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.
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.)
I didn't malign all social sciences.
> Do you think we have it all figured out?
No.
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.
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!
> 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".
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".
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.