This post and discussion hits close to home. I'm a tenured professor of social science (at a large research university) who is on the cusp of leaving my positio

This post and discussion hits close to home. I'm a tenured professor of social science (at a large research university) who is on the cusp of leaving my position, in part because of better opportunities elsewhere for my family, but also because of the stuff discussed in the post and the tenor of the discussion here. Maybe my point is off the mark given your "qualitative" qualifier, but about the social sciences: behavior is a phenomenon. It's complex and can be examined at multiple levels, but it is a phenomenon. We have two choices in understanding it: to try to approach it through quantitative, methodical, logical, observation and prediction or to leave it to other approaches. If you do the former, it's extremely difficult and you end up struggling even to quantify anything. But if you do the latter, you are leaving something extremely important to wild speculation, unmoored opinion, and fairy tales. The quantitative social scientist faces a dilemma of being ridiculed for trying to approach something scientifically and rigorously when the alternative is to leave it to forces that are much worse. It's simply false that there are no provable metrics, unless you literally mean in the sense of proof, but that stands to be true of many scientific disciplines. And the reductionistic reply that everything is neuroscience is akin to telling computer scientists to abandon algorithmic theory because it's not about electrons, or the astronomer that it's all chemistry and physics anyway, or the evolutionary biologist that it's all molecular biology. In any event, the replication crisis is not about statistics, and it's not unique to the social sciences. Studies have shown the same problems exist in many fields, although they do appear to be worse as the field increases in complexity of subject matter. Oncology is also plagued with such problems, for example, although no one would say that cancer is a soft topic. The social sciences have a tendency to look inward (appropriately enough), and so in many ways, are bearing the brunt of the negative publicity they are shining on themselves and everyone else. The problem I see extremely complex, and won't be fixed by any statistical solution. There are many causes, too many to name (I could probably write a book on the topic and it still wouldn't be enough). In general, they can be summed up by saying that there's been a fundamental shift away from soundness, and toward celebrity and novelty, at a time when the justification for that celebrity is weakest, if it were ever strong. Tenure protections have eroded, accelerating the problems, and funding has been cut substantially from universities, even as there's an oversupply of new scientists entering the field. It's as if we decided as a society to honor war veterans by celebrating only those few survivors with the wildest, most glamorous tales of adventure, ignoring the dead who made the actual contributions. To make this analogy more accurate, imagine that we've grossly romanticized war publicly, lavished attention on these survivors, even while we've dried up job opportunities for our best and brightest young citizens in society at large; we've all but cut public funding from the military in practice, and replaced it with a thinly veiled system of contracted private mercenaries, who are told their obligation to the country is to raise funds in whatever way possible. I'm exaggerating and being dramatic to make a point, but I think the parallels are pretty close. I'd go so far as to say the problems aren't really unique to science, as is reflected in comments here about software projects and the like. We have serious problems in society (at least in the US) with overhype, and gross distortions in how we compensate for work and contributions to society in general. This is true in business, politics, healthcare, everything. I think science is just one more casualty of this, but it's been hidden for awhile due to the gradual nature of the disease, and the cracks are starting to show.