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Originally Posted by Kelhus999
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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
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.
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.