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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Say what? I'd say a "propper scientist" will know about the "scientific process" pretty well.

Sure, there are plenty of pseudo scientists out there that promote their political or economic agendas, but you can't discredit all science because of that.

Right now "hard" science is the best way to explain things around us and the universe. Sure, often it is wrong as new science gets discovered, but that's how human knowledge evolves.

As for the "soft" sciences (anything social/psyc, etc), that's a completely different matter. They are more prone to trends, fads and more personal biases, hence I would put them in a different category.

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> They are more prone to trends, fads and more personal biases

This is not necessarily true, and I would urge caution when making such generalizations. There is junk social science and there is also plenty of junk "hard" science. Examples of fake data, political and personal biases interfering with the scientific method, occur in all fields. Some "fads" eventually become accepted fact. It took 100 years before plate tectonics was accepted by the majority of the scientific community, there are many such examples.

Don't universally discount social science: it is just as important as physical science. We actually need more social scientists to help understand the reasons behind anti-science movements in the first place, and to help legitimize science as a process, critial thinking, and to debunk illogical arguments.

When you have prominent social scientists arguing that pointing out statistical errors in papers is "Methodological Terrorism" (http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...), I call that junk science.

And if social scientists want to "help legitimize science as a process, critial thinking, and to debunk illogical arguments.", they should start with fixing their own reproducibility crisis and p-hacking crisis before instructing other people on science as a process.

I completely side with Gelman on this issue, but you can't point to this one case to dismiss all of social science. One can find examples of p-hacking, irreproducible research, and fabricated data in any field, but the existence of such does not invalidate the entire discipline.

I am merely cautioning against over generalization that just because there are some high profile examples of bad social science, there is still a lot of very good social science happening and it would be a shame to ignore it.

That was poor wording. It was in reference to the science "cheerleaders" who, from my own observations, are often equally as clueless about science as there anti-science counterparts.

I think the sentence is meant as 'too many people who don't understand research and are therefore willing to discredit scientists'

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