The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Social Science Is Real! So Why Do Us Nerds Look Down On It So?
poshniallo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This thread was inspired by the Bjg Gulp thread
We all know the cliche of how hard scientists don't respect the soft sciences. We all know that libertarianism, with its focus on free will, is a popular philosophy among us geeks. I have seen countless people on these boards just pretend sociology just doesn't exist (not you, I don't mean you, you're awesome).
So why would this be?
Am I wrong about nerds? The validity of sociology and its evil twin, marketing? Both?
You tell me.
We all know the cliche of how hard scientists don't respect the soft sciences. We all know that libertarianism, with its focus on free will, is a popular philosophy among us geeks. I have seen countless people on these boards just pretend sociology just doesn't exist (not you, I don't mean you, you're awesome).
So why would this be?
Am I wrong about nerds? The validity of sociology and its evil twin, marketing? Both?
You tell me.
I figure I could take a bear.
0
Posts
(as a side note: Libertarianism / Objectivism is, with a couple very rare exceptions, quite rightly despised on PA)
as for your question, I think at least part of it is the usage of the name "science" and the appearance of scientific-ish jargon in a set of fields which, while valid in their own right, do not deserve the name science.
I think social sciences need more study, not less, but the phrase about correlation not equaling causation was probably coined thanks to studies in this field, where someone once noted that both sexual assault and freon use went up during Summer months, and thus tried to prevent rape by disabling everyone's A/C.
I think it's a matter of what you can classify as being fact or not. Since you can't say with certainty how people will ever act/behave, calling it a 'science' is just... well. It's a title thing really.
"coding and equations" are entirely beside the point
Science requires falsifiable hypothesis which are confirmed or denied by repeatable controlled experiments.
And you imagine that social sciences don't?
Again, see libertarianism.
Yes, I imagine they don't. I mean the term "social sciences" is broad and vauge so there may be some field under that rubric that fits the label but the major ones that come to mind do not (history, sociology etc...)
In particular the requirement for repeatable experiments is a real stickler.
though I think you (perhaps deliberatly) skipped probably the most important part and the entire point of my post above: just because some fields of study using the term "science" should not do so doesn't make them any less valid as fields of study.
... That goes against everything I know.
There's also a problem in social science of not really honoring the null hypothesis. Research that fail to reject the null hypothesis rarely even get published in social science journals.
Mathematics is based on logical argument based on postulates. It is not based on argument based on empirical data in the slightest.
they are drasticially different ways of thinking.
This also brings up a point relevant to the OP: just because a field makes use of another field of study (as science often uses mathematics) does not mean they are one and the same.
I don't ignore that, it is just not important to your definition.
Here is a list of "social sciences" from wiki:
The bolded are absolutely sciences, using testable hypotheses and relying on data to test them and formulate new ones. The italicized are really subsets of the bolded.
Law and Communication Studies are the only questionable ones to me on this list, as I think they would be more at home over in Liberal Arts.
Oh, okay. I can dig this.
I'm not really personally invested in this, literature and writing are hardly sciences!
Science, Engineering, Social Science, Liberal Arts, and Mathematics. I also vaguely want to put Computer Science in its own category, but it is really a subset of Engineering.
Computer science is weird and can be several things. Applied CS (like software engineering) is... well, engineering. A lot of the theoretical work like crypto and stuff is really more like mathematics. It's applied math, but purer than physics even.
So I'd say it doesn't really cleanly fit as its own field.
False.
It isn't even the case that we require this of the "hard" sciences.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
but then I became a physicist, so I'm probably biased
What Economics is bad at: settling disputes between the subtle, sophisticated versions of these notions
It's okay. There are enough Objectivists out there to keep us busy.
Oh, and the ten hundred thousand voters who will buy in to garbled versions of the message.
I don't think it's that so much as confusion over what exactly "social science" means.
Some people lump Liberal Arts in there, and I imagine that most of the indignation you get from hard science is directed toward people who think literary study is a part of social science.
Social science is a huge field. Some are much more social than science and others are very much built on controlled repeatable experiments with falsifiable hypothesis. My health work is built on this. Now the issue with this is the field since it deals with people means control is much more iffy for moral reasons. I cannot develop a control group from birth on a certain set of culture and behavior because that is immoral. So you work with what you can.
Good social science work will talk about confounders to results. This breeds more research to try to dig up what are real independent variables. Social science is science, just in it still in a baby mode because we are finding out what is a confounder variable, an independent variable and a dependent variable in a research. And it doesn't help this change as society changes. But to disqualify it because it is so complex we haven't even scratched the surface is really understating the work of very good social scientist who try to do just what the hard sciences do.
The art of teaching has a huge amount of criminally underused research in the last 30 years. Unfortunately, the schools have not really caught up to the realizations. Still, we know more about HOW we learn and how to encourage the betterment of that process than ever before.
