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> if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a

> if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? The implicit claim that you're making is that state funded academic studies of social science are important for a balanced, happy society. But where's the evidence that this is the case? Someone could argue (and at times have) that the state should fund religious institutions because they're necessary for a happy society. But some would counter that religion isn't necessary for a happy society, while others might counter that religion is important for a happy society but that it's unnecessary for the state to support it. If we're making the claim that these things should be funded by the state, and that they're important for a happy society, then those claims should be backed up by some fairly strong evidence.

demarq 2y ago
So how do you get that evidence?
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make the claim how to find evidence for it. Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.
  - ashwoods 2y ago
    I think you didn’t get the question. If we were to seek that evidence, who would turn to?
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      Economist! /s
  - notxpert14827 2y ago
    I think you’re missing their very good point. ”Social science” is how you get the evidence.
    - gonzobonzo 2y ago
      As I mentioned previously, if after decades of funding social science we don't have an answer to that, then it's simply incorrect to claim that continuing to fund social science is going to give us an answer. If you want to argue that we should put into funding a specific project to look into the benefits of social science, you can do that. But saying that we should do widespread funding of a discipline in order to find out if a discipline is actually worth it, and then after decades of doing widespread funding of that discipline you say "well, I don't have any evidence that it's worth it, because you have to keep finding it to find the evidence," is, to be frank, bizarre. Imagine if we did this for other fields. We putting funding into homeopathy for decades. Someone comes along and makes the claim that we need to continue doing this, in order for society to be healthy. Someone asks what the evidence for this is, and the reply is "we have to keep funding homeopathy to get the evidence!"
      - notxpert14827 2y ago
        There are many questions we may want to ask about society. For example, "Does funding social sciences make a society happier?" is one of them. Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers. Whether you see value in that is of course up to you. (I never said, claimed or argued any of the things you mention in your reply, so I'm not addressing those points)
        zenoprax 2y ago
        I think you're both still talking past one another. > Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers. This is almost tautological depending on where those fields lie between physics and philosophy. Chemistry is just applied Physics. Biology is just applied Chemistry. Neurology is just applied biology. But psychology (and by extension, sociology) is firmly on the Philosophy side of the fence in my uneducated opinion.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Well, you could ignore the naysayers and divert hundreds of billions of dollars into funding a vast social science apparatus for decades, and then see if the results have clearly made people happier in ways that couldn't have been done without the state. Which is what has been done, and why NZ is defunding it.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Ah, but that wasn't true social-science research :)
camillomiller 2y ago
I'm absolutely not for these cuts, and I believe that social sciences are important. Nonetheless, the politicization and radicalization of social sciences in the last 15 years is undeniably problematic, and plays a role in the balcanization of society. Academic detachment from reality is a problem even smart academics can joke about, as they know it is somewhat of a true trope. The ones that certainly laugh about that the least are a lot of social scientists, in my experience. They are also often very far from considering the complexity of economics in their fields of studies, and that's also an issue. Sprinkle some identity politics dust on it, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster, offering conservatives and anti-progressists your academic head on a silver platter. I believe that social sciences (yep, it's a generalization, I know...) have failed to play academic politics properly in the last two decades, mostly due to radicalization of ideas and topics.
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  The irony is that it's the same non-academic organisations that are deciding those topics to get funded and who now are deciding to cut the funding. Academics have to apply for funding and one big criteria over the years has been it's "social impact". So there's three things. The politics of those in charge of funding. The change of academia to only allow research deemed socially useful (utilitarianism). And the third is the co-adoption of researchers themselves. As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical not to cut the funding. Furthermore these organisations have, over the years enlarged and entrenched themselves. This is why millions are spent on thousands of people to monitor DEI of the academics.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Implicit in the request for research with social impact was that it should be positive social impact, as perceived by most people not just one partisan wing. > As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical If it were that easy it'd have been done already. You can't tell radical activists to just be reasonable.
- 2y ago
derbOac 2y ago
So, the problem with these types of arguments is the evidence is often obscured by shell games with labels, or ignoring the elephant in the room. My research sort of straddles statistics, epidemiology, neurogenetics, and social sciences, and my impression is there's a great deal of stuff that doesn't become interesting to people until it involves social sciences. I say this from the perspective of someone who often wants the math and whatnot to be more appealing to people when it's not. You can take some model, or method, or advance, and if it sits somewhere in a wetlab or physics building, no one cares. But if you make it about relationships, or money, or happiness, or children's social development, it becomes interesting. The value is so built into the fabric of these things we don't even recognize it half the time. It becomes another physics grant, or engineering grant, or medicine grant. They're social science in nature, but god forbid you call it that because it's seen as soft or irrelevant even though that's the thing people are actually most interested in. People don't give a damn about memory models in bare-metal programming, or electrical engineering, but they do care about being able to talk to their relatives on the other side of the globe. The other thing that always strikes me as odd about these discussions and decisions is we as people are, well social beings. So do you want to leave the study of our social behavior and experiences to ... what exactly? Religious theory? Astrology? What else is there than scientific study of psychosocial phenomena? Are you saying that social phenomena shouldn't be studied at all? That it should be studied nonscientifically? Within the social sciences there's a well-known phenomenon of people coming in from elsewhere and thinking they can solve all the problems because they're physicists, or chemists, or whatever, and that you can just slap whatever paradigm works in that to study psychological or socioeconomic phenomena. It's seen as naive, and it inevitably fails because it doesn't scale up to the population level, or doesn't address the difficulties of the real-world phenomenon as it is, or whatever. There's also the problem that some of the biggest contributions of social science aren't what people think they are. Modern meta-analysis and preregistered replication research both came from psychological research for example (meta-analysis from clinical and educational psychology), and I doubt people realize that. But it's widespread in biomedical research, and should probably be applied more widely in many other fields. In certain ways it's more scientifically rigorous than what happens in a lot of biophysical science. But it goes against the stereotype of what "psychosocial research" is.
- 2y ago

demarq 2y ago

So how do you get that evidence?

