Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

I try not to look down on social science, for the most part data is data as long as you can reason about how it was collected and who by.

The only thing that worries me a little (or a lot sometimes) is that there doesn't seem to be much "bone" for the meat to hang off of - that is, in physics, if your theory doesn't match experiment it's wrong whereas in social science you're never going to have a (mathematical) theory like that so you have to start (in effect) guessing. The data is really muddy, but thanks to recent (good) political developments whatever conclusions can be drawn from it may not be right in their eyes. For example, (apparently) merely commenting on the variation hypothesis can get you fired [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Contemp...].

View on HN

Requiring social science theories to have a mathematical founding might be a little too much to ask the social scientists because unlike Physicists, their command of mathematics is far from adequate to do any serious exploration.

I majored in Mathematics but out of curiosity I took some Psychology modules when I was in university. What I found baffling was their lack attention to details. They just seem to have an intuitive model of their subject and they were just reinforcing that intuition while overlooking any details that could have challenged it. Coming from a field where every symbol, punctuation matters, I realised to Psychologists exact details of a curve don't seem to matter much as long as the general trend made sense.

Someone who really impressed me was Dan Ariely who is a behavirol economist. Even though I didn't see any mathematics in his lectures, I loved his approach to the field. I'd be quite happy if more of social science took a similar approach even if they didn't back it up with rigorous mathematics.

I read one guess that 2/3 of the published results in social science are wrong. Suppose you tried to develop a deeper theory of these things and derived consequences from these “results” as one does in math and physics. If your corollary depends on 4 prior results, each with a 1/3 chance of actually being true — assuming no logical errors on your part — then the chance your result really is correct is (1/3)^4 <0.01. With results like this it’s not going to be easy to get much depth that holds water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com