Cognitive psychology has also opened up all sorts of interesting results from our heads. Everything from subtle perception biases to neural plasticity. Our brains are an amazing organism, and some of the best psychology is seeing how to put our wetware to work better or realizing when it starts to fail. Even in the 70's, we had no idea that the brain continued to sculpt itself throughout life. We had no techniques for figuring out how to cut out a brain tumor with the minimum risk of function loss.
Counseling and therapy are ....not as strong. We could have a whole thread about the ways in which modern medicine push people into medication, and therapy in general oftentimes acts as a wash. Most people, most of the time, get better -- with or without therapy. Moreover, we can see that the therapy offered by a village shaman often performs just as well as the one you pay for. Mental health has a HUGE component of social support networks. Just being able to speak your mind to someone is the single most powerful therapeutic effect.
When social support isn't enough, however, our ability to intervene chemically is both important and growing. It has serious issues with over-prescription and side effects (I have a friend with permanent tremors thanks to Ritalin). Unfortunately, the good and the bad still come interlinked. The same drug that supposedly fixes your depression can make you gain 30 pounds and lose your libido, and that's just gonna depress you all over again.
The truly toxic areas of psychology are the vast swathes of correlative studies. Look at personality psychology if you want a good index of these. "Such and such trait X has a 0.30 correlation with trait Y in our test population of thirty freshman psychology students." Every possible trait you can imagine is compared to every other trait in a complete mire of 0.25 correlations and flagrantly unsupported suppositions. Foolish people say things like "i'm an extrovert!", statements that have all the scientific rigor to them of bowl of jello.
Sociology, on the other hand, has the unfortunate step-child responsibility of both proving that the world is equal and that everyone has a chance...and of being the science that gets to step waist-deep in the mire of poverty, racism, and education that is the bottom of the barrel in america. Good luck.
Care to elaborate?
I don't consider many social sciences to be "real" sciences, but then my definition is admittedly very strict, likely from my physics background, though from some psychology classes too. A lot of social sciences, like psychology, sociology, economics and more, I'd call proto-science. They know what science is, and realize how useful it is. Researches in these fields do their best to collect data, form hypotheses, disprove these hypotheses, and do lots of other science-y stuff.
The trouble comes in because these fields are, well, soft. Psychology attempts to understand the workings of the human mind, roughly. It can say some very interesting things about experiments about vision, or how different people take risks, and a whole host of other things. But psychology is actually really crappy at understanding the mind, or consciousness or intelligence or instinct, mostly because these are poorly-defined concepts, and not enough is known about the field to even define these things, let alone explain them. It means the field is rapidly changing, with old truths being turned over every few years. This is a good thing, as the researches (who are legitimate scientists, usually) do their best to use scientific method to explore a really squishy subject. I think about it as being similar to the naturalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Lots and lots and lots of information is being collected, but the big questions are still a long way off from being answerable in a scientific way. Perhaps some are not answerable, and the fields themselves will need to be re-named or folded into other fields. For the time being, a scientific "truth" that comes out of physics or biology or chemistry has a great deal more weight than one coming out of psychology or economics, and for good reason. They're just not up to the same reliable level of scientific understanding.
Michelle Obama was a Sociology major.
The social sciences do have some empirical techniques, not as good as physics but at least as good as, say, large parts of medicine. Econometrics winds up pioneering a lot of more recent statistical techniques for a reason. Differences in differences dates to 1985. Discontinuity regression dates to 1960 (that turned up in psychology though).
Take economics. Economists are smart people. Their theories tend to make sense. Applied in small systems, they can often predict activity with great accuracy. But in large systems? One of the things that struck me most reading Nate Silver's recent book was how many economists were stating America was in no danger of falling into a recession in 2008 and who were predicting solid growth, while the recession was fully underway. It strikes me like a nuclear physicist confidently predicting that a nuclear weapon has no possibility of exploding while a mushroom cloud rises behind her.
And economics is one of the branches of social sciences for which the hardest numbers are available.
I'm definitely not saying that social sciences are not science, or that it is not a worthwhile field to invest in. Using social sciences to understand past and existing circumstances is a laudable goal. But I don't think that it's come into its own in terms of predictive ability, and it may never. There are simply too many variables, and half the time we don't know what a quarter of those variables are. That weakness in terms of predictive ability diminishes the respect that social sciences receive from the scientific community.
Just like how all the geologists, seismologists, and biologists working for BP are really confident that global warming is a coincidence completely unrelated to greenhouse emissions.
We should at least consider that the antipathy is connected to the subject of the social sciences, the bane of many of us geeks:the behaviour of other people.
Literally every event taking place in our bodies affects our mind, and vice versa. Its my personal belief that we are quite capable of suicide by mental choice - just look at widowers.
Psych studies have to take very careful precautions to try and minimize the meta-cognitive game going on. They're trying to hit a moving target that knows its being sought and consciously ducks out of the way.