[danieltillett]

I don’t have to imagine that society since they already exist and are called social scientists.

More seriously you do make a good point which is all scientists lie on a spectrum from always generating true hypotheses, to always generating false hypotheses. Scientists in different fields tend to lie more to one or the other of the extremes. My experience is the observational sciences are more shifted to the always false end than the experimental sciences.

[AlotOfReading]

Did you observe social scientists being wrong or was it verified experimentally?

[danieltillett]

I do hope you are not being serious, but assuming you are not, then quite an amusing response.

[AlotOfReading]

It was in fact a joke, but with some truth. You're making serious claims about a vast body of literature and methodologies without having actually understood their entirety. This is exactly what you're criticizing social scientists for doing: drawing conclusions based on observations from systems no one has fully isolated for experimentation. If you think this is methodologically unsound, that's fine, but you shouldn't then do it yourself.

[danieltillett]

I was making the pointed armchair observation that all hypothesis being tested in the social sciences are false. Of course none of the down voters seemed to noticed that my hypothesis is a social science hypothesis. Subtly is lost on HN most of the time.

More seriously the social sciences do have a lot of problems, some driven by the methodologies used, some by ideology, and some by the inherent noisiness and unreliability of the data available. Not an easy area to do science in.

[modbait]

This is being down-voted for the shots fired, but the underlying point is almost certainly true to a degree. People aren't ideologically invested in (say) the weight of electrons in the same way that they are in IQ curves across demographic groups.

[danieltillett]

Ideology certainly plays an important role in generating false hypothesis, but all the observational sciences suffer from the problem that you can't run experiments to rigorously test the robustness of your hypothesis.

In the experimental sciences you can get far using the rule of thumb that if you need statistics you did the wrong experiment, while in the observational sciences the use of statistics is inherent.