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I think that the larger problem with social science is that they conduct experiments under extremely specific conditions and then attempt to generalize to popul

I think that the larger problem with social science is that they conduct experiments under extremely specific conditions and then attempt to generalize to populations where those same conditions aren't present at all. And I'm not talking about the media's interpretation and broadcast of the findings. I'm talking about the papers themselves.

Ntrails 10y ago
It's also pretty hard/expensive to get 10000 people involved in a long term experiment. So they tend to get tens of people and extrapolate from there. I don't think it's that they're lazy or incompetent - it's just hard to have the sort of scale required for the levels of certainty you can get from firing a bazillion calcium ions at something for months.
- jdavis703 10y ago
  Why can't they do fewer studies but with larger sizes then? Do you then run into a problem of idled researchers?
  - nonbel 10y ago
    There is a sick culture that thinks being the "idea person" is the most important part of research, and that "idea people" should be in charge of implementing their ideas. A lot of issues stem from that.
  - mathattack 10y ago
    This is the modern physics model. The major discoveries and papers have 100s of authors attached to them. The soft sciences tend to have lots more smaller studies and papers. The damage is that there isn't an "Accepted body of knowledge" that everyone knows to be true. Perhaps this isn't even possible.
- mathattack 10y ago
  You can get "1 in 10000" significance without 10000 people. (How many Tails in a row would you need to flip a coin to believe it's not random at that level? Somewhere between 13 and 20?) Also, many datasets (think financial data or census data) are much bigger.