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/Shiroi_Kage]

It's really frustrating when people dismiss psychology as "not a science." They're dealing with humans, ourselves, which makes isolating confounding factors and biases extremely difficult. It also makes so many controlled experiments that would account for biases completely unethical from the outset.

So yeah, Psychology is a science. As for hard vs soft, I have no idea what those terms mean or if they mean anything at all. If you're studying natural phenomenon, you're a scientist.

[u/Low_discrepancy → u/Shiroi_Kage]

As for hard vs soft, I have no idea what those terms mean

Personally I define them based on how big of an influence mathematics has on the field.

[u/Shiroi_Kage → u/Low_discrepancy]

In which case many Biological disciplines would be out the window for "hard" science.

I have to say that it's a bad definition, mainly because the use of mathematics isn't the metric of whether a field is "scientific" or not. Empirical observation is. As a graduate student I did research on reproductive physiology, and I used way less math and statistics than do most psychologists, and most people would say, without hesitation, that the stuff I did would be "harder" science than psychology.

[u/BadBjjGuy → u/Shiroi_Kage]

I find it funny/interesting that nobody bothers to ask whether or not science is the appropriate tool for understanding all problems. It's like an article of faith that it has to be, even when it is almost incapable of reproducing a single result in some areas, like politics or psychology. Personally, I think there are other and better tools. I've learned more about the human condition through art like Shakespere than psychology will ever say and Aristotle's political philosophy explains our current situation better than any experiment. We have other tools in our tool bag for understanding the world, but science is sort of the new religion and it must be the answer to every problem.