To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine

"Like medicine, social science is subjective. And it is also normative. We have a stake not just in knowing how things are but also in using this knowledge to make things the way we think they should be. We study voting behavior in the interest of preserving democratic values. We study the relationship between inflation and unemployment in order to mitigate the next recession. Yet unlike medicine, so far social scientists have not proven to be very effective in finding a way to wall off positive inquiry from normative expectations, which leads to the problem that instead of acquiring objective knowledge we may only be indulging in confirmation bias and wishful thinking."

Some questions just deal with issues that are just not quantifiable (even the question he poses about immigration is just not completely quantifiable). And even questions that are quantifiable are often affected by beliefs (i.e. what happened to inflation in the 70s was a consequence, in part, of what people believed about the Philips Curve in the 1960s).

Perhaps more relevant: social science went through this phase nearly 100 years ago (in history, more than 100 years ago). And this issue was resolved often more than 50 years ago^. For example in history, EH Carr: people are not objective, arguments are often contingent but there are facts, present your argument, let your reader judge for themselves).

The most harmful thing is to claim that there can be objective truth about these issues. Economics has thrown itself against the rocks far too often. The trend towards this in history at mid/end of the 19th century produced some extremely unimportant work.

This can also tend towards quackery. I remember a biologist in my local politics dept (relatively prestigious) got a ton of funding because he believed he had found a way to spot the physical attributes of terrorists (srs, not joking, last I checked he had over $1m in funding from govt). Some people, like the author, are just unaware of the wider context. Less preaching about ways to "solve" social science, more listening (btw, in my experience all of the above applies to scientific research too...all research is contingent).

^ We first had the move towards (broadly) logical positivism/empiricism, then to post-modernism when that seemed ridiculous, and now to (imo) a reasonably healthy medium.

Social sciences is nowhere near the top of this list.

https://nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/aca...

Overall my understanding is that it is harder to be an academic in almost any field these days, but especially the humanities - social sciences are an in-between zone, but I doubt the universities cutting language and history programs consider the social sciences more 'science' than 'humanities.

Seems to me that there is a stigma around social sciences - both for legitimate reasons, and because, like anything which shines a light on the uncomfortable (systemic bias, racism, capitalism, etc) people get defensive and afraid and reactive and concoct conspiracy theories.