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Notes -
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
I have little to add, but I found my experience with the social "sciences" to be similar to yours, and it was discovering this about 10 years ago that made me disillusioned with the social justice/identity politics left. I'm not a scientist, but I did have enough experience with it in college and liked it enough to keep abreast of it after, and the common theme in science, the underlying principle that makes science science, seemed clear to me to be being open to oppositional perspectives. The more I looked into it, and the more rigorous any science got, the more welcoming and actively encouraging of skepticism and attempts to disprove claims it seemed to be. But most social "sciences" do not follow this at all and have, in fact, built up a whole structure of justifications for why basic scientific skepticism is wrong. That's not a science by any meaningful sense of the term, and it can't be expected to land on truth except by complete chance (likely worse than chance, due to how it's not a complete random process but rather follows incentives of its own based around social approval and signalling).
It's a shame, because social science is something that potentially could add immense value to the world through actual production of knowledge. And some of it does seem to happen, just completely drowned out by the monstrosity that wears "social science" like a skinsuit. I think about something the social scientist Jon Haidt (I think) said about biases and belief, that if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?" If social scientists can just try to avoid this fairly obvious pitfall and force themselves to always look for excuses not to believe evidence that reinforces their biases (e.g. that some patterns of behavior must have social/cultural origins rather than biological ones), they might be able to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Sadly, they mostly seem to be committed to the exact opposite.
I think that sentiment goes back to Thucydides, if not earlier.
Now I’m interested. What did Thucydides say?
It might be a different translation that what I remember, but the closest I could find is, "for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy".
I'll try to keep looking, as I preferred the wording I half-remember.
edit: "When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason".
Note that it wouldn't surprise me if this wasnt actually Thucydides, but that someone said it was, like how everything gets attributed to Twain, Lincoln, or Disraeli.
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