If you engage outside the scientific community, you're most likely going to encounter cranks.
Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
> Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theo...
Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.
For example, history is frustrating because you are going to end up in unique circumstances and you're not going to be able to see into the future, only the present. Yet, we must at least have an understanding of the world around us and critical thinking skills that can only come from with doing history.
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
And very little of psychology covers what is used in ads.
This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory.
Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
If you suspect that you're being lied to by the consensus, feel free to read alternatives by heterodox scholars. I suspected that they're crank.
It's not like I particularly agree with the way things work now, only that we shouldn't make things worse by making obviously stupid moves in the wrong direction.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(I don't think the GP comment was very good either, but taking the thread flameward is definitely not what we want.)