Fuck Nuance (2015)

29 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by bariumbitmap

6 Comments

bariumbitmap

18 minutes ago

I don't know much about sociology, so I found it interesting to read a sociologist critique his own field. This part stood out to me:

> To make a loose statistical analogy, it is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps increasing.

Like a statistical model having parameters, a theory should have some nuance, but too much nuance is analogous to overfitting. It reminds me of the maxim that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler

spenrose

6 hours ago

I still miss the original abstract:

- Seriously, fuck it.

qurren

8 hours ago

I like to think of nuances as nuisances. Sometimes I wonder if we can just merge these two words because they're pretty much the same thing most of the time.