I have two undergraduate degrees, both social sciences. For my CRJ bachelors all i had to take is a statistics course that was required on the curriculum, meanwhile the econ degree like 2/3 of classes had some level of math. Like i said look up econometric models. To the untrained eye it looks like pure math, something you'd see in engineering calculations.

I used stata for the econ undergrad degree. Some of those social sciences you have to use stats as part of your graduate degree but undergrad not generally.

https://www.channel3000.com/madison-police-arrest-2-women-accused-of-attacking-state-senator/

attackers who pummeled state senator in WI for taking a picture of the protests apprehended. i guess the one on the right's hair color change didn't fool the coppers. Blondie could get it tho

U.S. warns against planting unsolicited seeds from China

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-seeds/u-s-warns-against-planting-unsolicited-seeds-from-china-idUSKCN24S2OM





Those evil bastids. Trying to smuggle harmful plants into the US?

Statistics within psychology are actually extremely problematic, but not because the fields of sociology and psychology are inherently less capable of being quantified. I can only speak about the field of psychology at-length because it's my field of study, but there's a massive conversation that's been happening for the past several years because research in the field of psychology wasn't being replicated and a significant percentage of research that was being published included manipulations such as p-hacking.

As a result, there's been a great deal of research that has achieved astronomical levels of success and widespread teaching, only for it later to be found that the research was bunk to begin with. Very small sample sizes, homogeneous participant groups, p hacking, the entire culture of publication which values novel research over replication, etc.

In the current day, there are several seminal psychological studies that used to be taught to virtually anyone taking a Psych 101 course 5 - 10 years ago and that became highly influential (at least in perception), but that are now bunk.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is completely bunk, unethical, and would never make it through an IRB today.
Bystander Apathy as largely attributed to the Kitty Genovese case is actually completely bunk. Quite a few people actually contacted emergency services the night she was killed, contrary to the teachings of the time which led people to believe that nobody did anything.
Amy Cuddy had (previously) the most-watched TED Talk of all time on his research on power posing, which is complete bunk science. TED Talk now has an addendum added to her talk on their website, and Cuddy's research partner has completely renounced all of their previous work together.
Ego Depletion was a theory that dominated psych classes for a long time, but is completely bunk. Although, it was referenced and cited in one my courses just this last Spring.

The field has major issues, and people's criticisms about the validity of psychological research is not unwarranted, although it is overstated.

This post was edited by Handcuffs on Jul 28 2020 08:37pm

Funny thing is you can find these criticisms way back. Feynman has a talk where he speaks about the psychology students he talked to having no power to replicate experiments. Basically Experiment A, Result B. Based on this let's try to get result C. And when he points out they need to do A to get B first so they can make sure they're replicating they get shut down as a waste of time.

Biomedical sciences has a similar issue but was mostly driven by pharmaceutical companies getting pissed they were wasting money trying to build off of people's work that wasn't repeatable.

I remember watching the power poses talk and was disappointed when it got retracted. I recently learned of all the criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment and how it's basically just a repeat of the old "authority can convince you to do bad things" since the guards were coached into being aggressive.

Honestly I think since some estimates say over half of research in Psychology cannot be replicated it's very under-stated. The repeatability crisis in psychology, to me, is enough to basically call the whole field as it currently exists bullshit until prove otherwise.

Yeah, the whole field is going through major issues at the moment. I'm hopeful that we'll see meaningful changes, although there's a significant gatekeeping occurring by research institutions and the APA, which makes such needed change hard to come by.

Thing about p hacking is it's not a terrible thing to do in itself, if it's used as the basis of further research into the subject. It's done in biomedical sciences all the time. Do a clinical trial, collect a bunch of tumor samples and do genetic profiling of the individual. Create a large database of mutations, drug response, and tumor characteristics and let a program sort through for good correlations.

Then take the good correlations and see if you can find a common trend and base your next round of mechanistic experiments on that. See if the drug action is dependent on some things in the web of correlations and see if you can then create a targeted therapy for a specific sub-population.

It seems like the reason p-hacking is so bad in psychology is there's a lot of people who just stop at p > 0.05 and pretend that was their hypothesis the entire time.

I just found this youtube channel. It's by a Ph.D physicist in Germany and she explores physics problems and other problems in different fields. This is specifically an interview about the replicatability crisis that I listened to today. If you have any interest in physics and don't want to have math thrown at you, this is a good channel for entertainment. Almost as good as PBS space time.



This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jul 28 2020 09:26pm

For sure. I'll check it out. Thanks.

this sounds like a religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
The field is concerned with the objective measurement of skills and knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational achievement.

How do you even begin to objectively measure personalities or attitudes, might as well be measuring which colours are better

This post was edited by duffman316 on Jul 28 2020 11:04pm

Something being difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. You're doing that thing flat earthers do, where you don't understand the very basics and then proclaim the entire endeavor impossible.