aren't social sciences the true complex, hard sciences? not in the undergrad sense. when you're doing mathematics or physics you have all these idealized objects with nice properties and what you have to do is to think really hard about what can be done with them. now if you're studying a society it's really, really hard to get to anything meaningful because you have to make up models and test them and you don't have any nice properties to exploit. you just have thousands of people that don't know what the fuck they're doing, and you have to figure it out for them. really doing maths sounds really easy
if you think social sciences are easy in some sense, do you think drawing conclusions from societies is easy or you think it's a waste of time because it's not feasible?
Liam Jenkins
>now if you're studying a society it's really, really hard to get to anything meaningful because you have to make up models and test them and you don't have any nice properties to exploit. sounds like religion
Aaron Long
what?
Josiah Hall
what part of my post confused you?
Nolan Hall
making up models and testing them is what scientists do, in general. how does this sound like religion?
Jacob Carter
You're right in thinking it's 'hard' but the thing is it's downright impossible to produce any results in those fields.you can't test anything without introducing an assload of biasses . You can't even study humans because the moment they realize they're being studied any further results are biased towards poeple who know they're being studied.
Nolan Gray
>making up models and testing them is what scientists do, in general. how does this sound like religion? actual scientists generally perform tests that are falsifiable and reproducible. social "scientists" do not, it's essentially equivalent to prayer
Blake Nguyen
Please don't confuse the things 'social scientists' do with social science .calling yourself a scientists didn't make you one if you don't also do proper scientific work. Proper social science , although dauntingly difficult is not in principle impossible .
Jose Harris
i don't know how that's essentially equivalent to prayer, but whatever. i'm not asking about social "scientists", i'm asking about social sciences
and if you think this about social scientists, surely there are people that are actually trying to do good work?
Christopher Jones
Hey! I believe they are both truly complex and thought-provoking in their own unique way. In the science field, you can make several experiments to prove a point, in social sciences it is quite similar just different fields of study.
Hudson Long
Don't feed the troll user. He's one of those types who read a news article about some study he doesn't like and now assumes people who do anything other than labwork must not understand the scientific method
Carson Reyes
>the scientific method No such thing.
Tyler White
that just sounds like an argument for why we should focus on studying individual human behavior first (via some subsets of psychology and neuroscience), and develop a sound fundamental base to work with before branching off into broader systems like sociology and economics.
James Howard
they are soft sciences because they aren't founded on empirical laws you can measure physical, chemical and biological phenomena, but you have to use statistics for everything in soft sciences
Matthew Davis
Societies and other objects studied by social sciences are a lot more enthropic (i.e. have more variables) than physical phenomena. That makes simplification needed, but there are so many variables that can't be easily considered without making problems too complex that even the most complex simplification comes out as very simple in comparison with a STEM counterpart. TL;DR social objects are indeed more complex in themselves but their STUDY is so simplified that it is a lot easier than that of the natural sciences
Andrew Scott
>they are soft sciences because they aren't founded on empirical laws Neither is mathematics. Is math considered "soft"?
James Turner
>Neither is mathematics. Is math considered "soft"? Mathematics isn't a science.
Owen Howard
ah, so you're one of /those/ people. So tell me, what solution to the demarcation problem did you discover?
Alexander Ortiz
It comes down to neuroscience, essentially. If you understand fully how the human brain works, you could begin to define social sciences as a subfield of neuroscience, i.e. how our brain responds to social stimuli and how those aggregated effects in a social group will develop. If we get to that point, then yeah, social science would be pretty damn difficult because it'd require a thorough understanding of the human brain, something we still don't even have yet. Until then all we have are basic psych models and statistics which are unable to utilize the full scope of mathematics like other hard sciences, meaning they just won't be as difficult subjects to study as something like physics or chem.
Jason Perry
>So tell me, what solution to the demarcation problem did you discover? Axiomatic deductions have nothing to do with empirical evidence
Camden Johnson
define "science"
Evan Phillips
define "define"
Asher Bailey
This is the true patrician answer
Cameron Collins
Reminds me of Harvard First Law of Animal Behavior. Genetically standardized animals, kept in controlled conditions, and subject to precise stimuli --- will respond as they damn well please!
Connor Carter
It depends on your definition, if you see it as a sistematic study then we can say math is a science, but the distinction between soft and hard science kind of relies on a definition of science of empirical laws or the scientific method, which by itself it's a bit controversial, to avoid all of this I like to think of math as formal language, a "type" of logical system.
Matthew Baker
Define " " "
William Nguyen
Statistics probably contains the entire toolset needed to formulate a proper theory of Social Mechanics
Unfortunately, doing anything of the sort is hindered by social scientists' abject refusal to rigorously define a SINGLE word that they use