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I see this position somewhat often, almost unavoidably accompanied by a reference to Feynman. The position is, of course, pure nonsense if you take a few moments to think it through.

Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman, a non-expert in the area, wrote that essay, but it is also ludicrous to claim that a part of existence is unamenable to scientific study. If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied. There is no reason to believe human behaviour and thought is beyond this.

>Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman...

You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

>If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied.

Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry. Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences are also not science.

> You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

You'll need to substantiate this claim, of course.

> Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry.

Why not?

> Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences are also not science.

You are simply repeating the old misconception I've hinted at: that human behaviour is off-limits to scientific inquiry, even though it is real and physical. I fail to see why this would be the case. We are, after all, talking about measurable, quantifiable things inputs and outputs regarding human behaviour.

>We are, after all, talking about measurable, quantifiable things inputs and outputs regarding human behaviour.

I don't think it's true. Looking at behavior is like trying to guess at the internals of a black box piece of software that's very well obfuscated + randomized.

The empirical way to do it is more along the lines of neuropsych -- taking a look at the physical processes involved. I think human psychology and behavior is a lot like the plumage of a peacock; pretty, loud, but ultimately an abstraction above what is really going on.

> The empirical way to do it is more along the lines of neuropsych -- taking a look at the physical processes involved. I think human psychology and behavior is a lot like the plumage of a peacock; pretty, loud, but ultimately an abstraction above what is really going on.

There is no denying it is an abstraction. I would in fact claim the converse: all human scientific study to date has dealt with abstractions of varying degrees.

To offer a counterargument, we treat a great deal of systems like (semi-)black boxes and ultimately manage to derive useful statements about those systems. Examples include economics, black-box software analysis (like fuzzing), biology (e.g. we've learned many useful facts about the human body before we even knew of the existence of the cell), even basic physics (like the physics of gasses, as an epitome of something randomized, but still following broad rules). There is no reason to assume human psychology is different in this particular aspect.

In fact, we cannot assume so, as a lot of psychological knowledge we've gleaned demonstrably works, despite other results proving to be irreproducible due to the usual reasons[1]. As an example, it's hard to deny the existence and predictive power of modern human personality trait models.

It should also be telling that many modern, advanced statistical tools were invented by none other than psychologists, for use in psychology.

Neuropsych is definitely a worthwhile approach and I wouldn't separate it from the rest of psychology. Ultimately, we cannot really hope to derive everything using the bottom-up approach any time soon so a variety of approaches are needed. Also, to continue the above example, many studies of personality traits have shown connection to underlying genetic and environmental factors, such as this one: http://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00137-4

[1]: Science is hard, humans like and many times need to cut corners, the black-box system is extremely complex (as you noted).

Because most humans behave sufficiently different from each other. Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different. It's so bad that even the same subset of humans could react completely different if you do the same test 50 years later.

> Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different.

They could, but that does not mean they do. There are quite obviously rules and patterns to much of human functioning. Denying so seems like human hubris.

Even if each human displays unique behaviour for a particular trait, knowing that it is so for that particular trait is useful and therefore still amenable to scientific exploration. Even if humans reacted randomly in some situation, the random behaviour would be subject to a probability distribution and knowing it would be useful.

It's hard for me to see where exactly the leap to "it's impossible to study human behaviour scientifically" is necessary, particularly when we have so much evidence to the contrary.

It's not science if you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input. It's useful, sure. But it's not science.

Sorry, but this just sounds like a deepity. Science is a process, not a result.

It holds for most of science most of the time that you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input (because you don't know all the variables or the entire set of equations). Only when a phenomenon is completely known does this stop being true.

But when is a phenomenon completely known? After all, for a long time we've known classical mechanics to be completely known... Except it wasn't. And during the time we thought it was, you could get into exactly the type of situation you describe above: for the "same" input, you could get a different output, depending on the components of the stress-energy tensor you were not aware were relevant. The effect was subtle there of course, but there are many examples where it's not (e.g. the entirety of biology and medicine).

So I disagree with this description of science.

EDIT: Also, it completely slipped my mind the first time around because it's such a stupidly strong counterargument, but by your definition the entirety of modern physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and beyond) is not science.

Science is useful because it has the power to predict. It gains this power from getting the same output when providing the same input. If what you are doing doesn't have the power to predict it's not science. You can still apply the scientific method to what you are doing and if you're applying that method you might as well call yourself a scientist and what your doing science, but then again, a few hundred years ago scientists didn't yet know that things like alchemy weren't science, so they applied the scientific method to it and figured out that it isn't useful.

> Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different.

The same is true of chemicals, rocks, or lots of other categories of things subject to scientific inquiry. In fact, interesting scientific results tend to come from how the behavior of different subsets of categories like that behave in similar conditions, rather than being made impossible by such differences.

You're arguing that everything can be subject to exploration via scientific method, and he's arguing that some people reject this anyway. Here is a quote about an ideological split that happened in the anthropology community:

>The divide is trenchantly summarized by Lawson and McCauley (1993) who divide between ‘interpretivists’ and ‘scientists,’ or, as noted above, ‘positivists’ and ‘naturalists.’ For the scientists, the views of the ‘cultural anthropologists’ (as they call themselves) are too speculative, especially because pure ethnographic research is subjective, and are meaningless where they cannot be reduced to science. For the interpretivists, the ‘evolutionary anthropologists’ are too ‘reductionistic’ and ‘mechanistic,’ they do not appreciate the benefits of subjective approach (such as garnering information that could not otherwise be garnered), and they ignore questions of ‘meaning,’ as they suffer from ‘physics envy.’

cite: https://www.iep.utm.edu/anthropo/#SH4b

> But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry.

