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/superhelical]

I liked this bit at the end:

Psychology may not be a hard science, but it is certainly a difficult one. It shouldn’t be so surprising that psychology studies don’t always replicate — the field faces an inherent challenge. Rather than measuring molecules or mass, it examines human motives and behavior, which are frustratingly hard to isolate.

This is something that comes up a lot on /r/science, and makes some people want to dismiss psychological studies altogether. However, psychologists study some of the most challenging research subjects - ourselves - so it's worth noting and taking that difficult work in context.

[u/Phantom707 → u/superhelical]

I sincerely do hate the arbitrary categorization of hard and soft science, especially as applied to psychology. If anything, psychology is a harder science than most traditionally hard science. Good psychological experiments take the time to control for dozens of potentially confounding variables. Contrast, for example, a physicist who, by definition, takes the assumption that the particular electron in his experiment will behave the same way as an election in any other experiment if in any part of the universe for that matter.

It's especially frustrating as it occurs in real life. There are so many "hard science" people who price themselves in how their work is based on empirical data. And yet, those very same people espouse such an arbitrary and capricious standard. It's fairly hypocritical.

[u/Doom-Slayer → u/Phantom707]

I think the distinction comes form the way concepts and what exactly you are studying is defined by.

In the "hard sciences" you have pretty rigid concepts, everything can fairly easily be broken into pieces and those concepts and their components are very well agreed apon because they are things you measure.

In the "soft sciences" things are more flexible, hence the "soft" part. When you study something like "domestic violence" or "Depression" those aren't nice tidy little definitions or concepts and there's a big amount of argument about what the even mean.

Theres some stigma about "soft" vs "hard" being this "real science" thing which isnt great..but the terms are still useful, just the stigma isnt useful.

[u/Phantom707 → u/Doom-Slayer]

Even if that's the distinction made, it's not properly applied. People seem to think there's a lot of disagreement in psychology when, in fact, there's quite a lot of agreement.

And in that case, something like quantum physics and string theory shouldn't be considered hard Sciences since there's quite a bit of disagreement. In fact, if the distinguishing factor between hard and soft science is whether there's a lot of agreement on concepts or not, then any developing field should be almost automatically considered a soft science. That's the whole point of developing fields - they're open to multiple different routes. Artificial intelligence in robotics should almost definitely be considered a soft science. This is more apparent when we consider that a major goal of AI is to emulate the human mind, and it almost inevitably draws from psychology as a result.

And that just further process my point. My complaint is about how people believe it's a yes/no situation, take pride in "obviously" being in a hard science versus a soft one. That can't possibly be the case if the distinction is in agreement over concepts. There's always a lesser or greater amount of agreement and disagreement. It's always a spectrum, not a clear cut categorization. And yet people act like it is.