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Experimental psychology and economics are not normal among the social sciences. Having a hypothesis and testing it, as experimental psychologists do, is not pr

Experimental psychology and economics are not normal among the social sciences. Having a hypothesis and testing it, as experimental psychologists do, is not present in any other field of social science. Neither is the mathematical rigor that some fields of economics apply. These fields are the "physics" of social science. Most of the rest of the social sciences involves very little science (the process) or math.

bee_rider 4y ago
Economics is as unfalsifiable as every other social science, they’ve just had longer to construct a heap of math to hide behind.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I like to think of economics as being similar to the string theorists in physics. Their work, too, is also practically unfalsifiable but mathematically beautiful.
pkkm 4y ago
I definitely don't object to calling out particular subfields when they're non-empirical and heavily influenced by ideology, which I know happens. What I object to are sweeping generalizations that the whole thing is "not science" and "entirely populated by ideological activists". That's intellectually lazy and unfair to the many people who do good work trying to unravel the workings of attention, memory, perception, and reasoning. We should try to talk with a higher level of detail and distinguish rigorous work from low-quality work rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater.
runarberg 4y ago
This is some sort of a reverse no true Scotsman fallacy. There are plenty of more fields inside social science where hypotheses driven research and testing is the norm. Anthropology comes quick to mind, so does behavioral psychology. Urban engineering, population control, and transportation design use research from social scientists which gets tested all the time with their work, which in turn feeds back in to theory of social systems. In fact I would say that economics is probably the least “scientific” of the social scientists, since it is based more on mathematics more then discovering and applying properties of the real world. But that is just my definition of science which IMO shouldn’t involve assumptions and derivation of truths from those assumptions, the latter being philosophy.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Anthropology is not a beacon of the scientific method, no. The "hypothesis driven" nature of the field is about as hypothesis driven as literature analysis. If you are treating the process of "I have a hypothesis, I look for evidence, and I find it" as scientific, then History and English are sciences too. The difference that makes a science is that the process of looking for evidence is about systematically trying to falsify your hypothesis - and once there are no alternative explanations left, you have a good theory about what is going on. Anthropology, literature studies, history, and even "harder" disciplines of social science (like linguistics and several other kinds of psychology) don't really work this way. They can produce useful knowledge, sure, but that doesn't make them sciences. As to the other fields you mentioned, all of them are engineering disciplines, which are very different than sciences. Engineering is about producing useful work from the results of science. The results that those particular disciplines use largely come from psychology.

bee_rider 4y ago

Economics is as unfalsifiable as every other social science, they’ve just had longer to construct a heap of math to hide behind.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I like to think of economics as being similar to the string theorists in physics. Their work, too, is also practically unfalsifiable but mathematically beautiful.

pkkm 4y ago

I definitely don't object to calling out particular subfields when they're non-empirical and heavily influenced by ideology, which I know happens. What I object to are sweeping generalizations that the whole thing is "not science" and "entirely populated by ideological activists". That's intellectually lazy and unfair to the many people who do good work trying to unravel the workings of attention, memory, perception, and reasoning. We should try to talk with a higher level of detail and distinguish rigorous work from low-quality work rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater.

runarberg 4y ago

This is some sort of a reverse no true Scotsman fallacy. There are plenty of more fields inside social science where hypotheses driven research and testing is the norm. Anthropology comes quick to mind, so does behavioral psychology. Urban engineering, population control, and transportation design use research from social scientists which gets tested all the time with their work, which in turn feeds back in to theory of social systems. In fact I would say that economics is probably the least “scientific” of the social scientists, since it is based more on mathematics more then discovering and applying properties of the real world. But that is just my definition of science which IMO shouldn’t involve assumptions and derivation of truths from those assumptions, the latter being philosophy.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Anthropology is not a beacon of the scientific method, no. The "hypothesis driven" nature of the field is about as hypothesis driven as literature analysis. If you are treating the process of "I have a hypothesis, I look for evidence, and I find it" as scientific, then History and English are sciences too. The difference that makes a science is that the process of looking for evidence is about systematically trying to falsify your hypothesis - and once there are no alternative explanations left, you have a good theory about what is going on. Anthropology, literature studies, history, and even "harder" disciplines of social science (like linguistics and several other kinds of psychology) don't really work this way. They can produce useful knowledge, sure, but that doesn't make them sciences. As to the other fields you mentioned, all of them are engineering disciplines, which are very different than sciences. Engineering is about producing useful work from the results of science. The results that those particular disciplines use largely come from psychology.