[HN Gopher] What's wrong with social science and how to fix it (... ___________________________________________________________________ What's wrong with social science and how to fix it (2020) Author : pkkm Score : 78 points Date : 2022-12-11 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fantasticanachronism.com) (TXT) w3m dump (fantasticanachronism.com) | Der_Einzige wrote: | In some communities, notably AI, there are attempts to fight this | which are quite successful: | | e.g. https://paperswithcode.com/ and the recent phenomenon of | people hosting their system demonstrations on huggingface. | patientplatypus wrote: | This has always been the part of academia I have not understood. | Academics are supposed to "know" more than the public. They are | paid to have some understanding of reality in a way that the lay | public does not so they can have tenure - that is they can't be | fired (or it is very hard) for researching controversial subjects | with payoffs that are hard to define by someone not in the field. | | Everyone else in academia is working towards this end result or | drops out somewhere along the path and works in industry. The | exception being those specialist degrees that are quasi-academic | such as law and medicine, but which have more applied (and | therefore measurable) results. | | And yet, we don't hold these people to the standards they set for | themselves as a cohort? I wouldn't expect every paper to be | replicable, or every researcher to always be right. But I see | things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive and wonder | how many billions of dollar were put into this thing. It's | essentially a state backed way of defrauding the public out of | tax dollars to pay people with doctorates that made friends with | other people with doctorates. What if the US spent the money that | was used on the EmDrive on housing or social services for | instance? Or building libraries or bridges? | | All it would take would be for a few academic journals to demand | that the statistical replication of papers be required, but it | would mean that the editors would have to be guided by principles | other than maximizing revenue. | ThrowawayTestr wrote: | If I had a bunch of money, I'd setup a grant specifically for | funding replication studies. Real science can be replicated and | the only way to replicate is to do it. | amelius wrote: | Also, replication studies could be a great way for young | scientists to get started in their career. | FeepingCreature wrote: | I mean, the incentives do seem to blow the other way. "We | have invalidated the well-paid and instrumentally useful | papers of a dozen other scientists! Please hire us!" | PartiallyTyped wrote: | > Hey we found those issues in so and so papers, we | identified mistakes of a dozen other scientists and we do | our due diligence. Please hire us! | | I think it's a lot about the phrasing. | amelius wrote: | It may seem that way, but there will always be a PI | involved, with different incentives. | zinclozenge wrote: | When I was doing my physics masters (at a pretty good school | ie had a couple of nobel prize winners) there was at least a | handful of students whose phd projects involved "testing" | theories of gravitation and pushing them to their limits. | | Not quite the same as experimental replication, but along the | same lines I'd say. | kansface wrote: | Given that they are testing theory, yes. What theory | underlines psychology? How does one relate the findings? | texaslonghorn5 wrote: | Yes, and this is already how many PhD students spend their | first year or two | akira2501 wrote: | If the incentive is to get the grant and not to actually | produce replicable studies, then what impact would you expect | this to have? If the inputs are mostly garbage, then all this | might do is confirm what we already know. | | I wonder if you'd be better off having a two-phase grant | mechanism. One smaller payment for the research, and a second | larger payment if it is replicable. Actually incentivize the | "market" to produce good work. As it is, this incentive doesn't | actually exist. | yucky wrote: | There needs to be a prestigious award with a large monetary | reward for scientists who definitively disprove the most | previously published studies each year. Then track scientists | how have their names attached to the most garbage studies and | publicly drag them. | | Best way to clean house on an untrustworthy institution that's | been politicized. Do science for the science, not to fit some | shit narrative. | 10g1k wrote: | 1. Social science is not science. | | 2. It's entirely populated by ideological activists rather than | scientists. (It will never be populated by scientists because 1.) | marcosdumay wrote: | "Science" is the name of how you work with something, not of a | subject. | 10g1k wrote: | And there is no science in social science. | yucky wrote: | Yes, which I believe is why people rightly dismiss social | science, as not being scientific at all. | orwin wrote: | What is the science process that social scientists do not | follow? | | Hypothesis refutability? | | Replication? (probably their weakest point btw) | | I mean, in this thread i've read about successes in | sociology and economics, probably the most math-based | social sciences, but i'd say linguistics are probably the | second most successfull science in the last 40 years, and | that's considered a social science. History have also made | a lot of new discoveries recently (by criticizing older | works and getting past them). Archeology have slow | successes, but still, we understand Neandertal way, way | better than we did ten years ago. | dash2 wrote: | Sigh. This over-the-top reaction is very common among people | who don't know better. I'll just link my answer from the last | time (here, about economics, but it works fine for soc sci in | general): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411593 | pkkm wrote: | This middlebrow dismissal is way too broad and makes me suspect | that