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The reproducibility crisis and general decay of academia has given us a few decades of bad science. Entire fields have been built using massaged statistics to d
by heyjamesknight 2y ago
The reproducibility crisis and general decay of academia has given us a few decades of bad science. Entire fields have been built using massaged statistics to deny common sense in the pursuit of tenure.
We're just now "unlearning" much of this, especially in the social sciences.
- Aerbil313 2y agoWhy would we be "unlearning" anything now? It doesn't make sense. What changed? Are academicians not monetarily awarded for attention-grabbing and breakthrough-sounding research anymore?
- anon291 2y agoI mean, these fields weren't considered fields before. Sociology is a new field in that the methods it uses (the scientific method) are now being newly applied to social issues. There are several metaphysical and semantic questions to be answered here. Is the scientific method even appropriate for studying society? One prerequisite for the application of the scientific method is the belief that the laws being studied are fixed. Does that apply to every sociological question? If not, then the entire field is called into question. In times past, sociology would be the realm of philosophers who would, after careful study (not scientific, just regular human intuition) and reading (so they could 'experience' past events), would come up with a framework of human behavior and then defend it.