theory

"Shut up, nerd."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/intro.htm

Bourgeois scholars speak of any branch of learning with mysterious awe, as if it were a thing produced in heaven, not on earth. But as a matter of fact any science, whatever it be, grows out of the demands of society or its classes. No one takes the trouble to count the number of flies on a window-pane, or the number of sparrows in the street, but one does count the number of horned cattle. The former figures are useful to no one; it is very useful to know the latter. But it is not only useful to have a knowledge of nature, from whose various parts we obtain all our substances, instruments, raw materials, etc,; it is just as necessary, in practice, to have information concerning society. The working class, at each step in its struggle, is brought face to face with the necessity of possessing such information. In order to be able to conduct its struggle with other classes properly, it is necessary for the working class to foresee how these classes will behave. For this it must know on what circumstances the conduct of the various classes, under varying conditions, depends. Before the working class obtains power, it is obliged to live under the yoke of capital and to bear in mind constantly, in its struggle for liberation, what will be the behavior of all the given classes. It must know on what this behavior depends, and by what such behavior is determined. This question may be answered only by social science. If the working class has conquered power, it is under the necessity of struggling against the capitalist governments of other countries, as well as against the remnants of counter-revolution at home; and 'it is also obliged to reckon with the extremely difficult tasks. of the organization of production and distribution. What is to be the nature of the economic plan; how is the intelligentsia to be utilized; how are the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie to be trained to communism. how shall experienced administrators be raised from the ranks of the workers; how shall the broad masses of the working class itself, as yet only slightly class-conscious, be reached; etc., etc., - all these questions require a knowledge of society in order to answer them properly, a knowledge of its classes, of their peculiarities, of their behavior in this case or that; they require a knowledge also of political economy and the social currents of thought of the various groups in society. These questions show the need for the social sciences. The practical task of a reconstruction of society may be correctly solved by the application of a scientific policy of the working class, i.e., a policy based on scientific theory; this scientific theory, in the case of the proletarian, is the theory founded by Karl Marx.

[...]

Bourgeois scholars always maintain that they are the representatives of so called "pure science", that all earthly sufferings, all conflicting interests, all the ups and downs of life, the hunt for profit, and other earthly and vulgar things have no relation whatever with their science. Their conception of the matter is approximately the following: the scholar is a god, seated on a sublime eminence, observing dispassionately the life of society in all its varying forms; they think (and yet more loudly proclaim) that vile "practice" has no relation whatever with pure "theory". This conception is of course a false one; quite the contrary is true: all learning arises from practice. This being the case, it is perfectly clear that the social sciences have a class character. Each class has its own practice, its special tasks, its interests and therefore its view of things. The bourgeoisie is concerned chiefly with safeguarding, perpetuating, solidifying, extending the rule of capital. The working class is concerned in the first place with the task of overthrowing the capitalist system and safeguarding the rule of the working class in order to reconstruct life. It is not difficult to see that bourgeois practice will demand one thing, and proletarian practice another; that the bourgeoisie will have one view of things, and the working class another; that the social science of the bourgeoisie will be of one type, and that of the proletariat unquestionably of a different type.

[...]

Among the social sciences there are two important branches which consider not only a single field of social life, but the entire social life in all its fulness; in other words, they are concerned not with any single set of phenomena (such as, economic, or legal, or religious phenomena, etc.), but take up the entire life of society, as a whole, concerning themselves with all the groups of social phenomena. One of these sciences is history; the other is sociology. In view of what has been said above it will not be difficult to grasp the difference between them. History investigates and describes how the current of social life flowed at a certain time and in a certain place (for example, how economy and law and morality and science, and a great number of other things, developed in Russia, beginning in 1700 and going down to 1800 ; or, in China, from 2000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.; or, in Germany, after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; or in any other epoch and in any other country or group of countries). Sociology takes up the answer to general questions, such as: what is society? On what does its growth or decay depend? What is the relation of the various groups of social phenomena (economic, legal, scientific, etc.), with each other; how is their evolution to be explained; what are the historical forms of society; how shall we explain the fact that one such form follows upon another; etc., etc.? Sociology is the most general (abstract) of the social sciences. It is often referred to under other names, such as: "the philosophy of history", "the theory of the historical process", etc.

It is evident from the above what relation exists between history and sociology. Since sociology explains the general laws of human evolution, it serves as a method for history. If, for example, sociology establishes the general doctrine that the forms of government depend on the forms of economy, the historian must seek and find, in any given epoch, precisely what are the relations, and must show what is their concrete, specific expression. History furnishes the material for drawing sociological conclusions and making sociological generalizations, for these conclusions are not made up of whole cloth, but are derived from the actual facts of history. Sociology in its turn formulates a definite point of view, a means of investigation, or, as we now say, a method for history.

Professionally I've always been in STEM because I need to eat, but academically all of my interests are in social sciences and the humanities more broadly. Those fields are important because they add extra lenses of context for the material development of STEM. As society becomes more complex, we need to know the hows and whys and what ifs to anticipate and address crises. Where they have an incomplete understanding, because they're studying parts of a greater body like all physical scientists study the same universe that information is confirmed or denied by the same basic processes. Anything that doesn't intersectionally fit ends up being rejected by the bigger picture. If you don't have a humanities background of some kind, you're blind to the whole sociopolitical and sociohistorical and intellectual roots/impact of what you're studying. Your experimental subject did not just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it.

