Getting value for taxpayer money is not flimflamming, and it's not petty. There are a lot of good things to spend that money on, and if scientists want a piece of it they should provide a convincing justification.
But that's not the right way to frame it. We have some amount of money to spend, and we need to figure out how to deploy it. We know that in aggregate basic research has resulted in astronomical payoffs over time. Therefore it's in our interest to put money into basic research. It's not the scientists who should provide convincing justification on why they deserve our money. It's us who should provide convincing justification why more people should become scientists.
Social sciences and humanities are hard to measure, but they are often the most important problems: Peace and war; prosperity and opportunity; truth, freedom and justice; politics and policy. I'll observe that the problems of the world today aren't due to a lack of technology - we're doing very well with that - but to the very problems addressed by humanities and social sciences. (And perhaps that's not unrelated to the shift in focus from those fields to technology in recent decades.)
Here's an alternative perspective: STEM only allows precisely-measured problems; if you can't measure it, it's not STEM. Arguably, STEM is taking the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard stuff, the problems you can't measure but which absolutely must be solved, to the other fields.
EDIT: Major revision; sorry if you read the first version.
1) They often aren't that predictable and highly depending on cultural norms i.e. more or less anything goes for a study or a report and the standards that are in place just doesn't produce as much value to society compared to how much we spend on it IMO.
2) They even more often aren't actually re-producable but are rather pop-scientific studies that are more based on personal interpretation than any reproducible results. 2) They can often be studied on your own without need for guidance that can't be solved in a self study. (We are at a point were I would argue most humanities and social sciences doesn't actually need a university to happen on. Plenty of available knowledge for that today online and in various foras.
3) They don't produce value for society that can be reproduced by society, instead they are used often for political reasons or based on biases we have already that can't be tested.
Don't get me wrong, philosophy, social sciences, psychology etc all have an important role to play in society, but they do not need to be PHD's IMO. For the most cases they aren't rigorous enough which amongst other things is because they are more often than not coming from disciplines where the actual scientific rigor that is required to say anything along the lines of "we know".
Not sure in what way you think social sciences and humanities help solve those problems. In what way can we rely on those fields (rather than our own independent thinking) to "solve" the problems that you claim we have?
Most problems we have are solved (and created) by technology and most problems that technology can't solve neither social sciences nor humanities at large can solve (there are obvious exceptions)
> pop-scientific studies that are more based on personal interpretation than any reproducible results
> They can often be studied on your own without need for guidance that can't be solved in a self study.
What are these claims based on? From my limited personal involvement and my more extensive reading, they are not at all true. They also conflate many very different fields, from comparative literature to behavioral psychology to ancient history to anthropology to archaeology to philosophy ...
A basic requirement, just to get your foot in the door of the lobby, is expert knowledge of prior research and in techniques, something that does require a PhD (which is rewarded for original research - so the parent is almost saying that you don't need a PhD to get a PhD) and years of study. The idea that someone can learn these things (or acquire real expertise in any field) on their own, without mentoring and guidance from existing experts, access to research libraries, communication with peers, access to resources like labs and lab assistants, is hard to fathom and at best extremely inefficient. And that's just the first step.
> In what way can we rely on those fields (rather than our own independent thinking)
These fields are 'independent thinking'. They are individuals who care to spend years reading deeply, consult with experts, master the literature, practice the techniques, etc. If someone on HN posted that they had done those things, you'd give them some credit. If they got a PhD out of it, perhaps the credit should be taken away.
> Most problems we have are solved (and created) by technology
That is true, if we overlook minor challenges like government, human rights, education, laws, war, peace, politics, international relations, religion, truth, knowledge, freedom ...
https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...
You last answer kind of illuminates that you are talking about something very different than me. Academia didn't solve any of those areas and I never said that academia doesn't have important areas we are talking about whether it should get funding which my claim is that it doesn't need these days compared to basic research in the hard sciences.
The worlds problems aren't going to be solved with another expert in peace or a political science major, understanding how to get fusion to work on the other hand is.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have experts in peace or political science and that they can't be instrumental in bringing something to reality but we don't need funding to learn to be a political major or to acquire knowledge.
Getting an education and educating yourself isn't the same.
> The worlds problems aren't going to be solved with another expert in peace or a political science major
You keep saying that, but what is it based on? How can we ignore the long history of the opposite? Who do you think makes peace and solves these problems? I read a lot of international relations literature (for someone not in that field); these problems are technical, require a lot of expertise (especially because it must be applied it under great uncertainty), and the stakes are incredibly high. In fact, one widely accepted view of many wars up through WWII is that they were caused by amateurs in international relations who made amateur mistakes and ended up with wars they didn't want. I encourage you: Educate yourself; read the literature; learn how international relations, for example, and social policy actually happen.
It's easy to write that we should dismiss expertise but before we throw out centuries of knowledge, and lifetimes of acquired expertise for lay amateurs reading Reddit on the weekend, perhaps we should consider it more carefully. The lives, freedom and prosperity of billions of people are at stake.
> we don't need funding to learn to be a political major or to acquire knowledge.
> Getting an education and educating yourself isn't the same.
