[timwaagh]

Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money. There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

[demosthanos]

Wow. I disagree with your position on the merits and read through your replies to see if someone had provided an effective counterargument, but you really touched a nerve: it's straight ad hominem snark all the way down. So I guess I'll give honest engagement a shot.

> I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a counterargument.

There are some fields that study universal facts about biology or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these will largely yield similar results that can be applied anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating research done in one population on a different population, but humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly necessary.

On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.

This means that even if the net return on investment for medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their own medical research. They can always take advantage of what others are learning about biology, but if they don't research the way that New Zealand works then no one will.

[timwaagh]

Your argument about knowledge being lost is probably valid but I am not sure it's convincing. If your research creates results that result in products being sold elsewhere, like say in medicine, that will mean patents and local opportunities for high value export oriented business like pharma companies. Which could bring in much needed foreign currency for the new zealand economy and help boost it's GDP per capita. Which right now in ppp terms is more at the level of Eastern Europe than the west. In other words new zealand has some catch-up to do.

[lWaterboardCats]

In theory what you say sounds great, unfortunately in practice, many fields have become far from objective and “peer reviews” seem to be more of “peer support”.

[PittleyDunkin]

> There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science.

Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the chance.

[dgfitz]

Fwiw, I took psych101, sociology101 , and minored in philosophy.

I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.

[tmpz22]

We should scrap economics?

[PittleyDunkin]

TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political science to make a lick of sense.

[nradov]

Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the research results produced by economists aren't necessarily wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research anyway then what's the point of funding it?

[boxed]

But somehow it's the physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who are doing something about it, not the social scientists (or whatever the term is).

[ausbah]

you know the replication crisis in pretty much every discipline of science right? esp our industry’s pet fav machine learning

[neves]

"hard" science without social disciplines gave us Nazism