Given the title I expected to find an interesting article on what can go wrong if we overly rely on quantitative methods in the humanities. But this article doesn't distinguish between badly-applied quantitative methods and where the limits of those methods are even if they are executed well.
For example:
> We look at instances where the effect exists and posit a cause—and forget all the times the exact same cause led to no visible effect, or to an effect that was altogether different
This just sounds to me like bad quantitative modelling.
There is a huge argument to be made for qualitative research, and there is much-needed criticism of the idea that "hard" methods are more valuable than "soft" methods. I think this article manages neither.
Plus even if all the previous measurements were totally useless, that doesn't mean we should just give up and stop trying to measure soft stuff.
No, it's quite the opposite. Instead of many small underpowered experiments and studies we should be spending on fewer but well designed and run larger ones. (Even if that's naturally harder.)
I can recommend having a look at the book „how to measure anything“ to get a sense of how to apply measurement techniques to „soft“ contexts.
Yup. All psychotherapies were started just because someone thought they sounded good; and are still being practiced because they sound good. There are hundreds of different schools of psychotherapy today. There is a movement toward testing the effectiveness of therapies, but they just show whichever therapy the researcher fancies is the best, and metastudies reveal about equal effectiveness of all the major therapies.
The point is, I think, that quantitative measures are not lifting the scientific status of a field automatically; and can mask the lack of sound foundation.
You've missed the entire point. A sort of conflation is the problem - not by the author, but by people in and around soft sciences and humanities throwing a bit of statistical jazz into their papers and then drawing ostensibly rigorous conclusions which influence social policy.
The reality is that by their vary nature, both soft science and humanities (there is a lot of overlap) cannot be held to the same rigor as, say, mathematics, physics, chemistry. These sciences are pure theory (like gender studies), non experimental (like psychology), and fundamentally unfalsifiable in the majority of cases...but laymen, and apparently government officials, either don't understand or pretend they don't understand - either way shitty policy and legislation is passed and innocent people (society) are worse off frequently.
>attitudeX
>NY Times bestseller
>Toxic
Please address the issues directly and name your sources rather than just giving a general progressive word salad. I'm ready to support you but you don't convert people by brushing them off as out of date.
But you are right about what happens next: you top it off with academically uneducated (or simply unaware of scientific rigour) politicians like Trump (he's just an obvious example, far from being the only one) making calls on different social topics.
Perhaps you should look harder. The dominant approach in economics for 20 years has been to reject correlational studies and try very hard to get at casuality, by:
* Running randomised controlled trials, often at scale (see eg Esther Duflo);
* Laboratory experiments, which have provided a body of robust paradigms and results;
* Seeking natural experiments;
* Statistical techniques like regression discontinuity and instrumental variables.
There's plenty of bad work in the social sciences. So is there elsewhere in the natural sciences (cough Lancet). There's plenty of good work too.
I did not want to imply that social science studies are non-rigorous, I was actually trying to defend their scientific nature, but with an incorrect phrasing.
Indeed, in Econ grad school I learned a lot about control theory, statistics, dynamic programming, etc. But I was never told to read Foucault, Levi-Strauss or even Marx - something that sociologists and other people in humanities usually have at least a basic understanding of.
If we judge what is science by level of quantitative rig our then economics is the only social science.
Sure many studies have flaws (not just in the social sciences), but what is the alternative that we simply use theories because of their "beauty" (whatever that means)? Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?