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Comment by gonzobonzo | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make the claim how to find evidence for it.

Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.

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I think you didn’t get the question. If we were to seek that evidence, who would turn to?

Economist! /s

I think you’re missing their very good point. ”Social science” is how you get the evidence.

As I mentioned previously, if after decades of funding social science we don't have an answer to that, then it's simply incorrect to claim that continuing to fund social science is going to give us an answer.

If you want to argue that we should put into funding a specific project to look into the benefits of social science, you can do that.

But saying that we should do widespread funding of a discipline in order to find out if a discipline is actually worth it, and then after decades of doing widespread funding of that discipline you say "well, I don't have any evidence that it's worth it, because you have to keep finding it to find the evidence," is, to be frank, bizarre.

Imagine if we did this for other fields. We putting funding into homeopathy for decades. Someone comes along and makes the claim that we need to continue doing this, in order for society to be healthy. Someone asks what the evidence for this is, and the reply is "we have to keep funding homeopathy to get the evidence!"

There are many questions we may want to ask about society. For example, "Does funding social sciences make a society happier?" is one of them. Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers. Whether you see value in that is of course up to you.

(I never said, claimed or argued any of the things you mention in your reply, so I'm not addressing those points)

I think you're both still talking past one another.

> Social sciences give us the general capability to ask those questions and understand the answers.

This is almost tautological depending on where those fields lie between physics and philosophy.

Chemistry is just applied Physics. Biology is just applied Chemistry. Neurology is just applied biology.

But psychology (and by extension, sociology) is firmly on the Philosophy side of the fence in my uneducated opinion.

Where is the evidence that social sciences give us the capability to ask those questions and understand those answers? I would argue that only I have that ability and instead you should direct that money towards me.

The evidence is in the typical academic outputs: textbooks, published articles, monographies, etc.

The difference being for homeopathy we actually do have the research priving it's a scam whereas for social studies we only have the research showing that some proiminet studies are a scam (or are unpreplicatable for other reasons). That's a far cry from "social studies are proved not to benefit society at all" and cutting all funding for them.

Well, we don't have studies proving it's a scam. We have papers that show that specific homeopathic remedies don't work. That doesn't disprove homeopathy in general. So - we should fund it until funding it is fully disproven from all angles?

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