It's truth. Even though there is a lot of pulp being publicized in science atm (mostly due to publications contributing to rankings and shit), there is still plenty of actual science being done in all of the fields.

😂

I may be wrong but this is how I feel (more or less) about how scientific these fields are:

Math - follow the rules and you can't get the wrong answer (not really science at all).

Physics / Chemistry - everything but 1 factor of interest is controlled for in experiments.
Biology - most things are controlled for in experiments.

Psychology - some things are controlled for in experiments, nothing is controlled for in observational studies.
Sociology - nothing is controlled for in observational studies.

This is why I cannot agree that sociology is anywhere near as scientific as physics.

its perfectly valid to define "scientific" the way you do, but whats the purpose of such a ranking? the less chaotic and uncontrollable a subject's study object is, the purer and more reliable its results and conclusions are. not really a big surprise.

from math, which only deals with theoretical constructs and is so pure it can be based entirely on logic and doesnt even have to conduct experiments, over physics and chemistry up to social sciences like sociology, economics and psychology, which deal with the chaotic and erratic nature of human behavior.

such a ranking is kinda pointless, isnt it?

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 11 2017 10:23am

The purpose of the ranking, in my opinion, is that it lends degrees of confidence to the conclusions drawn in different fields. Controlling for variables and repeatedly experimenting is crucial to science.

Many peer-reviewed, and generally 'accepted', psychological and sociological studies are neither experimental nor repeatable. Compare this to math, physics and chemistry where peer-reviewed and 'accepted' theories are always tested many times before being published.

When a 'science' strays from repeatable experiments, it also loses some credibility with me.

This. The more accurate in terms of predictive power a theory is, the better it is. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology all tend to have extremely high reliability as far as their theories are concerned, because it appears that the nature of the subjects they describe is highly consistent. It's not often you make new observations that break these previously well defined and observed patterns.

Sociology, on the other hand, is much, much less reliable because the subjects it studies are highly adaptable and individual. It's extremely difficult to come up with rules that govern behavior because there are just too many variables to control for, let alone the fact that each animal / person has its own free will, genetic inclinations, and life experiences that lead them to often make different decisions in the same scenarios. I wouldn't say that it's completely useless as a field of study, but it's so unreliable that I would have a hard time putting stock in anything it has to say. Studies are often hard to replicate, and even when they are repeatable, they don't apply to a significant portion of the population anyway.

To try and equate "hard sciences" with the "social sciences" is completely dishonest. There is (quite literally) a world of difference between them and their usefulness.

I'm not equating them in terms of replicability. I'm just saying that social sciences are actually sciences. How big a confidence interval is has no relation to whether the scientific method was applied or not.

The entire issue is that the scientific method is NOT being applied in full; part of the scientific method requires experiments to be repeatable, which Sociology tries to skirt around by using insufficient P values.

Well said.

Sociology is definitely science.

It's just that most sociologists and psychologists are poor scientists.

I agree about math. It's philosophy, not science. There is some limited science in mathematics, in the form of non-analytical techniques. Approximation methods and all that, but that's a relatively small part of the field.



He's right. Remember, science is just a method.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 11 2017 01:02pm