gonzobonzo 2y ago
Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make the claim how to find evidence for it. Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.
- ashwoods 2y ago
  I think you didn’t get the question. If we were to seek that evidence, who would turn to?
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    Economist! /s
- notxpert14827 2y ago
  I think you’re missing their very good point. ”Social science” is how you get the evidence.
  - gonzobonzo 2y ago
    As I mentioned previously, if after decades of funding social science we don't have an answer to that, then it's simply incorrect to claim that continuing to fund social science is going to give us an answer. If you want to argue that we should put into funding a specific project to look into the benefits of social science, you can do that. But saying that we should do widespread funding of a discipline in order to find out if a discipline is actually worth it, and then after decades of doing widespread funding of that discipline you say "well, I don't have any evidence that it's worth it, because you have to keep finding it to find the evidence," is, to be frank, bizarre. Imagine if we did this for other fields. We putting funding into homeopathy for decades. Someone comes along and makes the claim that we need to continue doing this, in order for society to be healthy. Someone asks what the evidence for this is, and the reply is "we have to keep funding homeopathy to get the evidence!"
    - notxpert14827 2y ago
      There are many questions we may want to ask about society. For example, "Does funding social sciences make a society happier?" is one of them. Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers. Whether you see value in that is of course up to you. (I never said, claimed or argued any of the things you mention in your reply, so I'm not addressing those points)
      - zenoprax 2y ago
        I think you're both still talking past one another. > Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers. This is almost tautological depending on where those fields lie between physics and philosophy. Chemistry is just applied Physics. Biology is just applied Chemistry. Neurology is just applied biology. But psychology (and by extension, sociology) is firmly on the Philosophy side of the fence in my uneducated opinion.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Well, you could ignore the naysayers and divert hundreds of billions of dollars into funding a vast social science apparatus for decades, and then see if the results have clearly made people happier in ways that couldn't have been done without the state. Which is what has been done, and why NZ is defunding it.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Ah, but that wasn't true social-science research :)

camillomiller 2y ago

I'm absolutely not for these cuts, and I believe that social sciences are important. Nonetheless, the politicization and radicalization of social sciences in the last 15 years is undeniably problematic, and plays a role in the balcanization of society. Academic detachment from reality is a problem even smart academics can joke about, as they know it is somewhat of a true trope. The ones that certainly laugh about that the least are a lot of social scientists, in my experience. They are also often very far from considering the complexity of economics in their fields of studies, and that's also an issue. Sprinkle some identity politics dust on it, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster, offering conservatives and anti-progressists your academic head on a silver platter. I believe that social sciences (yep, it's a generalization, I know...) have failed to play academic politics properly in the last two decades, mostly due to radicalization of ideas and topics.

thinkingemote 2y ago
The irony is that it's the same non-academic organisations that are deciding those topics to get funded and who now are deciding to cut the funding. Academics have to apply for funding and one big criteria over the years has been it's "social impact". So there's three things. The politics of those in charge of funding. The change of academia to only allow research deemed socially useful (utilitarianism). And the third is the co-adoption of researchers themselves. As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical not to cut the funding. Furthermore these organisations have, over the years enlarged and entrenched themselves. This is why millions are spent on thousands of people to monitor DEI of the academics.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Implicit in the request for research with social impact was that it should be positive social impact, as perceived by most people not just one partisan wing. > As politics change the response should be to change the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical If it were that easy it'd have been done already. You can't tell radical activists to just be reasonable.
2y ago

derbOac 2y ago

So, the problem with these types of arguments is the evidence is often obscured by shell games with labels, or ignoring the elephant in the room. My research sort of straddles statistics, epidemiology, neurogenetics, and social sciences, and my impression is there's a great deal of stuff that doesn't become interesting to people until it involves social sciences. I say this from the perspective of someone who often wants the math and whatnot to be more appealing to people when it's not. You can take some model, or method, or advance, and if it sits somewhere in a wetlab or physics building, no one cares. But if you make it about relationships, or money, or happiness, or children's social development, it becomes interesting. The value is so built into the fabric of these things we don't even recognize it half the time. It becomes another physics grant, or engineering grant, or medicine grant. They're social science in nature, but god forbid you call it that because it's seen as soft or irrelevant even though that's the thing people are actually most interested in. People don't give a damn about memory models in bare-metal programming, or electrical engineering, but they do care about being able to talk to their relatives on the other side of the globe. The other thing that always strikes me as odd about these discussions and decisions is we as people are, well social beings. So do you want to leave the study of our social behavior and experiences to ... what exactly? Religious theory? Astrology? What else is there than scientific study of psychosocial phenomena? Are you saying that social phenomena shouldn't be studied at all? That it should be studied nonscientifically? Within the social sciences there's a well-known phenomenon of people coming in from elsewhere and thinking they can solve all the problems because they're physicists, or chemists, or whatever, and that you can just slap whatever paradigm works in that to study psychological or socioeconomic phenomena. It's seen as naive, and it inevitably fails because it doesn't scale up to the population level, or doesn't address the difficulties of the real-world phenomenon as it is, or whatever. There's also the problem that some of the biggest contributions of social science aren't what people think they are. Modern meta-analysis and preregistered replication research both came from psychological research for example (meta-analysis from clinical and educational psychology), and I doubt people realize that. But it's widespread in biomedical research, and should probably be applied more widely in many other fields. In certain ways it's more scientifically rigorous than what happens in a lot of biophysical science. But it goes against the stereotype of what "psychosocial research" is.

2y ago