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Comment by jpeloquin | Hacker News Reader

I'm having difficulty reconciling these two opinions:

1. This ethics guidance is bad because it limits, or even censors, scientific investigation related to socially sensitive topics.

2. Social science has a reproducibility crisis and is mostly useless (a viewpoint commonly expressed in response to other articles).

Does anyone hold both of these opinions, or is it just different people talking at different times?

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If you're using outrage to select science for what's pleasing to hear instead of what's true, you can use 1 as an explanation for 2. And 1 isn't exactly new.

Ah, so the social science reproducibility problems are hypothesized to be caused by bias (or, less provocatively, filtering), moreso than e.g. bad experimental design. Yes, that would nicely reconcile both perspectives.

There's plenty of room for both. If you have lots of bad experiments and filter the ones you agree with, the combination is even worse because there's an apparent consensus.

I hold both of these views.

Science is about figuring out the truth about the world.

Censorship prevents that.

Something that is not reproducible isn’t even science.

I really don’t see a contradiction.

These are orthogonal issues.

Are they really? If social science is unreliable, then it is reasonable to conclude that (a) limiting its scope of investigation doesn't matter or even (b) limiting its scope of investigation is actually good, so that it at least does less harm. In what perspective are the issues fully orthogonal?

Stereotypes (about all groups) and their accuracy are some of the most replicable in social science, yet would likely be considered hateful or insensitive.

Any measures of difference between people. Neoteny, IQ, etc.

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