There's a difference between "disdain for sociology" and "disdain for the way sociology is drawing conclusions from the experiments it performs".

Sociology is very important to study. The tools we have for it are not great, in various ways. For example, one can study people and societies by reading Balzac's writing, but the number of people who can produce that sort of thing is fairly limited. We can try to do controlled experiments, but the way we do it in practice is not great. We really really need better tools here...

Indeed, psychology and sociology are much more difficult fields of study than hard sciences. Physical laws, however tricky they are, don't seem to change at all, and tend to be the same everywhere you look. Psychology is about studying a behaviour of an advanced computing system that's about as smart as the researchers themselves. Sociology is about studying how those advanced computing systems interact with each other at scale. It's insanely difficult, and that's why it's so hard to even come up with an experimental setup that makes some sort of sense. Not to mention ethical issues (many experiments would be so much simpler if you could disregard the well-being of the test subjects).

So yeah, personally, I have utmost respect for the complexities involved in sociology - while at the same time I absolutely hate all the bullshit that's being done because doing actual research feels too hard.

Just who do you suppose was held back by "excessive rationality"? I'd suggest that many many more people in the world are held back by "not enough rationality".

There is no stereotypical "scientists' disdain" for those topics. It is vital to understand history, social sciences, economics, politics, and the arts. What is disdained is the way these topics are, in the present world, not pursued along more rigorous lines.

Too many people like to look good by producing grand-sounding theories about these topics, without putting their ideas through a more rigorous process to check whether they are actually true or not. Then we get a cohort of followers who believe these theories as if they were "as true" as mathematical theorems, but they are not. This wastes everyone's time, and worse.

One can certainly picture an overly-specialised scientist who doesn't know anything other than the specific field they chose - I guess this is what you mean by "excessive rationality" - but I don't see many cases of this actually existing. What I see in far greater numbers is the problem I mentioned in the previous few paragraphs, as well as people using the "excessively rational" image as a straw-man argument to attack scientists, to distract the world from their own flaws, of "not enough rationality".

I agree with everything except your last paragraph. You're mostly on track with what I'm talking about. There are plenty of people who throw a bunch of bullshit into a "grand-sounding theory." And on the other hand, just because something isn't backed by a mathematical theorem, doesn't mean it isn't true, or useful!

Agreed that unproven does not imply false, and there is a tendency for people purporting to be "skeptics" to make this fallacy. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_fallacy

However, it's too easy for bullshit-artists to hide behind this, as a way to deflect criticism of the theories that they're proposing, or the general area of work that they've chosen to pursue.

We're all human so it's perfectly reasonable to believe in something that's unproven - but then be honest about it, and explore the topic from a critical viewpoint without getting personally defensive. Unfortunately I see many more cases of this, than instances of the fallacy-fallacy.

Might be just another Eselei of Einstein to say that, init? Sure he can go and say that, and the former is a widely held believe, but he got nothing on pythagoreans, does he? If numbers were surreal, what are we talking about then? If they are just in our imagination, what isn't? Where did he say that? Also, a tree has more than branches. Religion is like a rotten root or some other evil imagery, if you will.

Edit: maybe he was a nihilist, I'd tolerate nil as the only non quantitative number. Sorry for the rant, but that's what you get for anecdotal evidence.

This feels like a spam comment but it's pretty much the type of lateral thinking that I am suggesting is missing from hard science :)

> And yet, the greatest scientists in history did NOT have the stereotypical Scientist's Disdain for sociology or softer topics.

Feynman certainly did.

Edit: Picked up the wrong author. The book I'm thinking of is "The Romantic Economist" by Richard Bronk. https://www.amazon.com/Romantic-Economist-Imagination-Econom...