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Comment by pw0ncakes | Hacker News Reader

Most likely, not nearly as much. In medicine, tests are expensive and ethically complicated, because you're experimenting on living beings whose inner workings we barely understand. So the ability to make firm conclusions, like you can do in the sciences, is not there.

Gravity is proved. Evolution is rock solid. We still don't know if coffee is good or bad for us.

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Gravity is proved. Evolution is rock solid. We still don't know if coffee is good or bad for us.

Gravity is not proven. Falling is easily observed, and general relativity is a pretty good theory for it, but the jury is still out on how exactly gravity works. Evolution is also easily observed (e.g., drug resistant pathogens); its basis in natural selection and genetics is the part that is rock solid.

As for coffee, it's some combination of good and bad. Which part dominates in which situations is up for debate.

(Apologies for being pedantic -- caffeine high just set in.)

Fair enough. I should have said that the Law of Universal Gravitation, not "gravity", is effectively proven. We don't know how gravity works.

Gravity is proved. Evolution is rock solid.

Sure, thats old physics/biology. You can't compare that to state of the art medicine. You need to look into modern cosmology, string theory, quantum mechanics and make the comparison. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to make such a comparison.

That aside, the incentives are different. Medicine --> $$$. String theory doesn't.

I don't mean physics. I mean human sciences with statistics heavily applied (eg, economy or sociology).

In the humanities it is a bit harder than medicine because you can't even do controlled experiments in most situations, and observational statistics is complicated.

> In the humanities it is a bit harder than medicine because you can't even do controlled experiments in most situations, and observational statistics is complicated.

That's not the hard part. In the humanities, people care about the answers. They want to find economic value in diversity, for example.

No one went into medicine to prove that a particular compound cured gout.

But a researcher's grants/patents certainly do depend on proving a particular compound cures gout.

Usually not. The researchers grants depend on figuring out the mechanisms around a certain class of compounds curing gout. A pharma company is going to take that research and find a compound that can be patented (a process that takes a while and rarely gets research funding

Many researchers also have for-profit companies on the side, and care about whether the results they publish in their day job are good or bad press for those companies. (Especially common in biomed.)

In many of the social sciences, people come into the field with agendas and political leanings that at best subtly bias what they are doing and at worst override their search for truth and cause them to find the results they want, whether those results are real or not.

In the hard sciences, there is rarely an agenda. People often care very much about the results, but they rarely bring with them deeply rooted political biases.

Strictly speaking the "humanities" (philosophy, literature, history) don't make any kind of attempt at science at all, whereas the social sciences (economics, sociology) have the difficulties you point out.

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