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0 pointsllamaimperative1y ago0 comments

> But why do those fields deserve more money

Because it'd be good to understand what makes people happy, for example. Or what enables relationships to thrive. Or when different forms of government are suitable or unsuitable to solve a set of problems, etc.

Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers, but the vast majority of opportunities left in the western world to improve people's lives is not particle accelerators, it's answering questions like: "what actually helps people feel satisfied in life, loved in their relationships, and belonging in their community?"

> At least a large part of the problem is cultural

Is it? Why so?

Negative results aren't published in almost any field, and that's actually a good on ramp to the discussion we should be having, which is about the broken incentives of science and scientific publishing specifically. The broken incentive model isn't special to softer sciences and it has far more dire consequences in other domains.

You can't possibly think that soft sciences are the only ones hiring people with a string of positive results... right?

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superposeur1y ago

> Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers

Believe me, you aren't "breaking" anything to anyone. If you could solve the secret of happiness (your example), no amount of money would be too small.

The issue isn't whether social science would be good to figure out. Definitely it would, to the extent there is actually a "thing" to figure out, which may be true and may not; i.e., "what makes people happy" may be so contingent and/or so ineluctably open to interpretation that it makes no sense as a rigorizable concept. (There is nothing wrong with unrigorous concepts, btw, these have been fruitfully explored by the poets and philosophers and therapists.)

Ok, so even granting that there is a stable, rigorizable "truth" for the social sciences to discover, the issue is whether the methods and analyses as they have been practiced are effective or even could be tweaked to be effective. Clearly, they aren't. And not just a few bad apple studies, but seemingly the whole darn lot.

llamaimperativeOP1y ago

> Clearly, they aren’t

Arguing is easy when you just assert your conclusion eh?

noslenwerdna1y ago

I agree that studying psychology better could be beneficial. Is it possible? Or more to the point, is it merely a matter of money, as you said?

I said a large part of the problem is cultural, I did not say that psychology is the only field with cultural problems. I'm not sure how you got that idea.

llamaimperativeOP1y ago

No no, what you said is that it's "clearly practically impossible" to have more statistics, more controls, etc. to get higher powered studies of high-chaos questions like the ones asked in the soft sciences.

I said, to that point: no it's not. You just do bigger, longer term, more complete studies. The limiting factor on this -- right now -- is typically money. Perhaps you can pour infinite money and problems with e.g. recruitment or monitoring will still prevent us from getting to statistical power, but maybe not.

That is not the only problem social sciences face, but most of the problems they face are not exclusive to social sciences whatsoever, which then prompts the obvious question of why they get so much flak.

noslenwerdna1y ago

I never said anything about practicality, you are confusing my replies with someone else's. I said this

"But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural."

More money won't fix the cultural problems with the field. Maybe the lack of a universal quantitative framework makes issues that are slightly bad in some fields much worse in the social sciences. I don't know. But it's naive to just say other fields have the same cultural problems so we can ignore it for MY field.

There's a famous anecdote where Dyson came to Fermi with a theory for weak decay (I think). There were a handful of datapoints that matched experimental results.

However, Fermi threw out Dyson's theory, despite the empirical agreement, because it had 5 free parameters ("with 3 parameters I can fit an elephant, and with 4, I can make it waggle its trunk is the quote" IIRC). This is difficult, but essential criticism all fields need.

AND all this is apart from the fundamental question of whether important generic scientific truths can really be gleaned from the social sciences.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsllamaimperative1y ago0 comments

> But why do those fields deserve more money

> At least a large part of the problem is cultural

Is it? Why so?

You can't possibly think that soft sciences are the only ones hiring people with a string of positive results... right?

0 comments

superposeur1y ago

> Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers

Believe me, you aren't "breaking" anything to anyone. If you could solve the secret of happiness (your example), no amount of money would be too small.

llamaimperativeOP1y ago

> Clearly, they aren’t

Arguing is easy when you just assert your conclusion eh?

noslenwerdna1y ago

I agree that studying psychology better could be beneficial. Is it possible? Or more to the point, is it merely a matter of money, as you said?

I said a large part of the problem is cultural, I did not say that psychology is the only field with cultural problems. I'm not sure how you got that idea.

llamaimperativeOP1y ago

noslenwerdna1y ago

I never said anything about practicality, you are confusing my replies with someone else's. I said this

"But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural."

There's a famous anecdote where Dyson came to Fermi with a theory for weak decay (I think). There were a handful of datapoints that matched experimental results.

AND all this is apart from the fundamental question of whether important generic scientific truths can really be gleaned from the social sciences.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse