[superposeur]

> it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments.

Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.

[llamaimperative]

> Clearly, this is practically impossible

No it's not? You put more money into the studies and you can do bigger, better versions of them.

A major obstacle to putting more money into studies: people jerking themselves off about how soft sciences are a joke and hard sciences are Super Serious Business.

[smegger001]

As my sister who is studying one of the soft sciences put it to me when i pointed out the lack of rigor compared to the hard. "sure we could make psychology a hard science but pesky ethics boards wont approve me raising batches of several hundred human clones in controlled environment for each test"

[noslenwerdna]

But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural.

One example is the famous reluctance to publish negative results in psychology. Nearly all published results in (collider) particle physics are negative.

If senior faculty prefer to only hire people with a string of published postive findings, you are literally encouraging p-hacking. Again, they are not "bad" people, it is just that the system the senior people have setup in that field is not conducive to doing good science.

[llamaimperative]

> But why do those fields deserve more money

Because it'd be good to understand what makes people happy, for example. Or what enables relationships to thrive. Or when different forms of government are suitable or unsuitable to solve a set of problems, etc.

Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers, but the vast majority of opportunities left in the western world to improve people's lives is not particle accelerators, it's answering questions like: "what actually helps people feel satisfied in life, loved in their relationships, and belonging in their community?"

> At least a large part of the problem is cultural

Is it? Why so?

Negative results aren't published in almost any field, and that's actually a good on ramp to the discussion we should be having, which is about the broken incentives of science and scientific publishing specifically. The broken incentive model isn't special to softer sciences and it has far more dire consequences in other domains.

You can't possibly think that soft sciences are the only ones hiring people with a string of positive results... right?

[superposeur]

> Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers

Believe me, you aren't "breaking" anything to anyone. If you could solve the secret of happiness (your example), no amount of money would be too small.

The issue isn't whether social science would be good to figure out. Definitely it would, to the extent there is actually a "thing" to figure out, which may be true and may not; i.e., "what makes people happy" may be so contingent and/or so ineluctably open to interpretation that it makes no sense as a rigorizable concept. (There is nothing wrong with unrigorous concepts, btw, these have been fruitfully explored by the poets and philosophers and therapists.)

Ok, so even granting that there is a stable, rigorizable "truth" for the social sciences to discover, the issue is whether the methods and analyses as they have been practiced are effective or even could be tweaked to be effective. Clearly, they aren't. And not just a few bad apple studies, but seemingly the whole darn lot.

[llamaimperative]

> Clearly, they aren’t

Arguing is easy when you just assert your conclusion eh?

[noslenwerdna]

I agree that studying psychology better could be beneficial. Is it possible? Or more to the point, is it merely a matter of money, as you said?

I said a large part of the problem is cultural, I did not say that psychology is the only field with cultural problems. I'm not sure how you got that idea.

[llamaimperative]

No no, what you said is that it's "clearly practically impossible" to have more statistics, more controls, etc. to get higher powered studies of high-chaos questions like the ones asked in the soft sciences.

I said, to that point: no it's not. You just do bigger, longer term, more complete studies. The limiting factor on this -- right now -- is typically money. Perhaps you can pour infinite money and problems with e.g. recruitment or monitoring will still prevent us from getting to statistical power, but maybe not.

That is not the only problem social sciences face, but most of the problems they face are not exclusive to social sciences whatsoever, which then prompts the obvious question of why they get so much flak.

[noslenwerdna]

I never said anything about practicality, you are confusing my replies with someone else's. I said this

"But why do those fields deserve more money, when at least a large part of the problem is cultural."

More money won't fix the cultural problems with the field. Maybe the lack of a universal quantitative framework makes issues that are slightly bad in some fields much worse in the social sciences. I don't know. But it's naive to just say other fields have the same cultural problems so we can ignore it for MY field.

There's a famous anecdote where Dyson came to Fermi with a theory for weak decay (I think). There were a handful of datapoints that matched experimental results.

However, Fermi threw out Dyson's theory, despite the empirical agreement, because it had 5 free parameters ("with 3 parameters I can fit an elephant, and with 4, I can make it waggle its trunk is the quote" IIRC). This is difficult, but essential criticism all fields need.

AND all this is apart from the fundamental question of whether important generic scientific truths can really be gleaned from the social sciences.

[matthewdgreen]

The question of "do those fields deserve resources" is answered as follows: are there interesting questions in those fields that we should ask and have answered (well)? I think the parent poster is saying: yes, there are.

This question is orthogonal to the question of whether the organizations currently conducting research in those areas are well-organized. You could fund them well and also demand re-organization as a condition. You could even find other scientists to do this work. But if you don't think the work is important, none of this matters.

[noslenwerdna]

That is fair. Is what you suggest possible though?

[superposeur]

I mean, a psych experiment will never have an N comparable to a particle physics experiment or be able to reach the 5-sigma threshold for discovery that now prevails in physics. On the other hand, the object of study for psych is intrinsically interesting since we are people and if something reliable can be gleaned then it's certainly worth money. My concern is that "bigger, better" (as you say) would have to include millions of people across cultures and times, tracking longitudinally, with randomization and controls. (Again, more complexity requires more statistics, not less.). Is this practical? Maybe ...