Hacker News Reader

Maybe none of this ideological bullshit is the real issue? Maybe the major problem is that hard vs soft sciences are subject to different experimental controls and confounding factors, not to mention standards of rigor. If you claim to discover a new particle your n will be in the billions, and a whole community will analyze your results with a fine comb. Meanwhile if you make a claim about implicit bias or the nutritional value of coffee it’s based on tiny samples with huge variability.

It’d be cool if your and the other poster’s ideological spat could try to not use science as the battleground, or at least eliminate more likely issues before going there. Social sciences are hardly even science from the perspective of a chemist or physicist, there’s no need to delve into petty ideology. Methodology is a much richer source of hurdles to overcome than old and sad debates.

> It’d be cool if your and the other poster’s ideological spat could try to not use science as the battleground, or at least eliminate more likely issues before going there.

I don't disagree. A big part of the problem is the social sciences claiming the mantel of science (often just statistics layered over tiny samples, as you point out), in order to imply some sort of impartiality and precision on par with the hard (i.e. real) sciences.

Unfortunately, and I say this sincerely, I believe the ideological nature of the social sciences since the 60s has been responsible for a huge amount of uncritical acceptance of bad (false) work as well as preventing a lot of unpopular good (true) work. I don't know how to deal with that fact other than stating so forthrightly, which, unfortunately from the perspective of science, carries necessary ideological freight with it.

>Social sciences are hardly even science from the perspective of a chemist or physicist

A chemist or a physicist still have hard time dealing with particle assemblies of say 100-100000 particles. For several last centuries they learnt to deal with [aggregate properties of] assemblies on the scale of 10e20+ particles. Only during last century they came to pretty good understanding of 1 particle.

In social sciences this is Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (ie. they are real social science today, not some professor in an office). This is the scale where aggregate properties appear, and they start to be able to drill down from it.

Pharmaceutical companies influence research according to [1] to gain support for their medicines.

Studying economic factors underlying social activity isnt by itself Marxist. This methodology is adopted in support of different political positions. In fact, many free-market economists also do this and get accused of 'economics imperialism' by social science faculty who want to study other factors.

Another point made in [1] is the blame isnt just on companies but people being influenced.

[1]https://medium.com/@drjasonfung/the-corruption-of-evidence-b...

> Hard sciences like physics are on much firmer ground, and conflating the two is clownish.

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

> It's a nice story you've got there, but the reason there is a replication crisis in the softer sciences is not due to the evil capitalists of the marxist imagination.

You understand literally nothing about Marxism. For example, "capitalist" isn't a moral designation, it is a description of an economic agent's role in an economic relationship. Capital owners have access to resources and they give permission to laborers to use those resources. That's it.

> cultural marxist

You can't be serious.

> See the ongoing fight against the idea of a high genetic basis for adult IQ.

This plays out more in the public sphere than in scientific communities. It's also the case that a few popular intellectuals try to sell psychometric science as saying more than it actually does about how social policies should be designed. This, again, happens moreso outside of scientific circles.