[scythe]

It's common to see this topic: what's "wrong" with social science. But there are always some things wrong with every science. If nothing was wrong, there wouldn't be any science left to do.

Social science asks more of us than any other science. Physics demands that we respect electricity and don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere. Chemistry requires that we not emit sulfur and nitrogen compounds into the air. But social sciences will not rarely call for the restructuring of the whole society.

This is the "problem" with social science, or more properly, with the relationship between the social sciences and the society at large. When we call for "scientific" politics, it is a relatively small ask from the natural sciences, but it is a revolution -- even the social scientists themselves use this word -- when the social sciences are included in the list (Economics is no different). Psychology, as usual, falls somewhere in between.

So the relationship between the social scientists and the politicians may never be as cordial as the relationship between the natural sciences and the politicians. The "physics envy", where social scientists lament that they do not receive the kind of deference that natural scientists do, will have to be tempered by the understanding that the cost of such deference differs widely.

(All of this is ignoring that physics had a 200-year head start)

[teorema]

Social scientists turn the microscope on themselves also. When the microscope turns elsewhere you see similar patterns to differing extents (cf. recent articles on reanalysis of fMRI data, pharmacology replication rates, Theranos or hydroxychloroquine).

Meta-science has always been the gift of social science. This will all eventually funnel down elsewhere, just like meta-analysis.

But you're right, in that social science hits very close to home, more so than other sciences. Imagine that it suddenly worked very very well, and someone in the field of neuropsychology could manipulate behavior just like you might a lightbulb. Isn't that what critics are really asking for?

[konjin]

>Physics demands that we respect electricity and don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere.

Physics does no such thing. It tells us that increasing the heat retained in the atmosphere increases the planets surface temperature. It is a descriptive science. Not a prescriptive one. Wanting to have industrial civilization possible in the next century is why you don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere. But that is a value judgment far outside the scope of physics, and one social sciences claim is theirs by right of ... something.

The metaphors people use to think about the natural world are terrible, or as Carl Sagan put it Demon-Haunted.

The reason why physics, and other hard sciences, are so useful and respected is that you can switch dependent and independent variables around with a lot of success.

If I have the ideal gas law:

PV = nRT

Then I can rearrange it and be fairly confident it still works.

P = nRT/V

If you are an engineer this is a godsend. You want to set a hard value for P but can only directly control V or T? Try the second equation! You have a chance at succeeding without having to spend decades building machines that blow up and kill everyone around them!

Politicians see that and are jealous. Surely if those lame eggheads can get things to work like that we can too. So the social sciences give you equations as well. After a bunch of statistics we see that:

time spent in school = a*wealth - c

We can't control wealth, but we can control how long people spend in school:

wealth = (time spend in school + c)/a

So if we force everyone to stay in school until they are 50 everyone will have 20 million dollars in their bank accounts.

And to anyone who asks how this works, politicians say: Why are you against science and hate poor people?

[tomrod]

This is why knowledge of causal inference is essential.

Causality is not established via tweaking a correlation or regression analysis, and we social scientists should know that.

[konjin]

Casual inference is the bottom most rug of what gives hard sciences its power. It is that we understand the objects we are manipulating at a much deeper level so we don't sound like idiots.

Suppose that we take:

g = ma

A perfectly valid way to find experimental values for gravity at a location. But that doesn't mean that if we push an object really hard we increase the gravity in that location, or decrease it if we pull on the object. Just because symbol manipulation gives as an answer doesn't mean that the answer makes sense, you need to keep track of all the implicit state of the universe.

[tomrod]

> so we don't sound like idiots.

I'm fine sounding like an idiot so long as my slope is increasing :)

Right, Judea Pearl covers this in [i]The Book of Why[/i].