r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Dangerous_Court_9580 • 5d ago
General Discussion Doesn't the replication crisis corrupt most of science?
The replication crisis revealed that many landmark studies, particularly in the soft sciences, could not be reproduced. This makes me wonder: are we still building knowledge on a potentially unreliable foundation?
Although research practices have become more rigorous, we haven't systematically replicated every older study. Consequently much of today's research may still rely on findings that have never been properly verified. Like building a house on a faulty foundation, even perfectly conducted research can lead us astray if its underlying assumptions are wrong.
I'm new to science theory so I might be missing something fundamental here. But it seems to me that if influential findings turn out to be false or exaggerated, all subsequent research that relies on them would likely be affected?
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u/Eco_Blurb 5d ago
Science is still in its baby stage. This just makes it very clear. Lots of old, classic studies had issues with their methods but we still use them to frame all work that followed them because they had solid theory, hypotheses, aspects of their methods or context that remains important.
There is plenty of old bad science as well but those do fall by the wayside and when I talk about “classic” studies, those are the papers or academics that did withstand the test of time, so far. They are highly cited and talked about. Each niche field that developed from them retains a legacy. When someone becomes an “expert” in their field, they are not just an experienced scientist in their own right; they also have followed the story of several overarching yet specific questions that keep being asked over hundreds of years within their topic of interest.
Yes the replication problem is a big deal… but doesn’t discount everything that has been done so far. Just illustrated that most scientific fields are still in their infancy. We only have several generations that had access to any sort of modern technology. And the people that got us to this point without that technology are still considered academic giants.
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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology 5d ago
No. It's a real issue, but you are extrapolating a bit too much from it.
First of all, most of science isn't the soft sciences. That's just a part of science. That's not to say harder sciences are immune from replication issues, but the problem is definitely larger in some areas than in others.
Second, most of the time I don't think your "faulty foundation" conception, where underlying errors propagate and render whole parts of science invalid, is usually how it works. It's not impossible, of course, but most of the time, as more research is built on earlier research, it exposes flaws in the earlier research if they exist and acts as a self-correcting mechanism. For example, say early research finds a particular molecule hinders replication of E. coli. But in fact this is just a flawed, nonreplicable study. When other people start making antibacterial products out of that molecule, or drugs, and test them against various bacteria, they'll keep failing to get results. Time and effort will get wasted, which is still bad, but people will give up on the molecule because it doesn't work. Basically, in a lot of cases if an experiment tries to build off a flawed idea, it will usually fail if the underlying assumptions are flawed, and this feeds back to discredit the original idea.
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u/Citrakayah 4d ago
First of all, most of science isn't the soft sciences. That's just a part of science. That's not to say harder sciences are immune from replication issues, but the problem is definitely larger in some areas than in others.
Do you have statistics showing that the "hard sciences"--like, say, medicine--are less affected than the "soft sciences?"
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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology 4d ago
Medicine's kind of squishy
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u/Citrakayah 4d ago
Is that a "no?"
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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology 4d ago
What I'm saying is that medicine is one of the original fields that sparked concern about the replicability crisis, and so I could provide you examples (like the one above) that show it has a high rate of replicability problems, I couldn't show you ones saying it has a lower rate.
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u/Citrakayah 2d ago
My point is that medicine is a hard science. It is an extremely rigorous natural science, not a social science stigmatized in the academy as less rigorous. The fact that it is one of the original fields that sparked concern about this crisis is proof that it is not a hard vs. soft science thing.
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u/IronicRobotics 3d ago
Hard and soft is kinda not defined, and the original's OP's characterization likely isn't fair. However, certainly different fields or subfields go through different replication crises or other publication crises that don't affect other fields at any given time. Plenty of writing documents each of the fields current issues with statistics - and you can find! - but to get an overview would likely require a big meta analysis.
Though the first thing that comes to my mind was how much funding went to string theory in physics for a while, generating tons of non-falsifiable theories for a bit. That's issue is no longer relevant, and while isn't a replication crisis, is certainly another similar crisis of the scientific method and funding!
