[tagrun]

This is exactly what's wrong with those "sciences": you can't do things scientifically (meaning the way "natural" scientists do) when it works for you and do something else when things start to get hairy, and call it science at the end of the day, because "there's more to it than scientific method" or because unicorns and dragons. That's the "fooling yourself" Feynman talks about.

And no, it's not just that majority of psychology results are "not easily reproducible".

Furthermore, again, science isn't just data fitting and extrapolation. A real theory gives you a lot more than what you put into it, including novel phenomena. Social "sciences" have been playing science for a long time, and still they don't have any universal laws or any deep understanding of what they're studying. I'm not saying data collection, interpolation and extrapolation (or as Rutherford put it, "stamp collecting") isn't a bad or useless thing. It just isn't science.

[James001]

Social sciences haven't been "playing science", they are just as scientific as physics. It's just that physics produces more reliable knowledge via the scientific method, while the social sciences produce less reliable knowledge.

The key point here is that science is not limited to the scientific method. The scientific method just produces more reliable knowledge, but is not the be all end all of science, it's just a limited subset, just like the "hard" sciences are a limited subset of science

[tagrun]

> Social sciences haven't been "playing science", they are just as scientific as physics.

This sound a lot like trolling, but I'll bite for this once.

You can't have less/more reliable knowledge. Science can't be half-wrong and half-right. You're either right or you're wrong. Your theory can't be vague and non-falsifiable. And you have to get a lot more than what you put into your theory. Regardless of how much you want to call it science, that is just pseudoscience.

I personally really don't want to be associated with such "scientists". Which is why I think twice using the word science/scientist and tend to use the word physics/physicists. All thanks to scientists who are able to think out-of-the-box, unlike the narrow-minded stupid physicists who don't know anything but scientific method!

[James001]

> You can't have less/more reliable knowledge. Science can't be half-wrong and half-right.

I wasn't trolling, but I think you might be?

Of course science can be more/less reliable or half-wrong/half-right. The truth isn't binary, it's closer to fuzzy logic sets.

And as much as you would like to call the "soft" sciences pseudosceince, you are doing yourself a disservice. In reality, your attitude suggests that you are closer to a pseudoscientist than the "soft" scientists you are so eager to dismiss. Narrow-mindedness like you are epsousing is the reason why science is in the dumps.

[tensor]

The truth is absolute, it's not some fuzzy thing. Your knowledge may be a fuzzy thing, but the truth is not. The problem in the social sciences is that they often ask questions that may not be well defined. So sure, then you end up in fuzzy half truths land, but only because you haven't defined the problem well.

To take a very simple example, let's take "intelligence." Almost immediately we can start arguing about what intelligence is, how to measure it, and so on. Notably, all the participants won't come to any meaningful conclusion because it's a poorly created human construct.

In contrast, the "hard" sciences like physics often deal with something much more clear cut: can you predict the future? If the starting conditions are X, what are the conditions at some time Y?

Can this be applied to the social sciences? We don't remotely know enough about things like the mind to be able to do this. Hell, even in biology the systems are so complex that we are still at the point of mostly guessing.

It's just not the same. Not by any fault of the people trying to study these extremely complex systems of course. Still, at the end of the day we should be honest with ourselves and recognize the differences.

[thaw13579]

Physics deals in fuzzy things, both theoretically (quantum mechanics and the associated uncertainty) and experimentally (noise is unavoidable and all conclusions require statistical reasoning). But I agree there is a vast amount more "fuzz" in the social sciences, but that seems like a reason to study it more, not less.

[tagrun]

Thank you for playing along and justifying everything I said.

[James001]

ah, good, no substantial reply. I thought you were just trolling and you were. Thank you for justifying everything I just said. Glad to know you agree that science does not = the scientific method

[ChoHag]

> You're either right or you're wrong.

Just like Newton's laws eh? Newton's laws of motion are Right. They are also inaccurate compared to Einstein's theories of relativity, which must mean Newton's rules are Wrong and Einstein is Right. But wait! There's quantum mechanics which proves that Einstein's work can only be Wrong because there's no way his science could be Right while contradicting quantum mechanics, which is Right.

You have asserted that science (now inexplicably a noun) cannot be Half-Right or Less Reliable so are Newton's laws Right or Wrong? Is Relativility Right or Wrong?

Or perhaps Newton was merely "less precise" - maybe another way of putting it is "less reliable"? - then Einstein.

I think you may be firmly in the "wrong" camp, since you insist so in binary classifications.

[danmaz74]

> You can't have less/more reliable knowledge. Science can't be half-wrong and half-right. You're either right or you're wrong.

No, you're either confident enough the theory holds - at least in some circumstances, confident enough the theory doesn't hold, or you can be not confident enough to say, but you can't ever say your theory is "right". See for example Newton's universal gravitation; it is "mostly right" for most use cases, but it is wrong when general relativity kicks in. And even general relativity is "wrong" when you go into particle physics. It's not as simple as "right or wrong".

[Joof]

Why not? It's useful to have a study at a higher level of abstraction with the tradeoff that it is less certain.

Should a physicist be making approximations? Probably not, but a biomedical researcher probably should.

[thaw13579]

I think this is arguing semantics. Yes, the methods and models of physics and psychology are different, but they both are trying to explain natural phenomena in a scientific way, that is, through hypothesis and experiment. The cargo cult analogy may have been apt at the time (1974), but psychology is completely different today. For an example, look at what we now know about visual perception, which goes well beyond a characterization as "stamp collecting".