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. It is man’s social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world. In their social practice, men engage in various kinds of struggle and gain rich experience, both from their successes and from their failures. Countless phenomena of the objective external world are reflected in a man’s brain through his five sense organs — the organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. At first, knowledge is perceptual. The leap to conceptual knowledge, i.e., to ideas, occurs when sufficient perceptual knowledge is accumulated. This is one process in cognition. It is the first stage in the whole process of cognition, the stage leading from objective matter to subjective consciousness from existence to ideas. Whether or not one’s consciousness or ideas (including theories, policies, plans or measures) do correctly reflect the laws of the objective external world is not yet proved at this stage, in which it is not yet possible to ascertain whether they are correct or not. Then comes the second stage in the process of cognition, the stage leading from consciousness back to matter, from ideas back to existence, in which the knowledge gained in the first stage is applied in social practice to ascertain whether the theories, policies, plans or measures meet with the anticipated success. Generally speaking, those that succeed are correct and those that fail are incorrect, and this is especially true of man’s struggle with nature. In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect ! but because, in the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later. Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth. Furthermore, the one and only purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our comrades there are many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge. When asked the sources of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles they consider the questions strange and cannot answer it. Nor do they comprehend that matter, can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life. It is therefore necessary to educate our comrades in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, so that they can orientate their thinking correctly, become good at investigation and study and at summing up experience, overcome difficulties, commit fewer mistakes, do their work better, and struggle hard so as to build China into a great and powerful socialist country and help the broad masses of the oppressed and exploited throughout the world in fulfillment of our great internationalist duty.

WHERE DO CORRECT IDEAS COME FROM?

May 1963

[This passage is from the “Draft Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in Our Present Rural Work”, which was drawn up under the direction of Comrade Mao Tse-tung. The passage was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung himself.]

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_01.htm

not really theory, or a text, or a complex concept, but i've had unusual luck treating statistical brainworms in organisations by referencing the McNamara fallacy; particularly the opening quote from the Wikipedia article:

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

— Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)[2]

i guess they don't normally think of the process in — or consequences of — a purely quantitative worldview, and the format of this argument seems to click something into place.

sprinkle some Goodhart's law and Edward Bernays into the conversation for added effect. Bernays's work is a great example of how social sciences can be used to great effect for all of the shittiest reasons.

The whole point of the social sciences is to understand how humans behave. That is the goal of the social sciences. It would be like if someone discounted meteorology because augury is bullshit. There's obvious use in understanding how humans behave because if you can understand how humans behave, you can predict how humans behave.

If they try to mumble about game theory, tell them that game theory is mostly about how people ought to act rather than how people actually act.

textbooks that actually explain the methodology probably, but if somebody wants numbers and testable hypotheses there's not much to say to them.

they're going to have to be a little more open minded if they want to be promoted into the higher echelons of STEM jobs

Best way to refute that isn't to show that social sciences are objective, but to show the endemic lack of "objective hard science" in modern/western/academic science

Some good texts:

Aikenhead & Michell's Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature is a close examination of indigenous and european empiricisms. It strongly argues that indigenous knowledge systems are more empirical than academic ones.

A book that shows this to be true in practice is Sillitoe (ed.)'s Local Science Vs Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development, which has contributions from around the world giving concrete examples of Europeans failing to be empirical in their investigations of other knowledge systems.

de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? contains a lot of examples of, even modern, scientists taking ideological presuppositions regarding animal intelligence as facts. Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures does similarly for fungi. Borg & Policante's Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital takes a look at how deeply entwined biological sciences are with capitalist society and ideology.

Lewontin's Biology as Ideology is a work by a practicing scientist criticising in more theoretical terms a lotta the above trends.

Not sure what's meant by useless though; e.g. history is objectively useless for the production of surplus value, but new ways to blow people up is very good for such profitmaking. History is very useful for understanding how we got here, what solutions have been tried, how they went wrong, etc, missile engineering is useful for blowing up the fascists stopping us from changing things

maybe look up some philosophy of science stuff?

this lecture by Rick Roderick covering Derrida might be helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvAwoUvXNzU

The whole lecture series on philosophy is pretty useful for STEMlordy types.

e: rewatched this and the wrap up ending is

https://youtu.be/LvAwoUvXNzU?t=2565

This is a bit indirect, but I've had some luck talking with stem people from the perspective that the purpose of stem is to actually use it, improve lives, get something done in practice in a material way. Given this, the technical portion of getting something done is at most 20-30% of the effort required in total, with the remaining portion coming down to various aspects of sharing knowledge, psychology, teamwork, etc. In short, society and the social sciences. If someone wants to play in the stem busybox and never get anything actually done, fair enough. If you want to actually be effective and actually implement or use some aspect of technology, you need to understand the context in which it will be used.

In short, tell stem-brained people that if they don't learn anything about humanities that they are deeply unserious.