Comment by BeetleB
2 days ago
Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics that very likely can never be tested.
At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!
That's actually the part about people constantly negging on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing.
There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over the Earth - often for decades if not centuries).
Most is relatively well verified, and often tells you how it was verified [2]. Often it's obtainable in publicly available datasets that numerous other researchers can verify was obtained from a legitimate source. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
There's lots of data available. Much is also verifiable in a very personal way simply by walking somewhere and looking. In many ways, social sciences should be one of the most rigorous disciplines in most of academia.
[1] Using Wikipedia's grouping on "social sciences" (anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
[2] Census 2020, Data Quality: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...
[3] Economic Indicators by Country: https://tradingeconomics.com/indicators
[4] Our World in Data (with Demographics, Health, Poverty, Education, Innovation, Community Wellbeing, Democracy): https://ourworldindata.org/
[5] Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/en
[6] iNaturalist (at least from a biological history perspective): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43577-Pan-troglodytes
[7] Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Data Sources: https://www.archsynth.org/resources/data-sources/
[8] Language Goldmine (linguistics datasets): http://languagegoldmine.com/
[9] Pew Research (regular surveys on economics, political science, religion, communication, psychology - usually 10,000 respondents United States, 1000 respondents international): https://www.pewresearch.org/
[10] Marinetraffic (worldwide cargo shipping): https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...
[11] Flightradar Aviation Data (people movement): https://www.flightradar24.com/data
[12] Windy Worldwide Web Cameras: https://www.windy.com/?42.892,-104.326,5,p:cams
People who hate "social science" are surely targeting too wide, but there's plenty of terrible research hiding under that umbrella that relies exclusively on social media/internet surveys/self-reported data and absolutely deserves criticism.
Since I expressed negative feelings, my thoughts on this:
I wouldn't say I hate social science, that's much too strong. The rampant fraud and poor method in several of the fields just means that I put less value in peoples' academic achievements than they deserve - which I don't like, because many surely sincerely tried to do good science and spent years on getting there, but I can't filter a priori in which camp a person belongs. They should not be defunded or stuff like that, but they need to get their act together. Somehow. I suspect a lot of this is driven by extrinsics (publish or perish; need an advanced degree to get a job, but the advanced degree is actually pointless for the job; probably more things I don't think of now), and those need to change to allow for good science.
Take for example the department I mentioned above, that's essentially commiting fraud. Word is, the professor running it is actually pretty damn good at what they do. They have an accepted grant application framed on the wall: "I need 2000 bucks. Signed Professor Foobar" (like 5000$ in today's money); times surely changed for the worse for them. And I pity that, since we're often (but not always of course) talking peanuts in many of those fields. Especially for Masters level research, or for a single paper.
But I judge people in my life by their competence and character anyway, not by their degree. So politely ignoring their degree has little to no adverse effect on how I interact with them.
A lot of psychology research involves data not from these datasets, though.
The complaint is that their data often doesn't strongly support the hypothesis, and dubious statistical techniques are performed to make it appear otherwise. And just poor statistics abilities (not malicious intent).
Physicists get away with it because they often just don't do any statistics. Often the data aligns so well with the hypothesis that you don't need any sophisticated techniques, or their work doesn't involve any data (like my example in my prior comment).
Most US trained physicists have never taken a course in statistics. It's not in the curriculum in most universities. When I was in school and would point it out, the response was always "Why do we need a whole course in statistics? We learn it in quantum mechanics."
No. That's probability you learn. Not statistics.
In social sciences (and medicine) people take a lot more statistics courses because the systems are much more complex than typical physics systems. A lot more confounding variables, etc. They simply need more statistics.
(Yes, yes. I know. There's probably some experimental branch in physics where people actually do use statistics. But most don't).
I’m not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down too much they’ll know who I am and you will know who they are.
I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.