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You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason, and many of us grew up with a categorica

You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason, and many of us grew up with a categorical understanding of a difference between "hard" material sciences like physics and chemistry and "soft" sciences like social sciences and many subdomains of biology and medicine. But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound. It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.

tash9 2y ago
True but there has been a movement towards replicating these high profile findings in the soft sciences. Hopefully that will gain more traction as a lot of the "newsworthy" studies are forced to get retracted after failing to replicate.
newaccount74 2y ago
> people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.
llamaimperative 2y ago
PSA: There's also a severe replication crisis in the hard sciences. The high horse is not well warranted.
- chairhairair 2y ago
  Completely false equivalence. The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people: 1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe. 2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field. 3. Social scientists playing defense.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    What exactly do you think are the foundations of modern psychology? Serious question. There are tons of non-replicable findings way, way further down the stack than psychology, and those tend to have a lot more relying on them than psychology/sociology studies. If you're upset about scientific validity, consider directing your ire to where problems are more likely to actually hurt people -- the "hard sciences." Nice ad hominem but I'm none of those things. I work in clinical trials, one of the few areas where we actually do have to know things, and a very good empirical demonstration of exactly how incredibly difficult that is.
    - elliotto 2y ago
      I'm curious to hear your perspective on the validity of psychology / psychiatry / sociology as someone adjacent to the field. I am a hard science maths / data science guy, but unlike a lot of my peers I have a great interest in softer reasoning (philosophy, ethics, political science etc). But I am constantly disappointed by how tainted by ideology psychology and psychiatry feel (and economics, but this is a different discussion). Do you think that psychology and psychiatry are held to the same rigour as harder sciences and should be considered as valid?
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        All fields of inquiry are tainted by ideology. Read the history of literally any scientific field ever. The entire system is designed to accept this as fact, because science is done by humans, and to still arrive at the truth nonetheless. If we take those two observations: a) science is done by humans and b) humans have motivations, obviously the way to arrive at truth is to allow for most things to be wrong most of the time. This is the process by which we've learned every single thing about the universe. I don't know what you mean by "held to the same rigor." I don't think any psychologist on the planet would tell you we understand psychology as well as we understand basic chemical reactions.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. What do you mean by this? the field of psychology is perfectly capable of policing itself, and it's rejected much of the conclusions of its historical predecessors. > In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. "hard sciences" also fail to produce results relevant to most people. Sure, they can maybe make better batteries, but how can they explain how dysfunctional society is? EDIT: We can also directly blame the poor communicational skills of "hard sciences" for diet culture. "hard sciences" have failed in their efforts to produce a population that can reason about nutrition in an evidence-backed manner, and this can be traced directly to how scientists choose to present their data.
- enavari 2y ago
  True, but I remember reading the replication failure rates were twice as much in the social science than in medicine.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    We constantly see small medical studies (<100 participants) posted here on HN that produce exciting results, which then disappear from view and/or fall apart when replicated with larger cohorts.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      How is this different from science working?
      - kjkjadksj 2y ago
        When it happens in the hard sciences its science working, when it happens in the soft sciences its a replication crisis.
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        Haha that seems to be the case!
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      If that didn't happen, it would mean that math was broken. That's how statistics is supposed to work.
- noslenwerdna 2y ago
  Depends what you count as hard science. The replication rate in high energy particle physics is near 100%? When the LHC started up they were able to measure nearly all of the particle resonances found in the 20th century. It's not like they suddenly disproved the existence of electrons or something.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Sure, further down the stack of chaos that is the universe (physics -> chemistry -> biology -> psychology -> sociology), it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments. That doesn't mean the people engaged in research at the bottom of the stack are good and the people at the top of the stack are bad. Nor does it mean we shouldn't be trying our best to understand things near the top of the stack.
    - superposeur 2y ago
      > it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments. Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        > Clearly, this is practically impossible No it's not? You put more money into the studies and you can do bigger, better versions of them. A major obstacle to putting more money into studies: people jerking themselves off about how soft sciences are a joke and hard sciences are Super Serious Business.
        noslenwerdna 2y ago
        But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural. One example is the famous reluctance to publish negative results in psychology. Nearly all published results in (collider) particle physics are negative. If senior faculty prefer to only hire people with a string of published postive findings, you are literally encouraging p-hacking. Again, they are not "bad" people, it is just that the system the senior people have setup in that field is not conducive to doing good science.
treflop 2y ago
Did the public ever read published papers until recently? I can’t imagine most people having access to any publications until the Internet and late 90s at minimum. My local library did not exactly have access to journals either. I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  University libraries still get hardcopies of monthly journals. Maybe back in the day a downtown central branch might have as well.
darby_nine 2y ago
> You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different. I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled (because as you say most of the time it's basically impossible). I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc. It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled Yeah, it is so strange when people say we should listen to the scientists, we shouldn't since scientists make all these much stronger claims than the data supports. Instead we should listen to the data, see what it says, rather than the scientists who did the studies. And it is really important to note that the data doesn't necessarily say what the study author says it does. Edit: Above is for social sciences, since they lack robust results. In the hard sciences were we have a lot more robust results it makes more sense to listen to those who know those results, that doesn't have to be scientists though could be experts like engineers etc.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    There's no rubrik for grading scientific correctness. Just because controlling variables is more difficult doesn't mean we should abandon the scientific method and just talk out of our asses.
consteval 2y ago
The reality is social sciences are inherently more complex because they are higher-level problem spaces. Biology in merely a stepping stone to psychology, like assembly to modern Java. Assembly is simple, understanding how the JVM works is hard. Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.

