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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.

I don't think you'd accept news media accounts of space science. But you're accepting their synopses of social science without looking deeper.

Perhaps I am wrong and you're actually an expert on sociology or some related field. But you are not accurately describing how the field works and what it does. It's hard to make the case for it when you're willing to dismiss its existence based on such a limited view of it.

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> You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.

Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.

Perhaps better than "if I don't like it, it deserves to have its funding cut"

I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.

To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.

> To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.

You’re not “flipping”, you’re just making a silly reduction.

There’s tons of things we don’t know about black holes. We don’t need another study to tell us that poor people are sicker due to past racism.

(One can certainly argue that it’s not worth the money to know more stuff about black holes. I am agnostic, but at least I see the difference in kind between the quality of the questions.)

Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well? Do you think we have it all figured out? Is Economics solved as well?

> Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well?

I didn't malign all social sciences.

> Do you think we have it all figured out?

No.

Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.

I mean, yes, there's some shoddy ideology-as-science at various universities but those people all still have jobs. That's not what got cut by DOGE, apparently.

> Ok so its just specifically the stuff at the intersection of race and poverty that bothers you? I'm not sure where this is going.

No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.

But I appreciate the subtle insinuation!

From TFA (more like 10th graf after a lot on the NASA project):

> research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,”

That sounds like science to me, they're trying to quantify health outcomes relative to community environment. Later research can use the figures, just like with your black hole observations.

One could say that maybe they should measure low-income communities in general with race as a dimension, but that doesn't make the whole thing "bad science".

Literally the thing I quoted in the top comment on the thread. Go read that comment.

Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process. Thanks for reminding me that you quoted that, I'm just not understanding the objection from then until now.

Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".

>Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process.

Is this really poorly understood? I think that's (partially) their point. I think we all pretty well understand that income correlates with health and that poorer people will tend to live in less healthy environments.

The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.

> The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences

This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.

Well put. It's easy to attack people attempting to work on hard problems for not achieving perfect results. Which they don't. Because IT'S HARD.

Weirdly, these critics never have useful suggestions to improve anything, it's all just personal attacks at one remove.

I mean, frankly, we wouldn't need a lot of these studies if people in power were slightly more willing to just believe (usually minority) people who talk about the problems they have.

Black soldiers were denied home loans after ww2; white soldiers were not; many white families therefor benefitted from owning a home (appreciation of value and safety/stability) in ways that black families did not.

Do we need a study on that? I mean, it doesn't hurt anything, but we could also just read some reports and talk to some people and then realize "hey this is messed up"

> > And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.

> The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.

And the thing that makes it had to do well is that it's easy to know ahead of time what experimental result will best favor your existing beliefs.

This is a narrative that doesn't match the reality.

Reported failures to replicate are pretty similar in other fields, including in biomedicine. The replication crisis was just first highlighted in social psychology; lots of other fields just don't report these failures to replicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis). It's a bit like shooting the messenger.

It's funny reading through the comments in this thread because there are people claiming that sociology both (1) is so obvious that the effects replicate at such rates that the research is useless because everything is known a priori and (2) that nothing replicates at all.

Also, criticizing fields like social psychology and sociology for focusing on social phenomena seems a bit strange because that's what the fields are about. It's like criticizing biology for having too much of a bias toward living things.

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