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And if you think that's bad, just wait till you hear about string theory! /s Honestly this is a thin critique indeed. Social sciences are difficult precisely b
by dbspin 3y ago
And if you think that's bad, just wait till you hear about string theory! /s
Honestly this is a thin critique indeed. Social sciences are difficult precisely because they focus on phenomena with multi-factorial causes. Simple, high confidence, predictive theories are rare in psychology, sociology, anthropology etc, not because social scientists are committing a 'hoax'. In part because the factors impacting individual and collective behaviour are profoundly complex. And also because experimentalism in the social world is ethically, practically and epistemically fraught. We can't easily experiment on people or societies, and we can't stand as independent observers of phenomena of which we are part. We can develop hypotheses, develop experiments which attempt to falsify our null hypothesis, triangulate evidence from different observations and so on. We can model, observe, and infer. Over time we can develop frameworks that are measurably useful - from CBT to behavioural economics. But none of this is easy or definitive.
I note how common this perspective - that social science is some kind of conspiracy of faux expertise - is becoming on Hackernews. And how ironic it is, given that it's rooted in a lack of expertise or even familiarity with the topics critiqued.
This is just one forum in which the growing social skepticism of expertise in general, and science in particular is being articulated.
- somenameforme 3y agoNo, this belief is rooted in the observation that many social science fields, like social psychology, have replication rates in the 20% [1] range and are rife with obviously broken experimental methodology - hey let's go poll Amazon Mechanical Turk penny poll pros, and extrapolate it to everybody - perfect! And note that those replication studies are not picking low hanging fruit, they're going after the some biggest, highest impact factor journals there are in these fields. And so what that tells you is that if you take a given study in these fields, took what was said and assumed the exact opposite (or at least that it was not statistically relevant) you'd be right overwhelmingly more often than somebody who took these studies and went 'wow, that's what the science says I guess.' Furthermore, there is a difference between something being difficult and it being impossible. Many don't realize that astrology was, for many centuries a "real" science, at least as real as modern social science is. It only ended, with some irony, because of the Church. They claimed that astrology's claims to be able to effectively divine the future was heretical and blasphemous, which led to astrology to go from a staple of education and science to being a fringe pseudoscience used for entertainment purposes only. I've no doubt that many practitioners of the time did genuinely feel that what they were doing was simply very difficult. And in fact there probably are some incidental correlations one can draw based on groups across time, so they would be able to show some "real" results, even if the entire field was completely bunk. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...