We need funding to pay professors, to provide resources for their research, and to teach the next generation; and to provide housing and other services and resources for students. The idea that you could learn it on your own without guidance is unfounded and, as I said, extremely inefficient at best. Tell you what: I'll work with someone who has decades of expertise and you do it on your own, and we'll see who gets to the finish line first. My guess is you'll end up way off course and never reach the finish line.
We are talking about fundamental research today and about academia today.
What many problems of society is academia helping solve today? What peace have academia solved? What really big problems in international relations have academia solved today?
Peace isn't a byproduct of some academic persons phd it's a byproduct of amongst other things technology making live more livable for more and more people.
You don't need to go to the university today to learn to be an expert in international relations technology have ironically enough made it possible to learn about more or less any academic field you want without ever needing a university degree in it.
For example, Bruno Latour wrote a book more or less on the temporally specific factors which lead to the acceptance of the vaccination in scientific communities and in society. Essentially, what I'm saying is something similar or parallel to Thomas Kuhn. Scientific advancement and technological advancement in society and the acceptance of a research achievement as /scientific advancement/ is less about the literal research achievement/advancement and the science, but about social context and temporal specificity. I.e. Kuhn's "paradigm shift".
Annemarie Mol's work, who is both an MD and non-STEM PhD, often highlights the very unscientificness of medical science and technology in practice. Though it's not really her goal, I believe, her examinations illuminate how the guidelines of medical science and the abstract understandings of specific diseases are incongruous with the reality of disease pathology in real patients, even when looked at on a large scale.
I don't see how humanities, social science, etc are somehow less worthy of PhD study. I don't experience STEM as somehow much more difficult to self-study, nor doctoral programs as strictly about knowledge, understanding, nor the validation of general information within a field. Doctoral programs are often about reaching toward mastery of a specific subject to the point of researching it, and there's a lot of networking, career-oriented stuff, and teaching involved. There's a somewhat apprenticeship-like quality to it. Then a committee validates that this research contributes something to the field in a general sense, and also meets bare minimum ethical standards in research, and other similar standards. They ask questions to validate that the candidate has knowledge and can answer questions about whatever highly-specific subject they're working with. It's not an end-all degree; it's one which certifies in whatever specific field that the recipient can master required comps or quals at a minimum standard and then plan, execute, and draw conclusions about research in written form done at a bare minimum standard required for peer-reviewed publishing. In pure math that can mean proving something and then explaining it, but actually most pure math phds I know completed their degrees in less time than say... I think 10-12 years is average or expected fast degree completion for doctoral candidates in Anthropology at my institution. In pure Math it's something like 6-7. Though all that varies by individual program.
I think it's also relevant to note that I think you're a bit jaded about social science research. It's like anything, there's useless, thoughtless, and downright unethical research, and there's also research which the researchers are attempting to engage in best practices and the most accurate understandings of their research. Like, if you look at something like quantitative Sociological research, it's often done via online self-report surveys. No less, sociology phds now are taught to methodologically consider the potential or downright likelihood of the unreliable self-reporter, in addition to the ways that the framing of a survey question influences the respondent's answer. The social sciences methodologically acknowledge these issues because it is a big part of these fields in itself that this would be a major research concern. So I would expect an ethical researcher to frame the results of a quantitative research study utilizing self reports in the language of self reporting. I.e. "X% of some sub group of respondents reported they experienced feeling cold in the winter time". The methodology of social science fields is also to lay that stuff out on the table, often recognizing the culturally-specific aspects of the research, and/or bias in the research. In the social sciences, people are taught not to create hypothesis and expectation. I'm sure that's something people do, but research questions can be rather open-ended.
Conversely, when you consider human research in the life sciences, there's an issue with the quality of research results. There's a well-documented risk of confirmation bias, observer-expectancy effect, and other experimenter effects, the most important for me being how researchers can unknowingly give cues to human and animal subjects which often results in the subjects confirmation their experimental expectations. The same issue with the framing of research is a major concern in areas like medical research where it can majorly impact results.
I guess I'm saying... I'm not trying to negg STEM research or hold up other fields. More, I'm trying to point out that STEM research and its uptake in scientific communities is not objective, nor immune to the conditions which influence social sciences. STEM research is influenced heavily by socio-political factors, and there is plenty of less than ethically performed and analyzed STEM research; there's STEM research which is only about confirming the researcher's view. STEM fields have all these ills too.
My point isn't that we shouldn't have the arts or humanities or social sciences, these are very important areas. The discussion was whether it needs funding or whether we could use the money for basic research instead.
Again not because it's not important but because it can be done in other ways such as self studies.
The biggest issue for the non-stem fields is that they have no external reality check and that opens up for the most absurd studies to be done and more importantly often affect society without any solid base because they can't be reproduced yet might affect policy.
https://www.nature.com/news/social-sciences-suffer-from-seve...
This is not just a problem for social sciences this is also a problem in real sciences but there are checks and balances in place that allow you to test that not so for humanities and social sciences.
And again I am not saying the fields under humanities, art and social sciences aren't important they are just not science.
Huh? They predict things about reality all the time; that's mostly what they do (at least the social sciences; humanities can be more analytical). And they base the predictions on observations about reality. I wonder what the parent is referring to.
P.S. Instead of downvoting me just because you don't agree why not just have the argument. I dont' downvote you just because i disagree with you.