[schnuri]

Social science is science.

[zooq_ai]

No. Social Science almost always is done/funded by organizations / people who already have a set agenda. A Department of "Equity and Justice" will always fund research that fits their mission. Thanks to spurious correlation, you can make up anything. Many social science research are not reproducible.

It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.

[nickpinkston]

Yea, because physical science is never funded by anyone with an agenda...

That's at least what the American Petroleum Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Beverage Institute, etc. tell us about climate change, smoking, and sugary drinks...

[zzzeek]

The same way all disease is studied by "doctors" who are deeply anti disease. You can't trust people with such a "set agenda"

[knowaveragejoe]

> It's also done by people who aren't hard-core physicists or mathematicians, meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.

This is so incredibly insulting to entire fields of study. The whole backlash against anything vaguely DEI-related has really done a number on the coldly logical HN. Prejudice does exist and we are allowed to study it.

[bilbo0s]

meaning they can't/won't do true multi-dimensional analysis and 2nd and 3rd order effects.

Neither does any other researcher these days. Thus, the crisis of reproducibility in “peer reviewed” papers.

Kind of disingenuous to single out social scientists for this practice. Probably a bit more wise to clean our own house first. Certainly unwise to be engaged in the very practices we’re attacking.

[hpeter]

Let's take a look at one of the definitions of science

--------- Science noun The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. ---------

It does not include where the funding or bias comes from.

It also doesn't include if their explanations are correct or not.

-------- social science noun The study of human society and of individual relationships in and to society. ...etc. --------

What you can do is (rightly) question their results, but can't say it's not science.

[__loam]

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

[zarathustreal]

I’m gonna have to disagree. If the majority of your “science” isn’t reproducible then you really can’t call it science in any meaningful capacity. That’s not to say it isn’t valuable or helpful in some way but that’s not what’s in question. In fact, it’s not science in the same way that we’re not questioning whether it’s useful. Particularly, in the literal way.

[aiauthoritydev]

May be and since this discussion can quickly spiral out of hand into flamewars I will not counter your claim anymore.

My question was whether the scientists who are warning us are "social scientists" who study dubious areas of "scientific research" such as "AI safety" or are some real scientists who know how neural networks and who can write python code or use tensorflow to to run a linear regression.

[banannaise]

It can be, but it often isn't. It depends wildly on who is doing the work and how they're doing it (which, to be fair, can be true of other sciences, although the density of quacks appears to be much higher in the social sciences)

[rrr_oh_man]

War is Peace.