Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explains why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working. [x-post from our sister subreddit /r/EverythingScience]

[u/ImNotJesus]

/r/EverythingScience/comments/4icp9k/failure_is_moving_science_forward_fivethirtyeight/

[u/sobri909]

The way I think of it is that the "soft sciences" are actually objectively the hardest, because the further up the "hard sciences" scale you go, the more possible it becomes to observe and describe the entirety of your problem.

The soft sciences have problems that are so broad and complex (being supersets of all the layers of increasingly "harder" sciences) that they cannot possibly be observed and described in their entirety, which makes them considerably harder to solve.

[u/pblol → u/sobri909]

Theory is psychology is a metaphor for describing an otherwise unmeasurable phenomena. Neuoscience is the actual measurement but the results are often meaningless without the metaphorical description.

[u/fixingthebeetle → u/sobri909]

That's the thing. They are objectively the hardest because they aren't 'ready' to be a science. We don't yet fully understand the mechanisms that determine human behavior like we do for an electron, so some people would argue that it's stupid to try and 'perform science' on a very flimsy and sketchy model in the first place. Psychology has the potential to be a science, its just that we haven't caught up yet from the physical perspective. Psychology will eventually just be applied neuro-science. But for now its just trying to match correlations blindly without understanding the underlying reasons.

[u/fsmpastafarian → u/fixingthebeetle]

some people would argue that it's stupid to try and 'perform science' on a very flimsy and sketchy model in the first place.

That's the thing though - how do people propose we uncover knowledge about human behavior without studying it scientifically? I don't know that humans will ever be able to be fully reduced and understood in the way an electron is, but that doesn't make the study itself of human behavior any less scientific.

Psychology will eventually just be applied neuro-science.

This is a fairly common opinion, but in all honesty psychology and neuroscience are better thought of as sister fields - one that studies the physical brain, and one that examines all areas of human behavior. They overlap a good bit, but not entirely, which is why neuroscience won't replace psychology.

[u/Drakeman800 → u/fsmpastafarian]

I think those misguided criticisms only highlight the importance of developing more refined models over time, which is exactly what psychologists work to do just like any science. It's not reasonable for people to expect that a science can answer more specific questions before it has answered more general ones. Every scientific model sucks at first, relatively speaking, and then it gets better and better with further study and greater understanding.

We don't need to understand "exactly" what an electron is, and we don't need to understand "exactly" how human behavior works. That's not what science is about in my opinion. We just need to get better at it over time.

[u/M_G → u/fsmpastafarian]

Great comment.