your only interaction with social science is via popular | media. You'd have a good point if you said "poorly done | science" rather than "not science" and restricted your | dismissal to the kind of n = 30 social psychology studies that | get paraded around by journalists when they confirm their | biases. But it's false as stated; even in psychology alone, | there are many findings which can withstand scrutiny and | replication, e.g.: - Spaced repetition (you | remember things longer if you space out your learning over time | than if you cram). - Primacy/recency (you usually | remember the first and last items in a sequence better than | items in the middle). - Stroop effect (you respond slower | when there are incongruent stimuli distracting you). - | Fitts's law (a model of human movement that can be used to | develop better UIs). - Strongly negative influence of | sleep deprivation on mental performance. | | And that's not to mention other social sciences such as | economics. | huitzitziltzin wrote: | 1. What's science? This is a surprisingly hard question. Im | going to guess physics is your model and you're going to cite | popper about falsifiability to me. A lot of activities which | don't look at all like physics are science. | | 2. Citation needed??? The professional incentives around | publishing are bad - I don't dispute the author's claim there. | But to say we are ideological activists suggests you haven't | met very many social scientists. | matthewdgreen wrote: | Reading through this quickly I see several problems that make me | wonder if the author has worked in academia. | | 1. _Publication venues aren't created equal._ People outside of | academia don't understand that anyone can and will start a | journal /conference. If I want to launch the Proceedings of the | of Confabulatory Results in Computer Science Conference, all I | need is a cheap hosting account and I'm ready to go. In countries | like the US this is explicitly protected speech, and the big for- | profit sites run by Elsevier et al. will often go ahead and add | my publications to their database as long as I make enough of an | effort to make things look legitimate. | | In any given field there are probably a handful of "top" venues | that everyone in the field knows, and a vast long tail ranging | from mid-tier to absolute fantasist for-profit crap. If you focus | on the known conferences you might see bad results, but if you | focus on the long tail you're doing the equivalent of searching | the 50th+ page of Google results for some term: that is, you're | deliberately selecting for SEO crap. And given the relatively | high cost of peer-reviewing the good vs _not peer-reviewing_ the | bad, unfiltered searches will always be dominated by crap (surely | this is a named "law"?) Within TFA I cannot tell if the author is | filtering properly for decent venues (as any self-respecting | expert would do) or if they're just complaining about spam. Some | mention is made of a DARPA project, so I'm hopeful it's not _too_ | bad. However even small filtering errors will instantly make your | results meaningless. | | 2. _Citations aren't intended as a goddamn endorsement (or | metric)._ In science we cite papers liberally. We do not do this | because we want people to get a cookie. We don't do it because | we're endorsing every result. We do it because we've learned (or | been told) about a _possibly relevant_ result and we want the | reader to know about it too. When it comes to citations, more is | _usually_ better. Just as it is much better to let many innocent | people go free rather than imprison one guilty one, it is vastly | better to cite a hundred mediocre or incorrect papers than to | miss one important citation. Readers should not see a citation | and infer correctness or importance unless _the author | specifically states this in the text_ at which point, sure, | that's an error. But most citation-counting metrics don't | actually read the citing papers, they just do text matching. | Since most bulk citations are just reading lists, this also | filters for citations that don't mean much about the quality of a | work. | | The idea of using citation counts as a metric for research | quality is a bad one that administrators (and the type of | researchers who solve administrative problems) came up with. It | is one of those "worst ideas except for any other" solutions: | probably better than throwing darts at a board and certainly more | scalable than reading every paper for quality. But the idea is | artificial at best, and complaints like "why are people citing | incorrect results" fundamentally ask citations to be something | they're not. | | Overall there are many legitimate complaints about academia and | replicability to be had out there. But salting them with | potential nonsense does nobody any favors, and just makes the | process of fixing these issues much less likely to succeed. | jcampbell1 wrote: | You are only making the author seem more correct. You have a | system where citations act as cookies and endorse | (administrators fault) but that is not the researchers intent. | | > Whatever the explanation might be, the fact is that the | academic system does not allocate citations to true claims. | This is bad not only for the direct effect of basing further | research on false results, but also because it distorts the | incentives scientists face. If nobody cited weak studies, we | wouldn't have so many of them. Rewarding impact without regard | for the truth inevitably leads to disaster. | | You also argue that high quality journals are good at filtering | quality. The author presents evidence that this is specious. | | You furthermore question whether the author worked in academia, | which is answered. | | Given your reading comprehension skills, I wonder if you are in | the correct job. | WalterBright wrote: | > for-profit crap | | And of course we all know that making something for profit | means it's bad. | kazinator wrote: | > _Citations aren't intended as a goddamn endorsement (or | metric)._ | | Works for GNU Parallel. :) | darawk wrote: | 1. He addresses this repeatedly throughout the piece. Journal | impact factor is (largely) uncorrelated to replication | probability. | | 2. Yes, but this hardly seems like a defense of citing | something false (without comment), or something that has | literally been retracted years ago, which is a large part of | his complaint. | | He is not suggesting the use of citation count as a metric for | quality. I have no idea how you could have possibly gotten that | from reading this article. A bullet point in his "what to do" | section is literally "ignore citation counts". | matthewdgreen wrote: | > He is not suggesting the use of citation count as a metric | for quality. I have no idea how you could have possibly | gotten that from reading this article. | | TFA is extremely clear that the presence of citations (in the | aggregate, as a count) on "weak" papers is something the | author considers a problem and a perhaps a moral failure on | the part of citing authors. The author also believes that | citations should be "allocated" to true claims. | | * "Yes, you're reading that right: studies that replicate are | cited at the same rate as studies that do not. Publishing | your own weak papers is one thing, but citing other people's | weak papers?" Here citations are clearly treated as a bulk | metric, and "weak" is a quality metric. | | * " As in all affairs of man, it once again comes down to | Hanlon's Razor. Either: Malice: [the citing authors] know | which results are likely false but cite them anyway. or, | Stupidity: they can't tell which papers will replicate even | though it's quite easy." Aside from being gross and insulting | -- here the author claims that the decision to cite a result | can have only two explanations, malice and stupidity. Not, | for example, the much more straightforward explanation that I | mention above (and that the author even admits is likely.) | | * " Whatever the explanation might be, the fact is that the | academic system does not allocate citations to true claims." | The use of "allocate citations" clearly recognizes that | citation counts are treated as a metric, and indicate that | that the author wishes this allocation to be done | differently. | | * "This is bad not only for the direct effect of basing | further research on false results, but also because it | distorts the incentives scientists face. If nobody cited weak | studies, we wouldn't have so many of them." Here the author | makes it clear that they see citation count (correctly) as a | metric that encourages researchers, and believes the optimal | solution is to remove all (but perhaps explicitly negative?) | citations to those papers. | | > A bullet point in his "what to do" section is literally | "ignore citation counts". | | Yes, after extensively complaining about the fact that | citations aren't used by authors in a manner that reflects | the way they're used as a metric, then _complaining further_ | about the fact that authors do not use them this way and | repeatedly urging them to change the way citations are used | -- the author then admits that their use of a metric is | problematic and should be ended. | | We agree! The only problem here was that the author took a | detour to a totally absurd place to get there. | boxed wrote: | A few of the suggestions are about making new financial | incentives. But the problem in the first place is the financial | incentive structures! It's much better to let people do their | jobs and not have a bunch of incentives. We know this is true for | programmers, why do people expect it's not true about everyone | else? | robertlagrant wrote: | Generally people do work for money. | poszlem wrote: | Because if you don't add money as incentive the only other | strong incentive is for people who join the social sciences | because they want to push some kind of policy that they feel | strongly about (In this case, their personal beliefs and values | serve as their incentive). There is even a joke among | psychologists that people who join psychology departments are | mostly those who themselves need psychotherapy (and they choose | to study psychology instead). | davidgay wrote: | The actual title is "What's Wrong with Social Science and How to | Fix It". Not exactly a neutral title edit... | | Especially as this comes from "a part of DARPA's SCORE program, | whose goal is to evaluate the reliability of social science | research" | class4behavior wrote: | The original title is too long and I assume op thought the | findings can be extended to all science anyway. | | On the other hand, removing the later part as the previous | submission did makes the title sound overly presumptuous, imo. | pkkm wrote: | > The actual title is "What's Wrong with Social Science and How | to Fix It". | | Yeah. I couldn't fit the whole thing into the hard 80-character | limit so I decided to drop the word "social" because I thought | the subtitle was important to keep. I guess it's moot now that | the title has been edited, I assume by a mod. | christkv wrote: | The worst part is when these studies lead to policy changes. | themitigating wrote: | Science is not an organization, business, or any single entity | and discussing it as such is ridiculous. | | How would you implement changes? | nordsieck wrote: | > How would you implement changes? | | It's pretty easy: you add requirements to accepting federal | grant money. | madsbuch wrote: | It is an institution though. With very strict rules regarding | the scientific method. | ivalm wrote: | No, there absolutely no strict rules regarding the scientific | method. At most there are conventions about the structure of | papers in some journals. | madsbuch wrote: | that regards form, which indeed is not a part of the | institution. | orhmeh09 wrote: | These rules are not as strict as one might think, especially | when they're tied up with people's careers--consider the | reproducibility crisis for instance. | madsbuch wrote: | they ought to be, though