My local library did not exactly have access to journals either.
I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
That doesn't mean the people engaged in research at the bottom of the stack are good and the people at the top of the stack are bad. Nor does it mean we shouldn't be trying our best to understand things near the top of the stack.
Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.
No it's not? You put more money into the studies and you can do bigger, better versions of them.
A major obstacle to putting more money into studies: people jerking themselves off about how soft sciences are a joke and hard sciences are Super Serious Business.
One example is the famous reluctance to publish negative results in psychology. Nearly all published results in (collider) particle physics are negative.
If senior faculty prefer to only hire people with a string of published postive findings, you are literally encouraging p-hacking. Again, they are not "bad" people, it is just that the system the senior people have setup in that field is not conducive to doing good science.
Because it'd be good to understand what makes people happy, for example. Or what enables relationships to thrive. Or when different forms of government are suitable or unsuitable to solve a set of problems, etc.
Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers, but the vast majority of opportunities left in the western world to improve people's lives is not particle accelerators, it's answering questions like: "what actually helps people feel satisfied in life, loved in their relationships, and belonging in their community?"
> At least a large part of the problem is cultural
Is it? Why so?
Negative results aren't published in almost any field, and that's actually a good on ramp to the discussion we should be having, which is about the broken incentives of science and scientific publishing specifically. The broken incentive model isn't special to softer sciences and it has far more dire consequences in other domains.
You can't possibly think that soft sciences are the only ones hiring people with a string of positive results... right?
Believe me, you aren't "breaking" anything to anyone. If you could solve the secret of happiness (your example), no amount of money would be too small.
The issue isn't whether social science would be good to figure out. Definitely it would, to the extent there is actually a "thing" to figure out, which may be true and may not; i.e., "what makes people happy" may be so contingent and/or so ineluctably open to interpretation that it makes no sense as a rigorizable concept. (There is nothing wrong with unrigorous concepts, btw, these have been fruitfully explored by the poets and philosophers and therapists.)
Ok, so even granting that there is a stable, rigorizable "truth" for the social sciences to discover, the issue is whether the methods and analyses as they have been practiced are effective or even could be tweaked to be effective. Clearly, they aren't. And not just a few bad apple studies, but seemingly the whole darn lot.
Arguing is easy when you just assert your conclusion eh?
I said a large part of the problem is cultural, I did not say that psychology is the only field with cultural problems. I'm not sure how you got that idea.
I said, to that point: no it's not. You just do bigger, longer term, more complete studies. The limiting factor on this -- right now -- is typically money. Perhaps you can pour infinite money and problems with e.g. recruitment or monitoring will still prevent us from getting to statistical power, but maybe not.
That is not the only problem social sciences face, but most of the problems they face are not exclusive to social sciences whatsoever, which then prompts the obvious question of why they get so much flak.
"But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural."
More money won't fix the cultural problems with the field. Maybe the lack of a universal quantitative framework makes issues that are slightly bad in some fields much worse in the social sciences. I don't know. But it's naive to just say other fields have the same cultural problems so we can ignore it for MY field.
There's a famous anecdote where Dyson came to Fermi with a theory for weak decay (I think). There were a handful of datapoints that matched experimental results.
However, Fermi threw out Dyson's theory, despite the empirical agreement, because it had 5 free parameters ("with 3 parameters I can fit an elephant, and with 4, I can make it waggle its trunk is the quote" IIRC). This is difficult, but essential criticism all fields need.
AND all this is apart from the fundamental question of whether important generic scientific truths can really be gleaned from the social sciences.
This question is orthogonal to the question of whether the organizations currently conducting research in those areas are well-organized. You could fund them well and also demand re-organization as a condition. You could even find other scientists to do this work. But if you don't think the work is important, none of this matters.
I am saying that we should take those claims less seriously, especially if the results from that domain don't replicate, as in the case of psychology and other social sciences.
Maybe there is little we can conclusively say about those domains.
There was little we could conclusively say about any domain until long term, concerted effort was made to understand each of them.
I'm sure some areas of physics have near 100% and some simply don't.
Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people:
1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe.
2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field.
3. Social scientists playing defense.
There are tons of non-replicable findings way, way further down the stack than psychology, and those tend to have a lot more relying on them than psychology/sociology studies. If you're upset about scientific validity, consider directing your ire to where problems are more likely to actually hurt people -- the "hard sciences."
Nice ad hominem but I'm none of those things. I work in clinical trials, one of the few areas where we actually do have to know things, and a very good empirical demonstration of exactly how incredibly difficult that is.
I am a hard science maths / data science guy, but unlike a lot of my peers I have a great interest in softer reasoning (philosophy, ethics, political science etc). But I am constantly disappointed by how tainted by ideology psychology and psychiatry feel (and economics, but this is a different discussion).
Do you think that psychology and psychiatry are held to the same rigour as harder sciences and should be considered as valid?
If we take those two observations: a) science is done by humans and b) humans have motivations, obviously the way to arrive at truth is to allow for most things to be wrong most of the time. This is the process by which we've learned every single thing about the universe.
I don't know what you mean by "held to the same rigor." I don't think any psychologist on the planet would tell you we understand psychology as well as we understand basic chemical reactions.
What do you mean by this? the field of psychology is perfectly capable of policing itself, and it's rejected much of the conclusions of its historical predecessors.
> In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc.
"hard sciences" also fail to produce results relevant to most people. Sure, they can maybe make better batteries, but how can they explain how dysfunctional society is?
EDIT: We can also directly blame the poor communicational skills of "hard sciences" for diet culture. "hard sciences" have failed in their efforts to produce a population that can reason about nutrition in an evidence-backed manner, and this can be traced directly to how scientists choose to present their data.
You absolutely do lol, or you're just straight wrong. Take your pick.
> The problem with “soft sciences” is that they can’t produce provably correct information.
Neither can hard sciences. Proofs are incompatible with empiricism. Abductive proofs (which is what the scientific process offers) are necessarily bounded by limited certainty. All you can do is progressively improve certainty approaching 100%, but reaching it is necessarily impossible. This is just basic Hume. You can never be 100% sure the sun will rise tomorrow or that the fundamental laws of physics won't arbitrarily change.
But, the same applies to soft sciences. We can and do increase our certainty continually. This is absolutely worthwhile and is probably far more valuable to humanity than merely modelling physical phenomena.
This is false, an obvious counter-example is an explanation that happens to be coincidentally correct (without being derived from any science)
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This seems like an attack on the notion of objective truth which while interesting in the abstract, is not particularly interesting to me personally.
How can you establish "correctness" without something like the scientific method? How do you even bind loosely-defined english to verifiable claims to real-life referents without agreeing with others on terms? No, you're chosen simple, comforting delusion over anything resembling objective truth.
> This seems like an attack on the notion of objective truth
Yes, truth is an apriori concept; objective truth is a silly delusion. Coherence is generally a much stronger concept anyway.
I don't see how you can say this, would you prefer to live 200 years ago before hard sciences had started changing peoples lives? Almost every convenience you see around you exists thanks to hard sciences.
My point was not to reject hard sciences so much as to emphasize you can't easily extract the consequences of them in isolation. It's nearly futile to even try. My apologies for poorly articulating this.
It was called natural philosophy for Christ's sake.
Modern medicine's forefather was heroic medicine, based on modulating the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile).
We didn't zap into existence with the hard sciences being hard. We made them that way through centuries of intellectual effort, almost all of which turned out to be wrong!
A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.
There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different.
I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.
I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc.
It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
Yeah, it is so strange when people say we should listen to the scientists, we shouldn't since scientists make all these much stronger claims than the data supports.
Instead we should listen to the data, see what it says, rather than the scientists who did the studies. And it is really important to note that the data doesn't necessarily say what the study author says it does.
Edit: Above is for social sciences, since they lack robust results. In the hard sciences were we have a lot more robust results it makes more sense to listen to those who know those results, that doesn't have to be scientists though could be experts like engineers etc.
Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.
But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound.
It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.