Lee has spent his entire career grappling with the issue of science denial — he’s the author of books on post-truth and defending science from fraud, the latter

Lee has spent his entire career grappling with the issue of science denial — he’s the author of books on post-truth and defending science from fraud, the latter of which he drew on for this essay. Here, he holds the state of the social sciences up to the prescientific “dark ages” of medicine, an unlikely source for guidance, and lays out a path forward. "Like medicine, social science is subjective. And it is also normative. We have a stake not just in knowing how things are but also in using this knowledge to make things the way we think they should be. We study voting behavior in the interest of preserving democratic values. We study the relationship between inflation and unemployment in order to mitigate the next recession. Yet unlike medicine, so far social scientists have not proven to be very effective in finding a way to wall off positive inquiry from normative expectations, which leads to the problem that instead of acquiring objective knowledge we may only be indulging in confirmation bias and wishful thinking."