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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
I disagree, mostly because the social “sciences” are more or less pseudoscience at this point. Very little science in done in those fields and what little is done rarely replicates. And of course there are topics that nobody will touch because it’s heresy and might lead to a career exterminatus. The entire system is too corrupt to give anything useful, and as such shouldn’t be funded by the government. Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo. To fund social “science” is to pay a guy n a lab coat to find a way to give cathedral propaganda the veneer of science.
If the government is to fund science, it must fund real science. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, biology, medicine, etc. are real sciences that use the scientific method to determine what reality is. They don’t start from their agenda and work to sane wash it.
I’m not sure that social sciences were ever dispassionate inquiry to begin with. I’m pretty sure that very few in those fields have ever done real science and wouldn’t know where to begin. As such I’m inclined to burn it down and ignore it until it can be rebuilt in the mold of harder sciences where the goal is to find truth and to test ideas rigorously. As they sit now, I don’t think they’re so much signal as anti signal— having someone cite sociology or psychology makes me less inclined to believe the claim than one made by anyone else.
Psychology is absolutely "real science", at least potentially. That these fields are filled with 110-IQ women with left-wing biases, who wish not to arrive at any conclusions which contradicts modern morality or politics, is an unfortunate fact unrelated to the potential of psychology as a field.
I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature. We also tend to compare what's "rational, logical or scientific" to ourselves, and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are flawed and wrong, and that they should change to become more rational, logical and scientific. This is a fallacy in that it tells the territory to approximate the map, rather than building maps which seek to approximate the territory.
The Tao Te Ching is still ahead of the consensus of today in multiple areas. "The prince" likely still holds up today (admittedly I haven't read this one). Buddhist meditation and enlightenment still hold research value today. And this is just older Psychology. There's also value in religion, values, wisdom, culture, rituals, etc.
No science, mathematics, nor logic can deal well with these areas at all. They're mere tools. You need to put humanity in the center in order to benefit humanity.
I almost agree with "The social science is so corrupt that it's almost worthless", but that's the fault of academia, politics and well, corruption. Self-help books are still popular today despite them not being hard science, and the lies society create about gender and sexuality has spawned "red pill" groups online which are closer to the truth than the consensus (thought they aren't perfect). In fact, I love psychology because it can explain why this problem happened in the first place (denial/repression of unpleasant parts of reality)
By the way, you don't need the scientific method to approximate truth in the first place. We're starting to forget this as the scientific method is so popular.
Your complaint seems orthogonal to whether we define science as only including the objective. I personally think that the true issue is not how we define science, but the almost-religious fervor people have for science. I quite agree that science is not some final arbiter of truth, and that many important things are completely outside the purview of science. I also think it's fair to say that anything which is not objective isn't real science, though. The two aren't in conflict.
I agree, I dislike the statement "anything not objective is not real science" only because it's used to dismiss anything outside of science as "pseudo-science" or "woo", which is to overestimate the utility of science and to create a false dichotomy. Perhaps it's laziness on my part, one just puts themselves in a difficult position if they attempt defending or even explaining the value of unscientific knowledge
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