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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Standard warnings: Social Psychology is not a science and should probably be ignored. "Grit" and "Intelligence" are so poorly and inconsistently defined as to be meaningless. This is controversy for controversy's sake

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Not true but typical belief of STEM types. If you go by reproducibility rates you could say the same about medicine and economics. Hell, gravity is poorly and inconsistently defined, but we don’t throw away physics.

I'm pretty sure gravity experiments are reproduced very frequently.

Perhaps it is because "STEM types" understand the difference in rigor that mathematics affords hard sciences. That's not an opinion.

Gravity is extremely clearly defined. And yes, we do bash on economics quite a bit. We bemoan medicine, but we don't make fun of it for having reproduction rates in the low single digits. Because it doesn't.

Even the Standard Model does not explain gravity, hence it is not "extremely clearly defined".

There’s a famous saying in the sciences: “All models are wrong, some are useful.” Many of our physics models have been “wrong” historically, but yet they describe the world well-enough to be useful in making very good predictions. Newtonian physics is a perfect example of this - it tells an incomplete story of reality, but it’s still extremely useful in making predictions about how the world works.

The reproducibility crisis across the social sciences (and sometimes even in biology and medicine and - hot take - machine learning) is evidence that many of these models are both wrong AND useless for prediction, as opposed to just being incomplete.

Many sociological and psychological models are useful as well. All sciences are affected by the reproducibility crisis because of the incentive structure in the peer review process. Physics has perpetuated useless models also so it’s not immune from criticism.

Back to my original point, it’s misleading to claim that social psychology is not a science and should be ignored.

Come up with an experiment that involves gravitational forces; there are physics models will predict it and you can design your experiment to have a P value of 10^-6 to confirm those models.

That's very different from the other items listed previously.

Reasoning mistake, it's also not in de phonebook, 300.000 km = 1 sec, that is what a the Minkowski Space defines as the relation between space and time.

> about medicine

Partially true.

> and economics

Yes.

So what?

So STEM types arrogate "real science" to themselves, while they suffer the same reproducibility crises as "soft" science. They also seem to be ignorant of the histories and developments of social sciences, so cannot even conceive how they could be scientific. It's myopic.

> So STEM types arrogate "real science" to themselves, while they suffer the same reproducibility crises as "soft" science.

What are you even talking about? STEM is science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Yes, these are hard sciences.

Medicine and economics are soft sciences and yes, they suffer a lot more from a lack of reproducibility than STEM studies.

Hard science suffers the same problems, albeit to a lesser degree, as other sciences because the peer review system is based on humans at the end of the day, so social and psychological factors will always be in play. It’s myopic to say social psychology is not a real science and should be ignored.

Economics is not STEM and many people who complain about psychology would also say it lacks rigor (especially the social rather than theoretical/mathematical side).

I think we know very little about psychology and how individual vs cultural human consciousness is.

Like... Samurai’s and self-immolating monks are human.

Post-enlightenment, post-Kant, social sciences treat man as an individual unit “homo-economicus” — nothing could be further from the truth.

Well, 'gravity' is a technical term defined within a theory--be it Newtonian or Einsteinian. This definition is not coming from the common sense, but the other way around: technical definitions percolate down to the commonsense.

The way the phenomenon of gravity is tested: by deriving (predicting) consequences with auxiliary hypotheses(or theories), then do empirical tests and compare.

That's not the case in social sciences: they pick an explanation(explanans) that only explains what is already picked(explananda).

Just pick up some facts, say, X, Y and Z. And postulate A to explain X, Y and Z. Then do all mumbo jumbo: statistics, surveys, questionnaire. That's not what theories in physics do: they explain/predict something(not from the set X,Y,Z) that is NOT already there.

Larry Laudan in his philosophy of science makes a distinction between confirming instances and positive instances. Social scientists just pick up positive instances(X,Y,Z), Natural sciences are on the look out for confirming instances(instances that are not of the type X, Y and Z).

Take a crude example from our ordinary experience: all swans are white. Go and look out for a white swan. That's a positive instance, not a confirming instance.

Many of the social sciences, including economics and psychology, do not meet the criteria to be considered a science (at least not a rigorous one).

What Separates Science from Non-Science? - https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2012/05/30/what_se...

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