not all people have the integrity. | jmaygarden wrote: | It doesn't appear that you read the article. Social science | journals definitely are organizations, businesses and/or single | entities that could change. | [deleted] | ajkjk wrote: | Whether or not that's the case, it's obviously possible for | loose-knit organizations to change. That's basically the role | of philosophy, or more specifically, convincing people to do | something different with argument. | yarg wrote: | Replication is a huge issue, but I've been wondering lately about | refusal to publish. | | Even if all of the published papers were peer reviewed and | replicated, there's a lot of science that never sees the light of | day. | | Even non-results are important - if not glamourous, and (even | worse) publishing is disincentivised if the results go against | what the funders wanted or expected. | jimmaswell wrote: | > refusal to publish | | My impression is that in social science, this happens when the | results are "wrong". Maybe compounding the replication crisis | if only the "right" results get published but "right" was | actually wrong. | trompetenaccoun wrote: | The replication crisis can not be overstated though because | "science" that can not be replicated isn't science at all. The | very base definition of science is that it's a method that | produces testable and predictable propositions about our world. | If a theory or paper does not deliver that it's guesswork, a | superstition or religious belief in extreme cases. But | certainly not science, no matter how many people or | institutions refer to it as such. Just as the Democratic | People's Republic of Korea isn't actually democratic. | | Do not trust the science. Verify the science. | jltsiren wrote: | Science is about the process, not the results. Somebody | discovers an phenomenon, studies it, fails to take something | relevant into account, and publishes a faulty result, and | that's science. Somebody else tries to replicate the study, | fails it, and can't figure out what went wrong, and that's | science. Then somebody discovers the flaw, gets a different | result, and publishes it, and that's science. | trompetenaccoun wrote: | When there is no reliable review mechanism, then the | process is inherently flawed. It may be science in your | book but following that definition, everything anyone | studies and publishes is science. Homeopathy is science by | that definition. Flat earth studies too. | | There needs to be proper scrutiny to ensure minimal quality | standards are at least followed, else the whole thing is | bunk. A study that can not be replicated by anyone is not | research, it's monkeys hitting keys without understanding | what they're doing. Sadly monkeys with PhDs in some cases | but that doesn't change anything. | | The distinguishing feature of what "real science" is in the | eye of the believer seems to be someone holding an academic | title, i.e. an argument from authority, not verifiable | standards that exclude randomness. There is nothing | scientific about belief. | hirundo wrote: | "Yes, you're reading that right: studies that replicate are cited | at the same rate as studies that do not ... Astonishingly, even | after retraction the vast majority of citations are positive, and | those positive citations continue for decades after retraction." | | The academic influence of social science papers is uncorrelated | with their scientific quality. | Semaphor wrote: | Needs (2020) | | 100 comments at the time: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24447724 | timcavel wrote: | poszlem wrote: | We absolutely need to change the way we do social sciences. My | favourite pet peeve in social sciences is idea laundering. | | "It's analogous to money laundering. Here's how it works: First, | various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For | example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in | society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel | bad about their condition. In other words, they convince | themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) | is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive | term); it's not true or false--in this particular case, it's a | story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly | ascribes authority to medical knowledge. | | Second, academics who share these sentiments start a peer- | reviewed periodical such as Fat Studies--an actual academic | journal. They organize Fat Studies like every other academic | journal, with a board of directors, a codified submission | process, special editions with guest editors, a pool of | credentialed "experts" to vet submissions, and so on. The | journal's founders, allies and collaborators then publish | articles in Fat Studies and "grow" their journal. Soon, other | academics with similar beliefs submit papers, which are accepted | or rejected. Ideas and moral impulses go in, knowledge comes out. | Voila! | | Eventually, after activist scholars petition university libraries | to carry the journal, making it financially viable for a large | publisher like Taylor & Francis, Fat Studies becomes established. | Before long, there's an extensive canon of academic work--ideas, | prejudice, opinion and moral impulses--that has been laundered | into "knowledge." (source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea- | laundering-in-academia-115...) | | I was one of the extreme "trust the science" people, until I | joined a startup that worked with academia. The amount of | pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen | surpassed even the most hardcore of startups. | geraldwhen wrote: | I struggle to see what part of social science is morales or | quasi religious beliefs mascarading as science. | | There is no cure. | poszlem wrote: | At the very least we need to start demanding two things: | falsifiability and reproducibility. We should stop calling | "science" things that are unfalsifiable. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-11 23:00 UTC)