Yes, it does. The scientific method and empirical investigation apply to any phenomena in the material universe, including human behavior.

Such investigation might lead to models with irreducible areas of randomness if there is some.ares of human behavior not controlled by deterministic laws, but our best models in certain areas of the physical sciences also have irreducible randomness, so that's not a distinguishing feature.

> pretty much none of it is science ( no replicable testing possible - hypothesis, experiment, theory )

By this standard, neither is most preclinical cancer research as so few of them replicate (11% - source: https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a). Even social science puts up better numbers than that (~60%)

There is a difference between bad science and "not being a science" ( aka pseudoscience ).

The difference is that in one you can formulate replicable science. In the other, by its nature, you can't. Because on deals with "natural law" and the other with society.

There is no "replicable scientific test" to determine whether capitalism or socialism is the best economic system. There is no "replicable scientific test" to determine whether to have the death penalty or not. So on and so forth. Much of it is pretty much a "religious" endeavor. Pretty much those with power decide and social "science" is used to justify whereas in the past religion was the justification.

"... Because on deals with "natural law" and the other with society..."

Society isn't... natural?

"There is no "replicable scientific test" to determine whether capitalism or socialism is the best economic system. There is no "replicable scientific test" to determine whether to have the death penalty or not. "

I wasn't aware that social science even attempted to answer these questions? Like most sciences, and this study, it attempts to study phenomenon as they occur. In this case this meta-study was trying to see if the backfire effect actually exists... which isn't making any moral or societal debate or opinion, just trying to verify a phenomenon existing. Which sounds pretty scientific to me?

Studying behavior is not equivalent to studying, say, astrophysics.

It is of course "natural" in the same sense that everything is natural, but the lack of the ability to ground research in empirical evidence means that the fields of economics, social science, psychology, and especially evolutionary psychology etc. are not actually engaging in science.

The form, structure, tendencies, or beliefs of a human culture are not at all analoglous to say studying a distant and ancient star by observing its emission spectrum or investigating the nature of reality by investigating subatomic particle interactions. This fundamental difference means that these fields will never be as dependable as true science; to be clear that doesn't mean they're useless, only that they're not science.

Not sure if you'd see my edit so I thought I'd reply directly.

>Considering you tossed around "illumati-esque", I doubt you are interested.

I am interested.

>Did you bother watching what he had to say?

I have.

>Just because I said it is a pseudoscience doesn't mean that I think it is useless or bad necessarily. No more than I think literature, ethics, philosophy or even religion is bad.

I never said that you think it's useless, or bad.

>I just think social "science" is a "religion" trying to latch onto the good name of real science. Just like creationism "science" or all the other fake "science" trying to gain credibility by associating itself with science.

I actually agree here, to be honest.

>the elites needed a new form of religion to control society.

This is literally the only thing I took issue with. I was, and am, genuinely curious on all the other stuff. I was hoping you would expand on it. I, however, thought it prudent to mention that I'd not be interested in reading it from the "elites controlling society" position.

>the elites needed a new form of religion to control society. That new religion is social "science".

Source?

I'd be interested in hearing more about why you think all social science is pseudoscience. However, if it's going to be the illuminati-esque, I'll take a pass.

Not exactly a source, but from my person experience I have seen people believing in social science results with a fervor that matches religious people believing in religious material. Questioning a study, even with valid reasoning, causes one to receive treatment that compared to questioning religious teachings. Bringing up an alternative study, if it disagrees with the person's own leanings, is comparable to quoting the wrong religious book to a religious individual. Having significant experience in both religious communities and the social sciences, there feels to be a lot of overlap and I personally see nothing wrong with seeing it as serving as a replacement religion for those who have left the classical ones behind.

Now to clarify, I am not saying it is psedoscience or some conspiracy by the elites. I think it happens, to give an overly summarized summary, because religion fills a spot in the average's human psyche that when empty people seek to fill with something else and social sciences are similar enough to serve as a good replacement. As for the reliability of the science, there is a reproducibility problem and the social sciences are plagued with issues to a far greater extent than the hard sciences. That doesn't mean it is fake, but that studies, especially those with little variations and replications, need to be taken with a measured serving of salt.

Interesting perspective for sure, and I think I can agree that people seem to get incredibly invested in some of these studies and subsequently defend them, as you described, with a religious fervor.

My bigger issue with the parent comment was more aimed at the matter-of-fact "it's the elites" statement, which I have little patience for. Using a conspiracy to justify your thoughts that something else is a conspiracy is a bit circular.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

People believe in "science" with the same fervor. The scare quotes are because someone will point to a study as definitive - the final answer - and use it as a blugeon (even if the subject is far from settled or the science itself questionable).

Science is a method of inquiry, it's not a tool to "win" a debate. I think you are just observing human nature, in this case reflecting in the so-call social sciences but can manifest in relation to hard science as well.

In both cases people are inclined to support what already matches their world view (which they project with their thoughts and actions and are reflected back filtered through their belief systems).