I have no expertise in social science myself, so all I can give is a perspective of an outsider looking in. Maybe part of the problem is a perspective issue, where my perspective of what social science is doesn't match the reality.

Anyways, jumping threads a little going back to the AI example, this seems like a perfectly reasonable social scientific experiment with a perfectly reasonable conclusion based off the data.

However, where (at least from my perspective) social sciences today seem to run into serious trouble is they take these preliminary data points, and then they jump to grand narratives (e.g. white privilege/intersectionality/patriarchy/institutional racism) and prescriptive "solutions" (e.g. affirmative action/bias training/equity, inclusion and social justice departments) skipping a lot of necessary steps in between; especially the part where you challenge your experimental hypothesis and narratives from every possible angle to see if it actually holds up.

For example, going back to the bias example, in response to social science experiments indicating unconscious bias may in fact exist, a lot of resources have been poured into unconscious bias training, in academia, government, and private industry. However, at least from my perspective, there doesn't seem to be any honest attempt to try to measure the effect and efficacy of this training. This seems extremely unscientific from my perspective. Again, maybe this is just a perspective issue and maybe there has been good faith scientific efforts to seriously examine efficacy and effects of unconscious bias training.

This is just one example. Generally, it seems from the outside looking in, within social sciences today there isn't much of an effort to actually challenge prevailing theories; and in fact there is a very strong effort to censor legitimate questions, which is the antithesis of how a scientific discipline is supposed to work.

Of course, I also accept a lot of the problem is that a lot of the challenges to current social science theory/policy are not coming from legitimate places; they are coming from bad faith individuals with agendas. But I dont think just blanket labeling anyone that challenges prevailing narratives as a racist and censoring them is the solution to this dilemma.

I feel if social sciences want to be taken seriously as sciences, there has to be a mechanism to distinguish bad faith agenda driven criticism and honest criticism/evaluation, and a willingness to seriously challenge prevailing theories, and a willingness to refute them if the data doesn't support the narrative.

A couple things I'd note.

1) I think you're jumping well beyond the bounds of social science when you refer to policies put in place by companies, governments, and so on. And also when you refer to people calling others racists later on.

Race and racism are topics of importance to people outside of the social sciences too. Policy makers may look to social science research to justify their policies but researchers are not generally responsible for those policies, either for good or for ill. Social science research which demonstrates the existence of various social inequalities doesn't always (or often?) prescribe specific solutions.

I think the fact that so much social science research is relevant to hot political topics makes it difficult for people to disentangle the actual science from the politics, in a way that isn't usually a problem in other disciplines. This can be a problem for researchers too, of course. Also, it's understandable that people involved in political movements are not necessarily prioritizing some concept of epistemological certainty over achieving their political goals, leaving aside the question of what level of certainty is reasonable. That's true for pretty much all political movements. But I think you're too casually mixing together political activism and research.

2) If we're talking about race and racism specifically, it's probably worth pointing out that there is a great deal more evidence than is provided by the one example I chose to highlight, and also evidence from beyond social sciences (e.g. from history). From my perspective the value of certain theoretical perspectives about racial bias, patriarchal gender norms, and so on is pretty well supported, keeping in mind that descriptive theories about the existence of those phenomena are separable from various political movements or goals meant to address them.

It's hard to respond to this because you aren't being very specific. I think you're probably also still conflating researchers with political activists, although I recognize that some people are both. Despite frequent claims like yours, in my experience I haven't noticed legitimate questions being censored within actual academic research. If anything, I've more often been surprised to find academic literature treating "politically incorrect" theories more seriously than I expected. I think I remarked on this when I made a thread several years ago after reading a criminology textbook on race and crime.

I think you can make the more modest claim that within specific disciplines there exist paradigms which influence what kind of theories tend to be used and what sorts of research tends to be done (I'm using Kuhn's concept of a scientific paradigm). That does have an effect, and I think it's certainly true that (for example) within sociology some theories are going to be more popular than others because they fit the overarching paradigm better. But there are a broad range of disciplines within the academy and within the social sciences and if you survey a broader swath of them I think the impact from this is smaller.

My first reaction to this is: taken seriously by whom? Social sciences are well established within the academy. Governments both fund and conduct a great deal of social science research, and are a primary source of data. It seems to me that social sciences are taken seriously already by a great many people.

That said, my feeling is that social sciences are poorly understood by the general public; maybe even more so than other sciences although that seems debatable when I think about public opinion on evolution or climate change, just as examples. But I've complained from time to time that I don't think social science organizations do as good of a job as they could of making their work accessible to the public, and I've also complained at times that I think useful concepts from research get lost in translation as they find their way into pop culture via politics, and that seems unfortunate.

Yes. I think you bring up a fair point. Most of the lay people's exposure to social science is through click bait articles in pop culture or political oriented journalism. And those sources probably are more interested in pushing whatever their particular agenda is then portraying the subject accurately, or even honestly.

I actually worked at a university for a number of years, and saw a lot of promotion for what I would term social science focused "activism", (e.g. flyers posted on doors for provocatively titled lectures such as "The Problem With Whiteness") but again that may not be a fair representation of social science disciplines as a whole.

It is probably a common theme where a small % of activists make most of the noise and get most of the attention, but may not represent the whole the way one might initially assume.

Also, as far as not being able to separate research from policy, I think it is fair to assume that if a policy is being widely enacted based of off research findings (e.g. unconscious bias training based off of findings of unconscious bias), if no-one from the research field is critiquing the policy that means they are tacitly accepting of it.

