Social science is science.
It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Neither does any other researcher these days. Thus, the crisis of reproducibility in “peer reviewed” papers.
Kind of disingenuous to single out social scientists for this practice. Probably a bit more wise to clean our own house first. Certainly unwise to be engaged in the very practices we’re attacking.
And look at me, being hypocritical. But my point stands.
Physical Science and Math can be isolated enough to do controlled experiments
That's at least what the American Petroleum Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Beverage Institute, etc. tell us about climate change, smoking, and sugary drinks...
Climate change is another of "not really science" fields mostly peddled by social sciences.
This is so incredibly insulting to entire fields of study. The whole backlash against anything vaguely DEI-related has really done a number on the coldly logical HN. Prejudice does exist and we are allowed to study it.
Doctors lose business if they are not very good. Bakers lose business if they are not very good. Car mechanics lose business if they cant diagnose problems properly.
The "ai safety", "bio ethicist", "gender justice researchers", "transrights researchers", "diversity officers" etc. pay no price of being wrong or peddling fake made up ideas, falsified data or pure nonsense. On the contrary more nonsense you can peddle higher you go in this field. Hence it is safe to assume a lot of these professions are full of fake, fraudulent individuals.
PS. There are indeed good people in these fields but they are very few and hard to find.
--------- Science noun The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. ---------
It does not include where the funding or bias comes from.
It also doesn't include if their explanations are correct or not.
-------- social science noun The study of human society and of individual relationships in and to society. ...etc. --------
What you can do is (rightly) question their results, but can't say it's not science.
My question was whether the scientists who are warning us are "social scientists" who study dubious areas of "scientific research" such as "AI safety" or are some real scientists who know how neural networks and who can write python code or use tensorflow to to run a linear regression.