Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
While I do find there is a lot of junk research going on, I don't think it is is any different in the social sciences from any of the other schools of scientific inquiry. The requirement to publish drives scientists from all schools to produce, and some of the stuff is pretty sketchy. Oh, and if you believe that the social sciences are a monoculture, try walking into any of the sciences departments and observe them. They are no different. Why? Because they all are trained to think about their subject matter in very specific ways and are from the same school of thought with the same interest. They are who they have been trained to be and who they wanted to be. This isn't news to anyone who spends five minutes on a campus.
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As someone who's dabbled in many social sciences, I'd actually agree that there is a real problem of worthless pseudoscience or now debunked theories being treated as relevant, and I doubt the same problem exists with hard sciences. However, it's more an issue of wasting disproportionate amounts of time with what is in essence the history of the field. (Creating a small army of confused and/or frustrated students in the process.) Whether or not for example Lacan is pseudoscience doesn't much matter because you're not expected to take it as a fact. It's just "interesting" or "a tool for analysis".
By far the worst I've gotten into is economics, where people constantly refer to unproven or in some cases even debunked macroeconomic models as if they were facts. Some of those people even make serious high-level economic decisions based on them, often causing serious harm. (Mostly to someone else.)