Why Social Science is Pseudoscience
This was originally the introduction to an article I'm writing on how social "sciences" might actually gain some legitimacy due to advances in technology and social media. But I didn't want anyone to think I thought social sciences are in any way legit science. Quite the opposite. Apparently I was feeling rather strongly about that this week (for some reason) and it warranted it's own article. Look for the real article coming soon!
I generally wouldn't acknowledge the social sciences. Disciplines like sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy and even economics and law, while interesting and informative studies of humans and the human social condition, are exasperatingly frustrating with their wishy-washy interpretations and inability to make accurate predictions. The appearance of rigor and scientific empiricism is often an over intellectualized attempt to obfuscate and generalize, using a confounding wall of big words to hide the fact that, while valuable to the human social condition, offer nothing by way of objective facts or empirical data. Social sciences are not at all scientific, and have generally relegated themselves to the realm of pseudoscience. And practitioners of these disciplines get really fuckin pissy when you tell them that.
In a whiny ass op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, felt the need to air his butt hurt grievances about the dismissive treatment he regularly receives from actual scientists.
"Once, during a meeting at my university, a biologist mentioned that he was the only faculty member present from a science department. When I corrected him, noting that I was from the Department of Psychology, he waved his hand dismissively, as if I were a Little Leaguer telling a member of the New York Yankees that I too played baseball."
"There has long been snobbery in the sciences, with the 'hard' ones (physics, chemistry, biology) considering themselves to be more legitimate than the 'soft' ones (psychology, sociology)."
Waah waah waah poor baby boo boo. Scientists are often accused of being snobbish and condescending, simply for happening to know what science is, and perhaps more importantly, what it isn't. It's just really hard to not face palm and roll your eyes when someone uses elaborate constructs and overly big words to say something childishly simplistic and untestable...while expecting to be treated like a rigorous scientist. In response to the professors public tantrum, Alex Berezow, a PhD of Microbiology and editor of RealClearScience.com, summed up the frustration most scientists feel when confronted with well educated morons.
"The dismissive attitude scientists have toward psychologists isn't rooted in snobbery; it's rooted in intellectual frustration. It's rooted in the failure of psychologists to acknowledge that they don't have the same claim on secular truth that the hard sciences do. It's rooted in the tired exasperation that scientists feel when non-scientists try to pretend they are scientists."
"That's right. Psychology isn't science."
The reasons that the social sciences are not actual science are many, and Berezow does an excellent job of distilling it down to a few simple points in his short piece here.
In short, you can't measure it. Any of it. There are tiny sample sizes, there are subjective descriptions and terminologies, the claims are often untestable and cannot be verified or falsified. There are undefined terms and unanswerable questions; What is consciousness? What is the meaning of existence? How happy are you today? Me? I'm a 3.7 out of 5. What does any of that even mean?
Certainly these are enlightening thoughts to entertain and can give you insight into your personal experience. But a preoccupation with unanswerable questions offers no real world data, is ultimately subjective and amounts to nothing more than narcissistic mental masturbation. It has value and feels good, but it's not going to produce anything useful.
This wouldn't be such a big deal if people didn't take this crap so seriously. But they do. Psychologists and sociologists will often present "studies" that come from a ridiculously small number of people under variable conditions, as if it were possible to derive any kind of meaning from a small sample size under easily manipulated, easily changed conditions. The problem being that the general public sees these fancy, scientific looking "studies" and take their "findings" seriously. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind, wherein 24 college students appear to have taken to sadism and torture in their roles as gaurds and prisoners, indicating that human beings are sadistic by nature when given the opportunity. Or just as easily, these impressionable, white, middle class undergrads could have been playing to the expectations of their professor and did exactly what he implicitly wanted them to do, the ultimate in confirmation bias.
And we're supposed to take away profound insights about all of humanity from this little weekend role playing exercise. The general public reads this kind of tripe and thinks they're getting valuable "scientific" insight into the human condition, when they're actually getting the overzealous ego of a charismatic professor who really wants to get published. These ridiculously small sample sizes and easily manipulated outcomes are why psychology is such a head slapper of a joke to real scientists.
Other examples of supposedly "scientific" studies influencing the public include the MIT computer engineer who claimed that GMOs cause autism and at current rates half of all children will be autistic by 2025!
Any person with an iota of critical thinking skills should be able to look at the headine or this accompanying graph and understand that this is complete non-scientific headline grabbing hogwash. This graph has got to be the most idiotic pile of pseudoscience crap I have ever seen. In case you don't recognize it, correlation does not mean causation. A child should understand as much.
There's the online survey taken by a sociologist in Germany that "proves" that vaccines have negative health consquences. There's psychoanalysis and repressed memories, cognitive behavioral therapy and social engineering, Rorschach tests and on and on and on. It's a bunch of bullshit.
So how does the general public know? How do you determine if that headline is legit or not. How can you tell if the claims being made are genuine science or interwebs pseudoiscience gobbledegook? How do you identify pseudoscience if you're not a trained scientist?
Look for key words. If they ever use the word 'prove' toss it out. Science 'proves' nothing. Grammar gives you a lot of clues; misuse of scientific terms, or misrepresentation of definitions. Huge claims that overturn all of conventional understanding. This is extremely rarely found to be true. Claims of a vast conspiracy to hide the 'truth' is probably the biggest indicator of bunk science. Lack of citations or peer review. Inability to replicate of verify. Claims that are not falsifiable. Hostility to change. Reliance on outdated work...
As someone who has read hundreds of scholarly papers I habitually scan any article for these tell tale signs, and can usually spot a bunk pile of crap within the first few sentences. It's not hard. And they are everywhere.
Education has begun to shift away from conveying information to be memorized and retained and toward critical thinking about the information you are presented with. Educators have recognized that we all have access to more information than it is possible to retain and the relevant skill of the intewebs age will be the ability to determine whether or not information is accurate and reliable. The bullshit posing as social 'science' makes that doubly hard.
More on how the social science might become legit next time.
