33 ms·

Like in any other field, initial theories can be flawed and it takes time to find convincing replacements. It's true that it's imperfect, but I think you have a

• buboard 7y ago
  One thing though is that a large body of research followed on the same path semi-blindly. Too much trust was placed on Chomsky's (brilliant on publication, but that was 70 years ago!) ideas that the brain might contain machinery for universal grammars. Other fields differ markedly on level of skepticism. That said, linguistics is not a science that is commonly referenced in politics, nor the exemplary "social science". It's arguably closer to hard sciences like mathematics. The science that are trusted when making public policy decisions are usually social/political science, psychology, economics et al.
• Chris2048 7y ago
  > but I think you have a blind spot Do you have evidence supporting this Ad-Hom, or is it just an imperfect initial theory?
• mc32 7y ago
  For me a big pet peeve is in the socsci there seems to be a cottage industry producing things like “a study in Manteca, CA, showed that buying meal kits has smaller carbon footprint than grocery store food”. But if you read you’ll find out they bought a few meal kits and made some big assumptions. But then you get a bunch of influences trying to be hip who push this without being critical. It could be a study on homelessness or addiction, etc.