No. Social Science almost always is done/funded by organizations / people who already have a set agenda. A Department of "Equity and Justice" will always fund research that fits their mission. Thanks to spurious correlation, you can make up anything. Many social science research are not reproducible.
It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Yea, because physical science is never funded by anyone with an agenda...
That's at least what the American Petroleum Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Beverage Institute, etc. tell us about climate change, smoking, and sugary drinks...
You kind of prove the point previous person is trying to make. Hard science proved the tobacco leads to cancer, Social Sciences helped Tobacco companies get highest ESG ratings.
Climate change is another of "not really science" fields mostly peddled by social sciences.
I assure you that physical research includes questions like whether climate change is happening, smoking causes cancer, and excess sugar causes diabetes haha.
Here is the rule of thumb. Does the "scientist" pay some serious price for being wrong ?
Doctors lose business if they are not very good. Bakers lose business if they are not very good. Car mechanics lose business if they cant diagnose problems properly.
The "ai safety", "bio ethicist", "gender justice researchers", "transrights researchers", "diversity officers" etc. pay no price of being wrong or peddling fake made up ideas, falsified data or pure nonsense. On the contrary more nonsense you can peddle higher you go in this field. Hence it is safe to assume a lot of these professions are full of fake, fraudulent individuals.
PS. There are indeed good people in these fields but they are very few and hard to find.
Bio-ethics is an extremely important aspect of the field in most research involving human and animal subjects. When we don't know about bio-ethics, we do fucked up shit as a society like the Tuskeegee Syphilis Trial. We did gain useful medical knowledge from that study but it had a massive human cost, most of which was borne by a poor community mostly made up of one racial minority. When bio-ethicists get things wrong there is absolutely a horrific cost and when I did bio research I had to take an ethics course every 3 years.
> It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.
This is so incredibly insulting to entire fields of study. The whole backlash against anything vaguely DEI-related has really done a number on the coldly logical HN. Prejudice does exist and we are allowed to study it.
meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Neither does any other researcher these days. Thus, the crisis of reproducibility in “peer reviewed” papers.
Kind of disingenuous to single out social scientists for this practice. Probably a bit more wise to clean our own house first. Certainly unwise to be engaged in the very practices we’re attacking.
Social Scientists actually have a problem that they can't do true controlled experiments (unless they spin an alternate universe). So, they literally have to work with spurious correlations
Physical Science and Math can be isolated enough to do controlled experiments
I’m gonna have to disagree. If the majority of your “science” isn’t reproducible then you really can’t call it science in any meaningful capacity. That’s not to say it isn’t valuable or helpful in some way but that’s not what’s in question. In fact, it’s not science in the same way that we’re not questioning whether it’s useful. Particularly, in the literal way.
May be and since this discussion can quickly spiral out of hand into flamewars I will not counter your claim anymore.
My question was whether the scientists who are warning us are "social scientists" who study dubious areas of "scientific research" such as "AI safety" or are some real scientists who know how neural networks and who can write python code or use tensorflow to to run a linear regression.
It can be, but it often isn't. It depends wildly on who is doing the work and how they're doing it (which, to be fair, can be true of other sciences, although the density of quacks appears to be much higher in the social sciences)
It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.