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I don't necessarily disagree with everything the parent wrote, nor did I downvote, but maybe "I don't think social science is a real science" is not the greatest starting point for making a genuinely social point.

It's like saying "I don't think physics actually exists, but here's my take on gravity."




Isn't that a pure opinion, of which you simply disagree? It is hardly a rare opinion at that. It's been a problem for the field since the start:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...

There's no contradiction between having views on social issues, and believing that people who call themselves social scientists maybe aren't following the scientific process as usually understood.


Oh, he was not saying that there are bad social scientists. This is a completely valid statement to make.

However, calling a discipline unscientific is not a matter of taste or opinion. There are a bunch of scientific methods and as long as you stick with them, you are scientific. No matter how well received your results are. (This, by the way, holds also true for climate science.)

There is a clear contradiction between calling social science unscientific and then relying on their concepts (trust, institutions, applied law, globalism, groupthink, etc.) in the very same argument.

edit: I can not answer to anyone anymore since I'm "submitting too fast. Please slow down." Sorry.


There is something to the argument that the inability to experiment limits scientific rigor.


Yeah, but to a certain extent that's true of things that no one doubts are science. Evolutionary biology is limited by the fact that evolution is non-repeatable, for example.

I used to be an archaeologist. Definitely a field where you can't experiment; you're studying the evidence left by the past. But good methodology in archaeology is making hypotheses about what you expect to find in a new excavation or an inadequately studied old collection, and then testing those hypotheses. Yes, there's a problem with controls, but that's not unique to social science.


Evolution has been proven experimentally, so I'm not sure why you're picking on that specifically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution

Archaeology isn't a science either, even though I've studied it myself and ancient civilisations are a particular favourite area of study for me. Archaeologists and historians in general frequently do things that wouldn't match the usual understanding of the scientific process: that doesn't mean we shouldn't study history, but comparing the fields credibility to that of physics is really problematic.

But to clarify, when I said "social science" I was referring to people who explicitly call themselves that. Archaeology and even psychology wouldn't count under that definition - but if someone actually says they are a professor of social science, to me that's an immediate red flag because the "research" produced by such people is in my experience usually just a complicated and expensive form of personal politics blogging.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good talks on this topic. There's a paper here:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...




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