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Comment by 10g1k | Hacker News Reader

This middlebrow dismissal is way too broad and makes me suspect that your only interaction with social science is via popular media. You'd have a good point if you said "poorly done science" rather than "not science" and restricted your dismissal to the kind of n = 30 social psychology studies that get paraded around by journalists when they confirm their biases. But it's false as stated; even in psychology alone, there are many findings which can withstand scrutiny and replication, e.g.:

  - Spaced repetition (you remember things longer if you space out your learning over time than if you cram).
  - Primacy/recency (you usually remember the first and last items in a sequence better than items in the middle).
  - Stroop effect (you respond slower when there are incongruent stimuli distracting you).
  - Fitts's law (a model of human movement that can be used to develop better UIs).
  - Strongly negative influence of sleep deprivation on mental performance.

And that's not to mention other social sciences such as economics.

It's interesting that your first three items are memory related. Is research into individual memory capability actually 'social' science at all? Technically it falls under the umbrella of Psychology, but the examples you cited seem like they're researching things closer to Psychophysics than anything socially influenced. For that matter I think that general response applies to all items on your list. Unless you can make a compelling case that sleep deprivation leading to poor performance is the result of anything socially related, or that the forgetting curve is cultural or something which is unlikely.

This is a matter of definitions but my impression is that in common usage, the whole field of psychology is considered a part of the social sciences.

Right, it's definitely technically under the umbrella of 'social science' but the examples you listed are certainly far more towards the side of neuroscience and psychophysics than they are to social or personality psychology, let alone fields like sociology. I can't think of a single social effect on how sleep deprivation negatively effects us for example - that seems to be straight up individual biology that's essentially invariant across all individuals and societies.

I'm happy to grant Psychology those wins, since they are good examples, but realistically Psychology has to be broken down further before you can critique it or praise it. (To be clear, I'm not saying that everything else in Psychology is worthless, there's good research in personality psychology, for example, but it's definitely on shakier ground).

Well, that’s just plain wrong. There is such a thing as social psychology, but psychology generally focuses on the person.

Experimental psychology and economics are not normal among the social sciences. Having a hypothesis and testing it, as experimental psychologists do, is not present in any other field of social science. Neither is the mathematical rigor that some fields of economics apply.

These fields are the "physics" of social science. Most of the rest of the social sciences involves very little science (the process) or math.

This is some sort of a reverse no true Scotsman fallacy. There are plenty of more fields inside social science where hypotheses driven research and testing is the norm. Anthropology comes quick to mind, so does behavioral psychology. Urban engineering, population control, and transportation design use research from social scientists which gets tested all the time with their work, which in turn feeds back in to theory of social systems.

In fact I would say that economics is probably the least “scientific” of the social scientists, since it is based more on mathematics more then discovering and applying properties of the real world. But that is just my definition of science which IMO shouldn’t involve assumptions and derivation of truths from those assumptions, the latter being philosophy.

Anthropology is not a beacon of the scientific method, no. The "hypothesis driven" nature of the field is about as hypothesis driven as literature analysis. If you are treating the process of "I have a hypothesis, I look for evidence, and I find it" as scientific, then History and English are sciences too. The difference that makes a science is that the process of looking for evidence is about systematically trying to falsify your hypothesis - and once there are no alternative explanations left, you have a good theory about what is going on. Anthropology, literature studies, history, and even "harder" disciplines of social science (like linguistics and several other kinds of psychology) don't really work this way. They can produce useful knowledge, sure, but that doesn't make them sciences.

As to the other fields you mentioned, all of them are engineering disciplines, which are very different than sciences. Engineering is about producing useful work from the results of science. The results that those particular disciplines use largely come from psychology.

Economics is as unfalsifiable as every other social science, they’ve just had longer to construct a heap of math to hide behind.

I like to think of economics as being similar to the string theorists in physics. Their work, too, is also practically unfalsifiable but mathematically beautiful.

I definitely don't object to calling out particular subfields when they're non-empirical and heavily influenced by ideology, which I know happens. What I object to are sweeping generalizations that the whole thing is "not science" and "entirely populated by ideological activists". That's intellectually lazy and unfair to the many people who do good work trying to unravel the workings of attention, memory, perception, and reasoning. We should try to talk with a higher level of detail and distinguish rigorous work from low-quality work rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater.

1. What’s science? This is a surprisingly hard question. Im going to guess physics is your model and you’re going to cite popper about falsifiability to me. A lot of activities which don’t look at all like physics are science.

2. Citation needed??? The professional incentives around publishing are bad - I don’t dispute the author’s claim there. But to say we are ideological activists suggests you haven’t met very many social scientists.

This attitude is dismissive and reductive

At the same time, a couple years ago I read a bunch of social sciences crap and realized at the end of it that none of the ideas were actually falsifiable. It was just a bunch of ideas and nothing more. At least with computer science, you can actually apply the crap you read in books to real world stuff

So with respect to social sciences and how much time and money they've wasted so far, I'm completely on board with being both dismissive and reductive

"Science" is the name of how you work with something, not of a subject.

And there is no science in social science.

Yes, which I believe is why people rightly dismiss social science, as not being scientific at all.

What is the science process that social scientists do not follow?

Hypothesis refutability?

Replication? (probably their weakest point btw)

I mean, in this thread i've read about successes in sociology and economics, probably the most math-based social sciences, but i'd say linguistics are probably the second most successfull science in the last 40 years, and that's considered a social science. History have also made a lot of new discoveries recently (by criticizing older works and getting past them). Archeology have slow successes, but still, we understand Neandertal way, way better than we did ten years ago.

> the most math-based social sciences

Please do not confuse "with papers using math which is cavalierly assumed to model reality well" with "math-based".

Sigh. This over-the-top reaction is very common among people who don’t know better. I’ll just link my answer from the last time (here, about economics, but it works fine for soc sci in general): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411593

Reply on news.ycombinator.com