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> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong
by spiralx 5y ago
> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences and other fields where theorising from first principles isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well. Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be an engineer than any other field was noted back in the early days of Usenet:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoTo be fair, given recent reproducibility fiasco, social sciences were scorned for a good reason.
- Teever 5y agoIs there anything to indicate that computer science and computer engineering will avoid their own reproducibility fiasco?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoWell... there's computer science, and then there's computer science. All (most of?) the stuff done on P vs NP is good science that will stand up. Studies on which language features make it better for developers are social science, because they involve those pesky humans. That stuff is likely to suffer from a reproducibility crisis.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoreproducibility in social sciences is usually a function of a)insurmountable costs of recruiting participants, b)complexity of the questions, and c) lack of standardization of humans. Sure social scientists would like to have N=1 billion, but they'd be lucky to get funding for 1,000.
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoOne of the problems is that the humans used were pretty standard -- all psychology students. Also publication bias.
- SubiculumCode 5y agocan't win. If your sample isn't diverse enough it isn't representative. It it is representative, its likely too small to get a reliable effect due to the number of confounds.
- SubiculumCode 5y agowhat a great link. Thanks for sharing.