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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

The problem we have with the social sciences is that we don't have good general theories to make sense of the experiments. Think of Newton's laws of motion. We could do a few experiments and calculate g and frictional coefficients and then we could know the answers to a whole class of problems. We don't have to do experiments on how fast a x kg block will slide down an inclined plane for every value of x.

Having a theory also enables us to get more out of a single experiment. Think about how the Michelson–Morley experiment led to Einstein's theory of relativity and all it's implications.

We don't have any such framework for the social sciences. We have trouble generalizing from the results of one experiment to another experiment with the situations slightly altered.

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I accept your argument from the perspective that it would allow social scientists/other interested individuals to assess new data in an easy framework. But, I don't think it would change the political problem that the author is describing.

Some (admittedly weak) examples illustrate this point: despite our knowledge of physics and our exploitation of this knowledge in the form of aircraft and rockets, flat-earth believers and those who don't believe/understand acceleration abound.

We know the mechanisms by which vaccines work - and could go observe the diseases they prevent by simply taking a trip, or reviewing public health data from different countries. But, anti-vaccine belief is also increasing.

There are many more of these stories, where the 'easy' idea beats out the well-established scientific consensus. Thus, I'm not sure that a fundamental understanding of how influence/addiction/personality work would change political support for these ineffective programs.

Flat earthers have zero influence on the development of physics, and their ideas don't matter to anyone except themselves and a few opportunistic journalists.

This is not true in the social sciences where it's very hard to do physics-grade research, especially given that the social sciences are very politicised, and research is often done to prove a political or moral point.

So in practice our understanding of personal and social/political psychology is pre-Copernican. There's a lot of moralising - which you will agree or disagree with, depending on your predisposition - but very little high quality research into the way that moral and political decisions are made individually and collectively.

We're left with a mythology of free objective democratic choice in politics which is clearly naive and reliably breeds monsters, but as yet there isn't a better model of choice to replace it.

I agree with your point - as mentioned in my first line, I state that such a comprehensive model would be very helpful for academic purposes.

I don't believe that it would change popular opinion - indeed, flat-earthers and other 'anti-intellectual' fads continue despite not being accepted by serious researchers.

To some extent I agree with you that behavioral science/psychology needs a unifying theory. Attempts at this have been made and are still alive and well. For example, take a look at Radical Behaviorism [1]--the philosophy of science behind (applied) behavior analysis.

The overarching goal of behavior analysis is to treat the study of behavior as a natural science. That is, to identify orderly relations (i.e., laws) between behavior and the environment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism

Well, that's not actually true at all. There are very simple hypotheses motivating things like DARE or Scared Straight, for example. What happens is, you do an experiment, and those simple experiments don't work out the way you thought. And so you have to explain it, which requires a bit of work.

This isn't any different from other sciences, where you have one hypothesis, test it, and it doesn't go the way you thought, and then people are left scratching their heads for a bit, until someone guesses right and demonstrates it experimentally.

Those mathematical models in physics you mention we accept because of debates over which was correct, for example, followed by experiments (and observations!). You see gambles on explanations of unexplained results in molecular biology all the time that don't really involve the same level of mathematical precision.

I think you're overstating the extent to which scientific process occurs in all disciplines with very precise mathematical models with low stochastic error. As the complexity of your system increases, the residual noise in any given model, especially models with little established information, will be high.

I had an analogical vision while reading your comment. It looks like this: 1. Hard Science -- poking a rock with a stick. 2. Soft Science -- poking a random stranger on the bus with a stick. HTH

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