special contempt for social sciences.

6. Why are soft sciences difficult to study?

Soft sciences are difficult to study because you can not control all the variables or maybe any variable for that matter. Sometimes it is even difficult to decide what exactly the variables are. Soft sciences can not be measured out like hard sciences can accurately.

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

8. What are the problems in “operationalizing” a concept?

To compare evidence with theory requires that you measure the ingredients of your theory. For ingredients like weight or speed it’s clear what to measure, but what would you measure if you wanted to understand political instability? Somehow, you would have to design a series of actual operations that yield a suitable measurement- you must “operationalize” the ingredients of theory.

9. Briefly describe how Diamond illustrates operationalizing in:

Mathematics- One cave woman said, “Let’s pick this tree over here, because it has many bananas.” The other cave woman said, “No, let’s pick that tree over there, because it has more bananas.” Without a number system to operationalize their concept of ‘many,’ the two cave women could never prove to each other which tree offered better pickings.
Chemistry- When Diamond and his colleagues were studying the physiology of hummingbirds, they knew that the hummingbirds liked to drink sweet nectar, but they argued about how sweet it was and operationalized the concept by measuring sugar concentrations off a spectrophotometer.
Ecology – Diamond questioned why more species of birds are found in a rain forest than a marsh. An ecologist, Robert MacArthur, measured how far a board at a certain height above the ground had to be moved in a random direction away from an observer standing in the forest or marsh before it became half obscured by the foliage. The distance is inversely proportional to the density of the foliage at that height. In a marsh all the foliage is concentrated within a few feet of the ground, whereas in a rain forest it’s spread fairly equally from the ground to the canopy. Habit complexity is operationalized as what’s called a foliage height diversity index, a single number. MacArthur’s simple operationalization of these foliage differences among habitats proved to explain a big part of habitat’s differences in numbers of bird species.
Psychology- Marie questioned why some doctors are more frank with their patients than others, and some doctors appear to withhold more information from some patients than others. She operationalized doctors’ attitudes and she discovered that doctors most convinced about the value of early diagnosis and aggressive treatment of cancer are the ones most likely to be frank with their patients.

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

It is more difficult and less exact because there are so many uncontrolled variables in soft sciences. Operationalizing leads itself to ridicule in the social sciences because the concepts being studied usually are familiar ones that most people think that they’re experts on. Anybody, scientists or not, think that they are entitled to talk about politics and psychology.

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

No political scientist at NAS has ever challenged a mathematical candidate in hard sciences by saying, “How does he measure things like ‘many’? Does he have a many-meter?’ People would laugh over the questioner’s ignorance of mathematics. Therefore Lang’s question of “How does Huntington measure things like social frustration,” betrays an equal ignorance of how the social sciences make measurements.

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

Diamond says that the ingrained labels such as “soft science” and “hard science” could be replaced by hard (difficult) and easy science. Even though ecology, psychology, and the other social sciences are more difficult to some people, and even can be more intellectually challenging than mathematics and chemistry.

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

Diamond believes that soft sciences are more important to humanity’s future, since our survival depends on whether we progress with understanding how people behave, why some societies become frustrated, and whether their governments tend to become unstable. I think that both soft and hard sciences are important to understand. However, I do agree more with Diamond’s idea that people need to have a better grasp of soft sciences, so that they can understand human patterns in society. People need to truly understand human behavior because otherwise they will continue to make the same mistakes and will not learn from them. Studying history and human behavior gives people a better grasp of the world around them, as opposed to just relying on scientific numbers and formulas in hard sciences.