[tw000001]

> conflation of humanities and social sciences.

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.

[barking]

This is 2020 and while in the past attitudeX or behaviourY might have been acceptable we have now come to understand (through Social Science Studies or NY Times bestseller that a particular academic has written) that both are wrong, toxic, in fact.

[partyboat1586]

>This is 2020

>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 I'm ready to support you but you don't convert people by brushing them off as out of date.

[tempodox]

That reminds me of a quote from Kurt Tucholsky: “Sociology was invented so people could write without experience”. A crisp way to summarize your point. Although I don't think that sociology can't be better than that.

[JordanFarmer]

What you speak of has led to unrecoverable loss... The more mankind "knows", the more foolish we become.

[necovek]

I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions: what I have seen is those studies noticing a correlation and then mainstream media picking it up as de facto conclusions (to put out a simplest example we've all seen: "people who have more sex are happier", directly implying that having sex leads to happiness, whereas studies noticed a correlation between people who claim to be happy and sex frequency).

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.

[dash2]

> I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions.

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.

[necovek]

FWIW, I realise I didn't phrase it correctly. What I wanted to say was that any non-terrible ("half decent") study does not attempt to draw a final, black or white (I wrongly used "rigorous") conclusion, but that mainstream media will do that instead by choosing a particular interpretation of the study results.

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.

[LudwigNagasena]

Economics is not really something people think of when they talk about humanities or social sciences.

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.

[ghaff]

There are definitely areas of overlap with social sciences--especially these days. Behavioral economics (for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize a couple years back) grew directly out of behavioral psychology for example.