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What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers
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2020-10-05 at 7:19 PM UTCedited for privacy
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2020-10-05 at 8:34 PM UTCBumping this because it'd be a shame to see it so quickly buried from latest threads by the barrage of inane threads Speedy Parker just shat the forums up with.
I read the whole thing. I understood... a portion of what was said. It was written well enough that it made for a good read regardless of your technical understanding though, so that was nice. I know this just deals with social sciences, but reading about the causes of the "reproducability crisis" always makes me worry about science in general. It's not like your peers attempt to reproduce your results as a standard part of the review process in any field. How much bunk gets through? Is established canon now? -
2020-10-05 at 8:49 PM UTC
Originally posted by Meikai Bumping this because it'd be a shame to see it so quickly buried from latest threads by the barrage of inane threads Speedy Parker just shat the forums up with.
I read the whole thing. I understood… a portion of what was said. It was written well enough that it made for a good read regardless of your technical understanding though, so that was nice. I know this just deals with social sciences, but reading about the causes of the "reproducability crisis" always makes me worry about science in general. It's not like your peers attempt to reproduce your results as a standard part of the review process in any field. How much bunk gets through? Is established canon now?
if you have spent more than 2.5minutes reading that then your doing it wrong because the author only spent that amount of time on those 2578 papers. -
2020-10-12 at 3:14 PM UTCThe problem with social science is that it is not a science at all despite the name, its up there with "religious science"
only natural science is science as defined by law, social science should be called social studies. real testing is impossible to do when the experiment involves people, there are so many variables you can never take out of the equation, anecdotal evidence and the guessing game becomes the de facto standard. -
2020-10-15 at 6:03 PM UTCedited for privacy
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2020-10-15 at 6:17 PM UTCJimmy'll fix it
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2020-10-21 at 5:50 PM UTC
Originally posted by Meikai It's not like your peers attempt to reproduce your results as a standard part of the review process in any field. How much bunk gets through? Is established canon now?
Checking proofs in mathematics is common during the review process. Not a science but at least it's something. Even in computer science where reproducing studies is usually relatively cheap, you'd be amazed how many results either can't be reproduced at all, or can't be generalized beyond the test data set. "AI research" in the last 10 years has made this a hundred times worse.
Originally posted by Kev The problem with social science is that it is not a science at all despite the name, its up there with "religious science"
only natural science is science as defined by law, social science should be called social studies. real testing is impossible to do when the experiment involves people, there are so many variables you can never take out of the equation, anecdotal evidence and the guessing game becomes the de facto standard.
So what's the acceptable amount of "variables" that can be involved in an experiment? How many variables appear in studies in the social sciences verses natural sciences? How would you count these? Quine pretty much leveled the idea that you can test exactly one atomic hypothesis in any given experiment. I mean I won't say that experiment design isn't more difficult when you're studying human behavior than when you're studying, say, human biology, but there's nothing fundamentally different about the scientific process between "natural" and "social" sciences. -
2020-10-22 at 5:24 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny So what's the acceptable amount of "variables" that can be involved in an experiment? How many variables appear in studies in the social sciences verses natural sciences? How would you count these? Quine pretty much leveled the idea that you can test exactly one atomic hypothesis in any given experiment. I mean I won't say that experiment design isn't more difficult when you're studying human behavior than when you're studying, say, human biology, but there's nothing fundamentally different about the scientific process between "natural" and "social" sciences.
Jesus i dont even know where to start with this.
How do you do a controlled, double-blind social experiment on which policies create more crime/suicides without huge lawsuits pending your way?
The reason you cant perform scientific experiments on human beings is because they have rights, you can do whatever you want to a piece of material until it bends, breaks or melts and record the resulting data. the social studies will always lack this fundamental rigor.
it disturbs me when i see the abstract studies compared to natural sciences, it gives the false impression that it has the same authority and then corrupt fuckheads exploit that to push all sorts of crackpot garbage. cargo cult science comes to mind, as does conversion therapy.
