[timwaagh]

Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money. There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

[demosthanos]

Wow. I disagree with your position on the merits and read through your replies to see if someone had provided an effective counterargument, but you really touched a nerve: it's straight ad hominem snark all the way down. So I guess I'll give honest engagement a shot.

> I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a counterargument.

There are some fields that study universal facts about biology or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these will largely yield similar results that can be applied anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating research done in one population on a different population, but humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly necessary.

On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.

This means that even if the net return on investment for medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their own medical research. They can always take advantage of what others are learning about biology, but if they don't research the way that New Zealand works then no one will.

[timwaagh]

Your argument about knowledge being lost is probably valid but I am not sure it's convincing. If your research creates results that result in products being sold elsewhere, like say in medicine, that will mean patents and local opportunities for high value export oriented business like pharma companies. Which could bring in much needed foreign currency for the new zealand economy and help boost it's GDP per capita. Which right now in ppp terms is more at the level of Eastern Europe than the west. In other words new zealand has some catch-up to do.

[lWaterboardCats]

In theory what you say sounds great, unfortunately in practice, many fields have become far from objective and “peer reviews” seem to be more of “peer support”.

[demosthanos]

This is baby-with-the-bathwater logic. Because there are flaws in the system (which are flaws in all of academia, not limited to the social sciences) we should defund the programs entirely and give up on whole fields of endeavor.

[PittleyDunkin]

> There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science.

Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the chance.

[dgfitz]

Fwiw, I took psych101, sociology101 , and minored in philosophy.

I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.

[mintplant]

I'm surprised you didn't get anything out of psychology. The psych I took as an undergrad has been quite useful in my daily life.

[dgfitz]

How so?

Philosophy helped me to think critically and find edge cases. Psych taught me about different parts of the brain and their functions. Soci taught me my professor was a giant fraud and the entire discipline was a 'solution' looking for a problem.

[tmpz22]

We should scrap economics?

[PittleyDunkin]

TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political science to make a lick of sense.

[JumpCrisscross]

> western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences

Rejecting empirically-proven supply-demand pricing models (no DSGE, I’m talking supply chain models that predict end prices) because it’s politically inconvenient is exactly the sort of nonsense the social sciences are criticised for.

[PittleyDunkin]

> Rejecting empirically-proven

I thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume.

[JumpCrisscross]

> thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume

It's pointed phrasing, but it works. When we have overwhelming evidence for a phenomenon that has solid theoretical foundations, it's fair to say it's empirically proven. Not absolutely or mathematically proven. But if you've read Hume or even Popper, you already know that.

The core point remains the case: a lot of economics is uncomfortable for some people (there isn't a strong partisan leaning to this tendency, in my experience) and so they come up with elaborate arguments for why that evidence should be discarded. The top comment illustrates this [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408895

[nradov]

Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the research results produced by economists aren't necessarily wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research anyway then what's the point of funding it?

[result2vino]

Let’s peel away facade of the rhetorical questions here and look at what you’re actually saying. Now, a massive, MASSIVE [[citation needed]] is in order.

[nradov]

That's not how this works. The questions I asked were not rhetorical and almost entirely subjective. Citations aren't necessary.

[ausbah]

you know the replication crisis in pretty much every discipline of science right? esp our industry’s pet fav machine learning

[neves]

"hard" science without social disciplines gave us Nazism