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.
It was called natural philosophy for Christ's sake.
Modern medicine's forefather was heroic medicine, based on modulating the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile).
We didn't zap into existence with the hard sciences being hard. We made them that way through centuries of intellectual effort, almost all of which turned out to be wrong!
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.
I don't see how you can say this, would you prefer to live 200 years ago before hard sciences had started changing peoples lives? Almost every convenience you see around you exists thanks to hard sciences.
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.
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?
I'm sure some areas of physics have near 100% and some simply don't.
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.
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.
I am saying that we should take those claims less seriously, especially if the results from that domain don't replicate, as in the case of psychology and other social sciences.
Maybe there is little we can conclusively say about those domains.