I bring up the unconscious bias training again, but only because I think it is pretty amazing how a policy (based on research findings) could become so uniformly accepted and implemented across such large swaths of academic, political, and private enterprise, with seemingly no rigorous examination whether the policy accomplishes any of the goals it purports to, or what unintended effects it may have. This seems akin to me of prescribing a medication based off of efficacy in laboratory animal studies, and then not even bothering to try to figure out how it may affect humans in real world settings.

I'm sure lots of people support those policies. Or, to zoom out, lots of social science researchers are convinced that the social inequalities they study are real social problems which deserve political and social action to address. I agree with that view.

But, the evaluation of specific policy ideas is separate from evaluations of the underlying research on the existence of those same inequalities. It would not follow from the conclusion that some policy response is flawed that the research on the existence of the inequality the policy is meant to address is also flawed.

An example that comes to my mind is "Ban the box" legislation aimed at reducing racial bias in hiring by forbidding employers from asking about prior felonies. There is some evidence that "Ban the Box" legislation has in some cases had the opposite of its intended effects (see also here). But, a reasonable interpretation of the measured outcomes associated with these policies (employers default to relying on racial stereotypes in the absence of previously available information) actually strengthens the conclusions of the original research on the existence of the problem the BTB policies were meant to address. This gets to your next point:

I think the BTB example certainly supports the idea that making policy aimed at reducing social inequalities can be challenging and research into the effects of various policy ideas is valuable. But then: the conclusion is not that there is a problem with social science research, but rather that we need more of it aimed at evaluating policies in addition to evaluating the existence and causes of various inequalities.

Note: I moved these posts out of the Philosophy of Social Science thread since I think the topic is sufficiently different and I want to talk about some more philosophy of science stuff there, eventually.

I am curious what if any role you think activism should have in sociology departments?

We're slowly inching towards the postmodernism conversation I want to have with clovis, when I get around to writing an OP. Or at least I think that question is related in an interesting way, and my long answer would end up covering similar territory.

I guess the slightly shorter answer is: I'm not strongly opposed to scientists also being involved in activism, although I think there are aspects of both which probably need to remain separate from each other.

I take it as a given that even ostensibly "neutral" scientific research will inevitably be "political" in the sense that it will reflect individual and cultural preferences, beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on. At the very least in choices made about what topics are interesting and worthy of investigation, but also in the sense that scientific observation is generally theory-laden and that prevailing theories are also products of the social construction of knowledge. Scientific racism is the obvious historical example of this issue.

So given the reality of science as a social institution and enterprise (and not just a set of epistemic principles) I don't think scientists in any field can entirely escape the need to think about the ethics of their work and how it ties to the world around them. Because the choice not to think about it still entails a particular politics: that of the status quo generally. Having openly disclosed secondary motivations which others can take into account when evaluating one's work doesn't seem obviously worse to me than people having more hidden or ambiguous motivations.

But, if I think the positivist idea of a completely neutral and "value-free" science is too idealistic, I also think there is a lot of value to what I'm going to call the scientific ethos and its principles (epistemic humility, openness, rigor, the search for truth). I think scientists should embrace and respect those values. I don't think scientists should avoid politically inconvenient questions and I think it's important to be aware of the impact biases can have on one's research.

Fortunately, scientific methods are intended to amelioriate the impact of those very same biases, whether they arise from secondary motivations connected to activism or something else. So I think the same processes which attempt to mitigate other biases in science are useful here, e.g. peer review, replication, and just making arguments explicit and the data which support them available to others. Those processes are important, and in general my view is it makes more sense (is more realistic) to try to account for the fact that researchers are humans embedded in a social context and that this context may be relevant to evaluating their work than to try to force researchers to take something like monastic vows of neutrality. Basically I think virtuous processes are more effective than insisting on virtuous researchers.

I agree that honest social science research of the ramifications of social movements, especially at the policy level, is a very good idea.

I think this only works if the processes themselves are not corrupted. I listen to a lot of podcasts from former/current reasechers, such as Adams, Haidt and Peterson who contend ideological activism within the field is so pernicious that it severely impedes any attempt to honestly evaluate activism based research.

Obviously you do not seem to have as pessimistic a view as the state of affairs.

By Adams I meant Sam Harris. Don’t know where the Adams came from at all

I'm familiar with the so-called "intellectual dark web", and Haidt's Heterodox Academy, but as far as I'm aware none of them has actually offered any particularly detailed critique of social science research processes, per se. More like criticisms of academic culture in some larger sense. Heterodox Academy, for example, is concerned with ideological diversity which I think is not entirely unreasonable in relation to the point I made previously abought Kuhnian paradigms and how they shape research. But it's not really a criticism of (say) peer review as a process. It's not a criticism of any particular methodology in social sciences. I also tend to think of Heterodox Academy as, well, part of the academy. :P

As a bit of an aside, but still on topic I believe, have you ever given any thought about what kind of political/societal structure could allow the US to remain functional with the current realities of 21st American century- e.g. social media, demographic diversity, loss of religiosity, Weakening of shared cultural norms.

It seems the concept of a relatively free capitalistic , representative democracy, which has worked fairly well, may not be particularly well suited for today’s realities. It seems the whole political system of democracy itself may not scale up in a diverse society without shared cultural norms.

For good or bad, it seems some sort of authoritarian system, with an imposed morality, might be the most stable.