Social Science Isn’t

This is a guest post by Mitt Castor which is the pseudonym of an MIT educator who runs the Babbling Beaver satire website. As usual with guest posts, it is presented here not because I agree with everything in it, but because I do think it makes some thought-provoking points.

Lee

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By Mitt Castor

One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was the flowering of the physical sciences and their utilization by engineers to improve the material circumstances of mankind. Characterized by the rigorous performance of controlled experiments designed to elucidate then validate both the efficient and material causes of phenomena, scientists strove to formulate what we have come to call scientific laws that could be applied to make useful predictions.

Much ink has been spilled debating the proposition that science precedes, rather than follows, engineering. Regardless of your views on that, no one can doubt the historically unprecedented rise in the standard of living that ensued when science and engineering worked together.

Over the course of four centuries, science evolved from the idiosyncratic pursuit of knowledge by a handful of eccentric gentlemen into a systematic endeavor employing millions of ordinary people. With a few notable exceptions, these early scientists were largely male. Most were very odd fellows. And unless they were supported by a generous patron or a rich spouse, they had to be gentlemen of independent means. Time and experience separated the kooks from the geniuses, whose laws bear their names.

This changed in the latter half of the 20th century when science became a large-scale industry supported either by the fruits of commerce or the politically mediated dispensation of taxpayer money.

Scientism is a phenomenon driven by the belief that the investigative methods of the physical sciences are applicable or justifiable in all fields of inquiry, including the so-called social sciences. This naturally led social scientists to concoct “laws” that could be exploited by social engineers claiming to improve the circumstances of the less fortunate. Because conducting properly controlled experiments to discover the efficient and material causes of human behavior is almost always an impossible or unethical challenge, social scientists invoked formal and final causes, sometimes called teleology, to both inform and justify the construction of their “laws.” That, along with a generous dose of what serious scientists call “hand waving.”

Economists proudly kicked off the scientism parade, claiming to study an abstract aggregate they dubbed “the economy.” They endeavored to characterize this abstraction using a variety of metrics that cannot be rigorously defined such as “gross domestic product” and “the price level.” Relationships among these metrics were mathematically described under contrived conditions like “equilibrium.” Such idealized conditions, never found in the complex and chaotic realm of trade and finance, make it easier for economists to dismiss their persistent inability to accurately predict anything. It also allows them to dodge responsibility for the disasters that often follow from their advice.

Undaunted, politicians proved eager to apply the “science” developed by economists to justify a smorgasbord of often conflicting policies following the political fashions of the times. Over the decades these included granting monopolies, erecting protectionist trade barriers, fixing prices, freezing wages, confiscating gold, nationalizing industries, paying farmers to not grow food, paying workers to not work, and the all-time bipartisan favorite of printing fiat currency in unlimited quantities. As the influence of economists were amplified through the power of politicians, the busts that followed booms became ever more extreme as remedies for the last economic fiasco often laid the groundwork for the next economic fiasco.

F.A. Hayek in his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture “The Pretense of Knowledge” had much to say about the rise of scientism. Not that many people listened. Scientism had already become far too entrenched to eradicate.

Unfortunately, the problem didn’t end with economists. Eager for a piece of the action, psychologists and sociologists joined the scientism parade, substituting statistical correlation for impossible-to-validate causation. Social engineers joined the fray, cherry-picking from among the explosion of irreproducible social science studies that met their fancy. This allowed them to arm politicians with the talisman of “science” so they could once again pursue a smorgasbord of often conflicting policies following the political fashions of the times. Over the decades these included eugenics-driven population control, sterilizing imbeciles, lobotomizing psychiatric patients, chemically castrating homosexuals, imposing forced bussing on public schoolchildren to promote racial integration, drugging young boys who wouldn’t sit still in school, and the latest craze of performing mastectomies on disturbed teenage girls struggling with womanhood.

Even anthropologist and archeologists hankered for a slice of the power and influence showered on scientism, twisting their scholarship to synergistically pursue academic fashions. Hence the quest to restore indigenous ways of knowing, promote the fiction of the peaceful noble savage, stop all research on the connection between genes and intelligence, and queerify historical figures from every epoch.

Most people are unaware of the difference between science and scientism, as well as the starkly disparate challenges faced trying to engineer physical systems comprised of inanimate objects vs. social systems comprised of human beings with agency. We are now paying a big price for this ignorance. As social engineering disasters pile up like multi-vehicle highway collisions, public trust in both kind of “experts” is eroding.

What can be done to restore some modicum of sanity? Let’s try turning off the money spigot by declaring a moratorium on government funding of all social sciences.

Will society suffer from a dearth of social science research? Not as much as it suffers from too much of it. Will a moratorium lead to the granting of fewer social science college degrees, reducing the number of deeply indebted unemployables demanding loan forgiveness? We can only hope.

Let us heed the warning that President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave in his farewell address, at the least as it applies to social scientism masquerading as real science (which is not without its problems, including corrosive politicization and a reproducibility crisis of its own – a subject for another day).

“The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”