tash9 2y ago

True but there has been a movement towards replicating these high profile findings in the soft sciences. Hopefully that will gain more traction as a lot of the "newsworthy" studies are forced to get retracted after failing to replicate.

newaccount74 2y ago

> people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.

llamaimperative 2y ago

PSA: There's also a severe replication crisis in the hard sciences. The high horse is not well warranted.

chairhairair 2y ago
Completely false equivalence. The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people: 1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe. 2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field. 3. Social scientists playing defense.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  What exactly do you think are the foundations of modern psychology? Serious question. There are tons of non-replicable findings way, way further down the stack than psychology, and those tend to have a lot more relying on them than psychology/sociology studies. If you're upset about scientific validity, consider directing your ire to where problems are more likely to actually hurt people -- the "hard sciences." Nice ad hominem but I'm none of those things. I work in clinical trials, one of the few areas where we actually do have to know things, and a very good empirical demonstration of exactly how incredibly difficult that is.
  - elliotto 2y ago
    I'm curious to hear your perspective on the validity of psychology / psychiatry / sociology as someone adjacent to the field. I am a hard science maths / data science guy, but unlike a lot of my peers I have a great interest in softer reasoning (philosophy, ethics, political science etc). But I am constantly disappointed by how tainted by ideology psychology and psychiatry feel (and economics, but this is a different discussion). Do you think that psychology and psychiatry are held to the same rigour as harder sciences and should be considered as valid?
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      All fields of inquiry are tainted by ideology. Read the history of literally any scientific field ever. The entire system is designed to accept this as fact, because science is done by humans, and to still arrive at the truth nonetheless. If we take those two observations: a) science is done by humans and b) humans have motivations, obviously the way to arrive at truth is to allow for most things to be wrong most of the time. This is the process by which we've learned every single thing about the universe. I don't know what you mean by "held to the same rigor." I don't think any psychologist on the planet would tell you we understand psychology as well as we understand basic chemical reactions.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  > The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. What do you mean by this? the field of psychology is perfectly capable of policing itself, and it's rejected much of the conclusions of its historical predecessors. > In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. "hard sciences" also fail to produce results relevant to most people. Sure, they can maybe make better batteries, but how can they explain how dysfunctional society is? EDIT: We can also directly blame the poor communicational skills of "hard sciences" for diet culture. "hard sciences" have failed in their efforts to produce a population that can reason about nutrition in an evidence-backed manner, and this can be traced directly to how scientists choose to present their data.
enavari 2y ago
True, but I remember reading the replication failure rates were twice as much in the social science than in medicine.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  We constantly see small medical studies (<100 participants) posted here on HN that produce exciting results, which then disappear from view and/or fall apart when replicated with larger cohorts.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    How is this different from science working?
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      When it happens in the hard sciences its science working, when it happens in the soft sciences its a replication crisis.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Haha that seems to be the case!
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    If that didn't happen, it would mean that math was broken. That's how statistics is supposed to work.
noslenwerdna 2y ago
Depends what you count as hard science. The replication rate in high energy particle physics is near 100%? When the LHC started up they were able to measure nearly all of the particle resonances found in the 20th century. It's not like they suddenly disproved the existence of electrons or something.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Sure, further down the stack of chaos that is the universe (physics -> chemistry -> biology -> psychology -> sociology), it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments. That doesn't mean the people engaged in research at the bottom of the stack are good and the people at the top of the stack are bad. Nor does it mean we shouldn't be trying our best to understand things near the top of the stack.
  - superposeur 2y ago
    > it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments. Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      > Clearly, this is practically impossible No it's not? You put more money into the studies and you can do bigger, better versions of them. A major obstacle to putting more money into studies: people jerking themselves off about how soft sciences are a joke and hard sciences are Super Serious Business.
      - noslenwerdna 2y ago
        But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural. One example is the famous reluctance to publish negative results in psychology. Nearly all published results in (collider) particle physics are negative. If senior faculty prefer to only hire people with a string of published postive findings, you are literally encouraging p-hacking. Again, they are not "bad" people, it is just that the system the senior people have setup in that field is not conducive to doing good science.

treflop 2y ago

Did the public ever read published papers until recently? I can’t imagine most people having access to any publications until the Internet and late 90s at minimum. My local library did not exactly have access to journals either. I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
University libraries still get hardcopies of monthly journals. Maybe back in the day a downtown central branch might have as well.

darby_nine 2y ago

> You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different. I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.

IshKebab 2y ago
The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled (because as you say most of the time it's basically impossible). I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc. It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled Yeah, it is so strange when people say we should listen to the scientists, we shouldn't since scientists make all these much stronger claims than the data supports. Instead we should listen to the data, see what it says, rather than the scientists who did the studies. And it is really important to note that the data doesn't necessarily say what the study author says it does. Edit: Above is for social sciences, since they lack robust results. In the hard sciences were we have a lot more robust results it makes more sense to listen to those who know those results, that doesn't have to be scientists though could be experts like engineers etc.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  There's no rubrik for grading scientific correctness. Just because controlling variables is more difficult doesn't mean we should abandon the scientific method and just talk out of our asses.

consteval 2y ago

The reality is social sciences are inherently more complex because they are higher-level problem spaces. Biology in merely a stepping stone to psychology, like assembly to modern Java. Assembly is simple, understanding how the JVM works is hard. Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.