[jokoon]

It's harder to do social/human science because it's just easier to make mistakes that leads to bias. It's harder to do in maths, physics, biology, medecine, astronomy, etc.

I often say that "hard sciences" have often progressed much more than social/human sciences.

[marginalia_nu]

Funny you say that, as medicine is one of the epicenters of the replication crisis[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine

[QuadmasterXLII]

you get a replication crisis on the bleeding edge between replication being possible and impossible. There’s never going to be a replication crisis in linear algebra, there’s never going to be a replication crisis in theology, there definitely was a replication crisis in psych and a replication crisis in nutrition science is distinctly plausible and would be extremely good news for the field as it moves through the edge.

[nickpsecurity]

Leslie Lamport came up with a structured method to find errors in proof. Testing it on a batch, he found most of them had errors. Peter Guttman's paper on formal verification likewise showed many "proven" or "verified" works had errors that were spottes quickly upon informal review or testing. We've also see important theories in math and physics change over time with new information.

With the above, I think we've empirically proven that we can't trust mathmeticians more than any other humans We should still rigorously verify their work with diverse, logical, and empirical methods. Also, build ground up on solid ideas that are highly vetted. (Which linear algebra actually does.)

The other approach people are taking are foundational, machine-checked, proof assistants. These use a vetted logic whose assistant produces a series of steps that can be checked by a tiny, highly-verified checker. They'll also oftne use a reliable formalism to check other formalisms. The people doing this have been making everything from proof checkers to compilers to assembly languages to code extraction in those tools so they are highly trustworthy.

But, we still need people to look at the specs of all that to see if there are spec errors. There's fewer people who can vet the specs than can check the original English and code combos. So, are they more trustworthy? (Who knows except when tested empirically on many programs or proofs, like CompCert was.)

[aidenn0]

A friend of mine was given an assignment in a masters-level CS class, which was to prove a lemma in some seminal paper (It was one of those "Proof follows a similar form to Lemma X" points).

This had been assigned many times previously. When my friend disproved the lemma, he asked the professor what he had done wrong. Turns out the lemma was in fact false, despite dozens of grad students having turned in "proofs" of the lemma already. The paper itself still stood, as a weaker form of the lemma was sufficient for its findings, but still very interesting.

[uriegas]

I agree. Most of the time people think STEM is harder but it is not. Yes, it is harder to understand some concepts, but in social sciences we don't even know what the correct concepts are. There hasn't been so much progress in social sciences in the last centuries as there was for STEM.

[diamondage]

I'm not sure if you're correct. In fact there has been a revolution in some areas of social science in the last two decades due to the availability of online behavioural data.

[uriegas]

Yeah, there is also the work of primatologists which challenges some of our beliefs of what we think is human sciences (like politics). See Frans De Waal.

Yet, I believe there hasn't been much progress as compared with STEM. But it is just a belief at the end of the day. There might be some study about this out there.