[lotsofpulp]

I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

[chromacity]

I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).

Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.

[pjdesno]

I would point out that most products are useless, and either fail or replace other products which weren't any worse. None of which prevented me from cashing my paychecks for the first half of my career when I worked in private industry.

Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.

[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]

Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.

[rain-princess]

Hey I have also called research a marketplace for ideas before! cool.

[thayne]

There are dubious results published in every subject, including math and physics (whether theoretical or experimental). The difference is that such results are less likely to be widely cited and accepted by the field. For math and theoretical physics, the reader can (assuming sufficient knowledge and skill) verify the result themselves, so if your proof is incorrect or not rigorous enough, you won't get cited. For experimental physics, it is more common for different teams to reproduce a result, or verify a result using a different method, so papers aren't usually widely cited unless they have been independently verified. Part of that is cultural, part of that is attempting to reproduce results is relatively straightforward compared to say experiments involving human subjects, and part if is because results are usually quantitative, so "we did the same thing as paper X, but with more precision" is still interesting enough to be published.

[kmaitreys]

Great take. I have seen the discussion on this often gets turned into a hard vs soft science debate where in actuality it's just simply about money.

[stogot]

I track these across all fields. It’s money and prestige and arrogance and ignorance and “keep my job” and more

[suzzer99]

> Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:

> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”

I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.

Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.

[p-e-w]

I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.

Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.

[sigbottle]

Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.

Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.

I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)

To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.

[wavemode]

There's plenty of results in math and physics that are true, in the sense that the math checks out, but are useless, in the sense that the authors claim they've made a breakthrough, but actually they've just tweaked a few parameters of an existing unverified theory and constructed a new unverified theory. (If you've ever read a news headline like "physicists now believe reality may actually have 400 dimensions!", they were probably citing one of these papers.)

There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.

[erikerikson]

I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...

[Georgelemental]

Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too

[hnburnsy]

  If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science 
  If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
  If it has the word "science", it's not

[fdupress]

Astrology thanks you for your service.

[wavemode]

Philosophers rejoice.

[austinjp]

Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.