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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 am inclined to say that this idea is true, but that most scientists don't actually go far enough. For quite some time, I've insisted to friends that social sciences are simply not science at all, that they're all just descriptive commentary. This can be incredibly interesting, it might even occasionally find something that's true about the world (although I'm skeptical of social psychology providing a net positive for truth), but it simply isn't science and would be better if it stopped trying to dress up in a lab coat to gain unwarranted authority. I am assured that there are hypothesis-driven experiments, so it's kind of like science, but every time I go look into it, absolutely none of it rises to a standard that would be acceptable in fields where the truth of falsity of a conclusion are expected to bear some sort of fruit.
This is certainly my stance on things. People should study psychology and sociology, carefully examining how people behave and forming ideas about why they do what they do, but they should knock it off with "studies" that try to look like biochemistry or fluid dynamics and stick to treating their work as philosophy and commentary loosely based on observation. The approach of pretending to be science has led quite a bit of the work done to being so much worse than mere commentary, convincing people to publish studies that are pretty obviously outright stupid, like the idiotic priming literature with its absurd effect sizes or the persistence of social "scientists" controlling away the effect. There are entire subfields that just appear to be outright fake, adding absolutely nothing to understanding the world or even subtracting from it.
I suspect that the unwillingness among other scientists to say that a lot of research is completely worthless stems from a circle-the-wagons effect in academia - if I say that the racial resentment scale is obviously nonsense, I'm impugning very serious researchers, giving credence to science-deniers, and I'm definitely not going to look cool at the cocktail party. If I nod sagely about how important the problem they've discovered is, I build bridges with academics, feel superior to the chuds, and look pretty cool at the cocktail party.
Isn’t all science, even good science, descriptive commentary? It’s certainly not supposed to be prescriptive.
I’d agree with an argument that social sciences are less interested in empiricism and more likely to navel-gaze on grand unified theories. “Descriptive” just doesn’t seem like the right word for that.
While anyone that's done the work knows that the construction of scientific papers is more than a little post hoc, I think you can get the idea for what I think science should look like from reading a typical paper in the Journal of Biochemistry or Journal of Immunology with a focus on the results sections. Yes, there is something that can be described as descriptive commentary, but the work typically follows the flow of hypothesis->experiment->result, which subsequent figures building on the previous result. Of course, people can and do draw incorrect inferences, run pointless experiments that don't test what they think they're testing, make statistical mistakes, and so on, but there really is an effort to get at the base physical reality of what's going on. I do not see similar patterns of genuinely hypothesis-driven work in the vast majority of social "science" papers, with the worst of it coming in major sociology journals that read more like fancy editorials than actual science.
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Good science is predictive commentary.
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