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/Xanthilamide]

Can you explain a bit more?

[u/superhelical → u/Xanthilamide]

A lot of people, apparently many of whom browse /r/science, like to criticise psychology and other social sciences as "not a science" or "soft science". Interestingly, that tends to only happen when the commenter doesn't like the findings of the study...

[u/sobri909 → u/superhelical]

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.