this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Really? They have control groups? Blind and A/B testing? Hypothesis that they set out to reject?
I'm sure they have methods but are they scientific?
The answer to all your questions are
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes - Whatever goes against my political allegiances.
Yes - They all just have an n < 50.
The issue with considering these to be anything like the 'hard sciences' is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.
God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It's important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don't get me wrong, but they're pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.
Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.
Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven't been falsified.
Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.
And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that's completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It's not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.
Emergence in action.
Wdym
Emergence. As in when something becomes greater than the sum of it's parts. Sapience. Life. Consciousness.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=16W7c0mb-rE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UebSfjmQNvs
Can you provide an academic paper? I think I understand the concept, but I fail to see it being meaningful with relation to the examples I posed of why the social sciences aren't scientific.
WhaaaaaaaaaaaAaaaaaaat? Lol.
Homie you're overthinking emergence.
You cannot explain consciousness through the collision of atoms.
It's literally something being bigger in human thought than the sum of it's parts. That's it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Seems more like religion and blind belief to me. I agree that you can't define consciousness in terms of particles... yet. But to say it's impossible is a huge leap. High level biology is basically all physics and chem for this reason; it's emergent from the 2 together. That doesn't mean that you can't define biological processes in terms of their chemical and physical activities though. It's kind of like free will: we think we have it because we make 'choices' but at the end of the day our brain is just a series of particles, so where does the free will come from? Are we just deluding ourselves?
The second video goes into that a lot. You're right though that the lens of how people view the world is a belief. People tend to fall on one side or the other for a reason, most of which is related to external vs internal locus of control which is also an order beyond lol. I get it, people want science to be black and white for a reason because order.
And no, you genuinely cannot explain politics with particle physics because it's a human construct sufficiently advanced to not be explained by it's baser inputs. Explaining the concept of philosophy through particle physics is a fools errand because they have nothing to do with each other lol. You're trying to fit the circular block in the square hole... hehe.
There are orders of magnitude to these things where something can be explained sufficiently as long as they're close enough in literal size scale to each other, but you go further and it breaks down.
You're not an automaton, you're thinking to yourself right now and have probably formed relationships with many people which requires concepts like love which can be explained partly with oxytocin but you don't get love by saying this hydrogen couples with this oxygen spot on a hormone receptive cell, biomarker, particle, etc.. You have to introduce hormones, larger systems, human bonds, replication, feel good molecules up and up until it's something different that's lost on just saying this fits here and does this other thing.
Could you explain the entire science_meme culture experience browsing Lemmy by only describing chemistry? You'd be hard pressed to not be able to describe it without having to use multiple human-only concepts once you get past the internet, simple changes in your body to make you feel good browsing, seeing, color, reddit exodus, keyboard, breathing, laughing, the dichotomy, the concept of false or propaganda lol.
Lots of words to say I have no proof and provide only conjecture.
Besides thirty minutes of well sourced videos and an entire wiki page with more source than I could ever provide?
It sounds like you're just obstinately head in sand sealioning stupid now lol. It's like asking for a source paper on the entirety of particle physics lmfao. Like what?
I think you just don't understand what I'm saying. All that may be true but then you would need to control for ALL those variables for good science which you just cannot do in the social sciences.
They're important, just not really good science. They're useful, but not in the way physics is. There aren't competing theories of the most basic levels of understanding in the hard sciences. There are throughout the entirety of the fields of the social sciences.
I mean you're not wrong with how you're thinking about hard STEM sciences but it's needlessly gatekeeping and full on incorrect to say others aren't good science. Most of them are very necessary and very real science usually far more important to the world than anyone to the right of the graph in your end of the Purity kxcd lol.
FWIW there's not competing sciences for even most of the STEM ones either. If you think there is... well you might just be studying string theory still lmfao.
Gotta feel sorry for made up quirks of mathematics that always fall apart when applied in the real world though lol. They make for fun what ifs but damn if they aren't fleecing their way to a paycheck for hypersensationalized headlines for super fringe never proveable theorems.
Just realized clean drinking water, electricity, transport infrastructure, etc. isn't important. The things you think are important to the world are only important because most people in first world countries have never had to face true hardship in their lives as a result of technological advancement.
I'm not talking about string theory. Scientists disagree about things at a high level all the time. It's how the fields move forward. They don't disagree on the fundamentals though, which social sciences have a tendency to.
I'm not here to say the social sciences are useless. In fact I've stated several times that I think people need to be able to understand them and use them. I'm arguing something different entirely and I don't know why you keep strawmanning me. It's not about some ideological purity but a basic difference in the ability to learn things because of our inability to control the relevant variables.
We are just going to have to disagree then. Said variables are heavily controlled, well known about, and usually spoken about in every paper about issues it might have.
I'm pretty confident we're at an impasse now so not much more to say since the long thread has brought in too many side musings too.
Take care.
Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.
Isn't one of the point of all those telescopes we built in space and on earth to prove or disprove our hypothesis regarding astronomy? Is that not experimentation?
No, it's observation. An experiment involves manipulating an independent variable while controlling other variables. There's none of that in space, not counting the ISS and Apollo. That said, you can still test hypotheses using observation. And that's equally true in both astronomy and in social sciences.
You make those claims without ever having looked into polisci studies. Not really looking to reject your own hypothesis.
A literature review comes first in science. I asked questions. I did not make claims.