It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole. There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some deliberate fraud, and an awful lot

It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole. There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some deliberate fraud, and an awful lot of venial epistemic sins. But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified with a certain political worldview, to the point where the suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more palatable to gen pop. Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are surprised when the people on the other side of that social engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to understand.