“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That’s pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
Astronomy has roughly a 400 year head start on most of these. Thousands of years if you’re counting astrology (which was good observations mixed together with nonsense).
What’s voodoo about political science?
“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That’s pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
Same thing astronomy did.
Astronomy has roughly a 400 year head start on most of these. Thousands of years if you’re counting astrology (which was good observations mixed together with nonsense).
That’s irrelevant. Astronomy and polsci can both only test their hypotheses through observation.
And Astronomy has had much, much longer to make those observations. They can also gather potentially millions of data points instead of five.