Hacker News Reader

Comment by temp8964 | Hacker News Reader

Is this clickbait? There are lots of efforts put in the improvement of quantitative methods in social science studies. There are good studies out there. There are also trash out there.

Even policy relevant social science research can produce good studies in highly contested fields, because of the mechanisms of peer review and open debate.

View on HN

Social sciences have the highest number of people who self-identified as Marxist back in 06. The rate was 17.6 as Marxist, 24.0 as radicals [1]. They've also been the worst field for the three decades of reproducibility crisis. You would have trouble convincing me that they aren't a fake, compromised "science" that ignores the scientific method to produce whitepaper propaganda.

1 - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147...

I know there are lots of Marxist/radical nuts in "social sciences", but social sciences as a broad concept includes too many fields. If the survey limits to the target we are talking about here (quantitative researchers with heavy training in statistics but never took a course in critical theory etc.), the number of these kind of nuts would be close to zero.

The reproducibility crisis is more related to social psychologists, which include lots of nuts. They are not what I was talking about.

While it's definitely well-documented that social sciences are among the hardest hit by the replication crises, putting that point second after the political beliefs of those in the field is a weird axe to grind.

It specifically illustrates my last point. The field is filled with ideological zealots who put our bogus propaganda to further their ideology. More in common with a cult than a science.

As I told you "social sciences" is not a field. It is many fields. The average 20%~30% is a product of some toxic fields with 90%~100% nuts and some fields with 50%~60% nuts to some fields with 0~5% nuts.

Sure, but what you said above is compete bullshit. The non-specific "efforts" to improve "quantitative measures" haven't pulled any of the social sciences out of the reproducibility crisis. What's the best of social science's reproducibility rate? 20%?

It does not. There is no inherent property of Marxism that causes one to be more likely to publish "bogus propaganda". Indeed, we can demonstrate evidence of the exact opposite, with the bevy of bogus corporate-funded studies (the tobacco industry is particularly notorious for this, but is by no means the only one).

You are making a non-objective argument in bad faith to grind your axe.

The issue instead is that conclusively studying human behavior is hard, and effect size is often small, and it's inherently impossible to control for conflating factors.

> There is no inherent property of Marxism that causes one to be more likely to publish "bogus propaganda"

Cult ideologies have no inherent properties that would cause the same, and yet no sane person would expect cult members not to shill for your their cult. Corporate shilling doesn't prove the opposite. It proves how easy it is to game soft science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com