Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 April 4

= April 4 =

Is anti-positivism against the mathematical formalization of the social sciences?
Anti-positivist opposes almost all the assumptions of positivism. Does this opposition extend to the use of mathematically rigorous techniques in analyzing data and explaining social structures and functions?49.144.142.130 (talk) 07:46, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
 * That certainly is my impression. They seem to be base their lives on using more and more obscure terms and stroking each others egos but there's no way of distinguishing dross from gold so it is all rubbish. Well perhaps if I applied some artificial intelligence it could distinguish something worth spending a little time looking at ;-)Dmcq (talk) 16:38, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
 * One can be an anti-positivist without opposing all use of mathematical techniques. The major critique of positivism is that a focus on only the measurable can be extremely&mdash;and misleadingly&mdash;reductionist. For example, clearly it is reasonable to count how many people a given person talks to in a day, or how many friends that person has on Facebook, and I doubt that anyone would reject the counting of such things, or even studying whether they were correlated. However, when it comes to working out the closeness of the connection between two people, an anti-positivist might question whether it is possible to measure such a thing, and would be very wary of any purported metric for such "closeness" and would utterly reject that we could develop such a metric and then proceed as if that metric were interchangeable with the original concept of "closeness." The anti-positivist would say that, for the positivist, "if you can't count it, it can't count," and would argue that there are things in the world that cannot be reduced to mathematically rigorous models. As Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, "&hellip;it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." Or, to put it another way, there is a danger of attempting precision that exceeds your accuracy. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 04:31, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Closeness is a measurement done every day for profit by companies like Netflix or Amazon. My own experience is that using mathematical methods gives far better results than any waffling - every time I've disagreed with the results of any such calculations I've done and asked someone else to say which of two things they think is closer to the truth they have sided with the machine against me. Dmcq (talk) 16:04, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Dmcq, the questioner did not ask whether you, personally, were a positivist. He/she asked what the non-positivist position would be. - Jmabel &#124; Talk
 * You pointed out closeness as something that an anti-positivist might think was not something one could measure whereas doing exactly that is the basis of most of the commerce on the internet. What is basically being rejected is the scientific method and unfortunately this leads to having journals where peer review means literary criticism. Mathematical equations can proliferate in pseudoscience just as much or even more than in proper science. Is it really using a mathematical technique or is it just for show or a mystical invocation if the result is not properly checked? Dmcq (talk) 13:31, 6 April 2015 (UTC)Dmcq (talk) 13:31, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Art Deco relief on a house in Bucharest
I know the odds aren't great, but I was wondering whether anyone would know anything about this rather remarkable, somewhat deteriorated Art Deco relief on a house in Bucharest (Str. Aurel Vlaicu, approximately nr. 125, no address posted that I could see). If you need a bit more visual context, see File:Bucharest - Str. Aurel Vlaicu 07 (derelict house).jpg, and the building next door can be seen at File:Bucharest - Str. Aurel Vlaicu 06.jpg. I was wondering whether anyone knows the date of the piece (1920s or 1930s, I'd guess), anything about the architect of the house (one of the earliest modernist structures in that area, I'd guess), its current status (looks somewhat derelict but not obviously abandoned), who might have lived there (especially originally), etc. I haven't been able to find anything relevant online, which is actually a bit surprising because there is a lot online about intriguing buildings in Bucharest. Searching is made a little more difficult by the existence of an airport with the same name as this street. Also, there's a cemetery in  Județul Covasna with a similar address. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 20:51, 4 April 2015 (UTC)


 * This link takes you to the "Contact Us" page of the National Archives of Romania website. While it's all in Romanian, I suggest you send your query in English, as an archives at the national level is likely to employ academics who can read it and forward it to the staff member(s) or sister institution who can provide the information you seek. -- Deborahjay (talk) 15:54, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * My Romanian is probably good enough to ask in Romanian, but in my experience, this is too minor a building for there to be much available from something like that. But, thanks, it's a reasonable suggestion, and does suggest the sort of direction I'll need to go (probably something with a bit more of a local focus than that). - Jmabel &#124; Talk 16:06, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yup, only after typing my response did I arrive at your User page (on the Commons first, actually), and saw your Babelbox for Romanian. My advice - as a museum archives staffer accustomed to handling queries written in nonnative English - is to write your salutations in Romanian and switch to English for an accurate, detailed description, as it's axiomatic that everyone's receptive language (certainly the written) is better than their expressive, which will be true for the recipient as well. Otherwise, I didn't expect the National Archives would have this level of detail in their collections but rely on their Bucharest location placing them near the municipal or county lands use registry or office of that sort. I trust you'll add details to the file in Commons! -- Cheers, Deborahjay (talk) 18:52, 7 April 2015 (UTC)