> What are the “hard” — as in difficult — problems in science? Hard problems in science are those that are embedded in complex systems; they are hard because to study something well you often need to isolate it from outside influences. Hard problems are those that vary by local conditions — science seeks to identify general laws, and when something is locally dependent, you need to sniff out the complex interactions that make it so. And hard problems are those that are difficult to quantify — science rests upon formalization and quantification, and you need to get traction at that initial step of quantification (i.e., measurement) before you can test theories. So… by these measures, if we are going to differentiate areas of science, the continuum of scientific problems should go from “hard” to “easy,” and psychology is clearly a science that deals with hard problems. Perhaps the hardest.
Reminds me of the counterintuitive about the two hard problems in computer science. Naming things, and deciding when data is obsolete, are easy mechanically. But because they have neither a deterministic nor correct solution, they end up being the hard problems you face as you build bigger projects. Or, to emphasize a line from Dr. Srivastava above:
> And hard problems are those that are difficult to quantify — science rests upon formalization and quantification, and you need to get traction at that initial step of quantification (i.e., measurement) before you can test theories.
It's possible for a science to be "hard" while having a lot of mediocre practitioners.
https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/making-progress-in-...
> What are the “hard” — as in difficult — problems in science? Hard problems in science are those that are embedded in complex systems; they are hard because to study something well you often need to isolate it from outside influences. Hard problems are those that vary by local conditions — science seeks to identify general laws, and when something is locally dependent, you need to sniff out the complex interactions that make it so. And hard problems are those that are difficult to quantify — science rests upon formalization and quantification, and you need to get traction at that initial step of quantification (i.e., measurement) before you can test theories. So… by these measures, if we are going to differentiate areas of science, the continuum of scientific problems should go from “hard” to “easy,” and psychology is clearly a science that deals with hard problems. Perhaps the hardest.
Reminds me of the counterintuitive about the two hard problems in computer science. Naming things, and deciding when data is obsolete, are easy mechanically. But because they have neither a deterministic nor correct solution, they end up being the hard problems you face as you build bigger projects. Or, to emphasize a line from Dr. Srivastava above:
> And hard problems are those that are difficult to quantify — science rests upon formalization and quantification, and you need to get traction at that initial step of quantification (i.e., measurement) before you can test theories.
It's possible for a science to be "hard" while having a lot of mediocre practitioners.