• Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    employing the scientific method

    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?

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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        5 months ago

        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.

              • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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                5 months ago

                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.

                  • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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                    5 months ago

                    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?