POLITICAL SCIENCE QUACKERY

2 Comments

Machinist

July 30, 2021 11:32 am

Is that a needle or a crayon?
Is there a difference, except that crayons are supposed to be non-toxic?

Ghost

July 30, 2021 2:48 pm

Much ado has been made about the contribution Edward Bernays and his nephew Sigmund Freud made to the eventual decline and collapse of our society. Around the time Einstein’s Theory of Relativity started changing societal concepts about time, space and man’s place in the universe, the idea of the triumvirate of man’s persona, the id, ego and superego, battling to control and direct man’s moral behavior turned the idea of right and wrong into one of Moral Relativity which could be measured by studying man’s psychological traits and treating subjective information with the same principles biologists treat samples in petri dishes and coming up with all sorts of mental disorders to treat with all sorts of experimental procedures.

Social Science is bunk and we all know it.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/social-sciences-dark-ages/

Many allegedly scientific studies on immigration, guns, the death penalty, and other important social topics are infected by their investigator’s political or ideological views, so that it is all but expected that some researchers will discover results that are squarely in line with liberal political beliefs, while others will produce conservative results that are directly opposed to them. A good example here is the question of whether immigrants “pay their own way” or are a “net drag” on the American economy. If this is truly an empirical question then why is the literature mixed? These are purportedly rigorous social scientific studies performed by well-respected scholars — it is just that their findings of factual matters flatly contradict one another. This would not be tolerated in physics, so why is it tolerated in sociology?

The article is good, but if you read through the eight criticisms of Social Science explained below, you may come to realize the current Covid19 exercise could actually be a social science experiment.

For years, many have argued that if they could emulate the “scientific method” of the natural sciences, they too could become more scientific. But this simple advice faces several problems. Among the issues that plague contemporary social scientific research:

Too much theory: A number of social scientific studies propose answers that have not been tested against evidence. The classic example here is neoclassical economics, where a number of simplifying assumptions — perfect rationality, perfect information — resulted in beautiful quantitative models that had little to do with actual human behavior.

Lack of experimentation/data: Except for social psychology and the newly emerging field of behavioral economics, much of social science still does not rely on experimentation, even where it is possible. For example, it is sometimes offered as justification for putting sex offenders on a public database that doing so reduces the recidivism rate. This must be measured, though, against what the recidivism rate would have been absent the Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB), which is difficult to measure and has produced varying answers. This exacerbates the difficulty in (1), whereby favored theoretical explanations are accepted even when they have not been tested against any experimental evidence.

Fuzzy concepts: Some social scientific studies can lead to misleading conclusions because of the use of “proxy” concepts for what one really wishes to measure. A recent example includes measuring “warmth” as a proxy for “trustworthiness,” in which researchers assumed — on the basis of studies which show that we are more likely to trust someone whom we perceive to be “on our side” — that perceptions of scientists as “cold” meant that they would be less trustworthy as well. But the two concepts may not be interchangeable.

Ideological infection: This problem is rampant throughout the social sciences, especially on topics that are politically charged. Two ongoing examples are the bastardization of empirical work on the deterrence effect of capital punishment and the effectiveness of gun control on mitigating crime. If one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it.

Cherry picking: The use of statistics allows multiple “degrees of freedom” to scientific researchers, but this is the most likely to be abused. In studies on immigration, for instance, a great deal of the difference between them is a result of alternative ways of counting the “costs” incurred by immigration. This is obviously also related to (4) above. If we know our conclusion, we may shop for the data to support it.

Lack of data sharing: As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers reports in Psychology Today, there are numerous documented cases of researchers failing to share their data in psychological studies, despite a requirement from APA-sponsored journals to do so. When data were later analyzed, errors were found most commonly in the direction of the researcher’s hypothesis.

Lack of replication: Psychology is undergoing a reproducibility crisis. One might validly argue that the initial finding that nearly two-thirds of psychology studies were irreproducible was overblown, but it is nonetheless shocking that most studies are not even attempted to be replicated. This can lead to difficulties, where errors can sneak through.

Questionable causation: It is gospel in statistical research that “correlation does not equal causation,” yet some social scientific studies continue to highlight provocative results of questionable value. One recent sociological study, for instance, found that matriculating at a selective college was correlated with parental visitation at art museums, without explicitly suggesting that this was likely an artifact of parental income.