Pseudoblog: Abstraction Leakage is a Significant Problem in Social Science. What should we do?

Research / Theory

Social science abstractions ‘leak’ - what should we do?

Abstractions are vital, but like many living things, dangerous, because abstractions always leak. (“You’re very clever, young man, but it’s reductionism all the way down!”) This is in some sense the opposite of a mathematician: a mathematician tries to ‘see through’ a complex system’s accidental complexity up to a simpler more-abstract more-true version which can be understood & manipulated—but for the hacker, all complexity is essential, and they are instead trying to unsee the simple abstract system down to the more-complex less-abstract (but also more true) version. (A mathematician might try to transform a program up into successively more abstract representations to eventually show it is trivially correct; a hacker would prefer to compile a program down into its most concrete representation to brute force all execution paths & find an exploit trivially proving it incorrect. /// from Gwern’s excellent On Seeing Through and Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset)

Tooling

Reviewing Differentiation (cont.)

Implicit differentiation

Acceleration + velocity

Linear approximation


Honig, Dan. 2018. Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work. Oxford University Press.
———. 2022. “Managing for Motivation as Public Performance Improvement Strategy in Education & Far Beyond.” Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE). https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-Misc_2022/04.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.