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Comment by aspaceman | Hacker News Reader

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community.

People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" scientific research (and vice-versa).

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Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer. Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or some such.

You tell that to the geometers.

A lot of applied math -- especially modeling -- is pretty freaking fuzzy.

I use "soft" to mean that the measurements are more subjective, contextual, or open to interpetation.

Chemical changes are "hard", but "power pose" and "improvements to your abilities" may be "soft".

Soft sciences are characterized by an inability to conduct controlled experiments. It's impossible to quantify all the independent variables so researchers guess or make assumptions.

I wouldn't take this too seriously. Theoretically mathematics is also a "soft science" or no science at all depending on the science theoretical background of the person you talk to (science is only experiments with data, empirical stuff...you know, following the scientific method).

I have since developed a very soft criterion for what I call science. Roughly...stuff that advances our understanding of the world and is conducted in a rigorous way.

They're called soft because the standards are very low when compared to the harder sciences, and it's basically impossible to do perfect controls or replications.

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