Jared Diamond Questions

1. Please describe the background of the dispute between Dr. Samuel Huntington and Dr. Serge Lang.
Dr. Samuel Huntington was nominated to join the NAS,a nd was unlikely to be unchallenged in joining the society. Dr. Serge Lang had only joined NAS the year before, but had assumed ''the role of a sheriff of scholarship"


2.How did Lang respond to Huntington’s “pseudo mathematics?”
Lang was " Disturbed by what he saw as the use of 'pseudo mathematics' by Huntington," and sent subsequent letters and information attacking Huntington.

3. What aspects of the dispute between Lang and Huntington are “political?” How does the author, Jared Diamond, feel about “Academic Freedom?”
Some of Huntington's research was done for the State Department in 1967 and was said to be an early supporter of the "Vietnam War." Diamond feels that academic freedom should be that anyone can raise the issue of a scholar's politics, not just scholars. He implies this with a sarcastic tone, in his statement, "evidently,academic freedom means that outsiders can't raise the issue of a scholar's politics but other scholars can."

4. Why does the NAS exist? Why does this make that attacks against Huntington seem peculiar?
NAS exists to advise the Congress on questions of science and technology. This makes the attacks on Huntington seem peculiar because he was willing to advise Congress, yet he was condemned for it by some NAS members.

5. Why does Diamond find fault in the traditional perceptions of the hard sciences?
Diamond finds fault in the traditional perceptions of the hard sciences because there are some "phenomena that are intellectually challenging and important to understand, but that can't be measured to several decimal places in labs."

6. Why are soft sciences difficult to study?
The soft sciences are difficult to study because"You can't start it and stop it whenever you choose. You can't control all the variables; perhaps you can't control any variable. You may even find it hard to decide what a variable is. You can still use empirical tests to gain knowledge, but the types of tests used in the hard sciences must be modified."

7. How did the NAS need to change in the early 1970s?
NAS was "confronted with the need to offer the government competent advice about social problems, [to] began to admit social scientists at all."

8. What are the problems in “operationalizing” a concept?
Problems in "operationalizing" a concept are that, "to compare evidence with theory requires that you measure the ingredients of your theory," so "you would have to design a series of actual operations that yield a suitable measurement."

9. Briefly describe how Diamond illustrates operationalizing in:
· Mathematics-it is necessary to quantify a general term, such as "many," otherwise the concepts such as "more" or "less" would be irrelevant.
· Chemistry-speculation about ingrediants, then one "proceeds by identifying some property of a substance of interest, or of a related substance into which the first can be converted."
· Ecology-comparative "differences among habitats, which at first seemed to resist having a number put on them, proved to explain a big part of the habitats' differences."
· Psychology-using a questionnaire, defined people into general clusters based on their answers, "the responses were then employed to define attitude scales, which were further validated in other ways."

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?
Operationalizations are more difficult in the soft sciences because of the large amount of uncontrolled variables. It leads to the ridicule of the soft sciences because they deal with familiar concepts, which "all of us fancy we're experts on."

12.Why does Diamond believe that Lang might be ignorant of the measurements taken by social scientists like Huntington?
Diamond believes that Lang must be ignorant of the measurements taken by social scientists like Huntington becausehe does not know anything about the social sciences.

13.Does Diamond believe the labels associated with the sciences be replaced? Explain.
Diamond does believe that the labels should be replaced because "hard" and "soft" denote that all the "soft sciences" are easy, while, in realitythey are "much more difficult and, to some of us, intellectually more 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 the soft sciences to be more valuable than hard sciences because "our survival depends on whether we progress with understanding how people behave." I disagree, in that i think that all of the sciences, hard and soft are valuable because the soft sciences allow us to understand people's behavior, and predict patterns and such, while the hard sciences allow us to understand the world those people are behaving in. Both elements are essential to beginning to understand the complexities of human life.