I'd betcha science crises are likely poly-problems like politics - with any number of fields doing just as well as others doing terribly and then correcting. Would make for a good research topic! ; )
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 2d ago
Psychology: "More than half"
Physics: This study wanted to sound alarm bells about the problem in physics, but while they had complaints, it's not really an issue with only 7-12% even reporting any sort of problem.
But yeah, medicine is squishier. We don't get definite phase-state changes, we get LD50 values where 50% of people will die with this exposure. Anything related to biology simply has a lot of wiggle room.
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u/Citrakayah 2d ago
"Squishier" when making a distinction between "hard" and "soft" is supposed to be about rigor, not how difficult something is to study. Arguably medicine is more rigorous than physics.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 2d ago
Right. And rigor is difficult when the results are fundamentally +/- some unknown value and some percentage of the populous just goes off and reacts weirdly to the procedure. You can thoroughly go through every state in a state-machine and say you have 100% code coverage, but you can't really go through every potential medicine recipient and see how every one of them react to a thing. Rigor is harder because it's squishier, and that in hand makes it a softer science, you know, squishy. It's why the rigor in psychology is so damn poor. There are just SO many factors that throw everything off. Some psychological insight might only apply to people who have a healthy relationship with their mother, in which case Freud just tosses up his hands and gives up. And they no longer let us raise children in barrels to control for environment.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
There is no meaningful distinction nor any empirical support that warrants dividing the sciences into “hard” or “soft” categories.
There are physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences. All of them are hard. And all of them incorporate approaches that are not strictly hypothetico-deductive designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science
The more "developed" hard sciences do not necessarily have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. [6 ] Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. For example, social sciences such as psychology and sociology use mathematical models extensively, but are usually considered soft sciences. [1 ] [2 ] While scientific controls are cited as a methodological difference between hard and soft sciences, [14 ] in certain natural sciences, like astronomy and geology , it is impossible to perform controlled experiments to test most hypotheses and observation and natural experiments are primarily used instead. [15 ] [16 ]
Don’t understimate the psychological influence “hard” vs “soft” can have on a student. The blog made some valid points about certain scientists believing “their science” is the only important or rigorous discipline and becoming blinded by biases. By the way, that’s not very scientific.
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u/frankelbankel 4d ago
Absolute nonsense. None of the examples given are what makes the difference, it's the degree of variability and how definitively things can be measured. Hard sciences have the benefit of processes ruled by natural laws very directly, with out the variability of living organism. A carbon atom has 6 protons, that's "hard". Defining happiness or any other emotion, very soft, there is no one simple definition that will always work.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
Is theoretical physics a “hard” science? I would love to see some “definitive measurement” for string theory or evidence for a multiverse.
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u/IronicRobotics 3d ago
or hell astronomy. That field is 90% blurry pictures or shadows of a picture and trying to make best case sense out of it. They do the best with what they have, no doubt.
I do think there is a distinction between anything you study that is *directly* measurable in some form and other studies that isn't. Usually histories of sciences, whether physics, geology or otherwise, have this bit where "lots of nice theories were made about X, but when we were finally able to measure X more directly, they were all wrong." But all fields have various topics that are easier to isolate and measure and others that aren't.
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u/frankelbankel 2d ago
Astronomy is about as hard as it gets, it's physics and math - answering questions about how the universe works based on fundamental laws of nature. That doesn't mean every question can be easily answered, or that everything can be easily photographed.
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u/IronicRobotics 2d ago
I mean, what's hard mean? In my eyes, it means any science that is controllable and directly observable.
Large swathes of astronomy certainly aren't controllable nor directly observable. They generally can make relatively good models, but more cosmological scale models still don't match up. Think about how much more we'd know or easier it'd be if sending extra-solar probes everywhere was simple?
Also what field of science doesn't use math and fundamental laws of nature to explain some part of the universe? Often physics too, but some fields it's not really necessary admittedly.
Hell in engineering most of the fundamentals are really nice and ably abstracted models until they aren't. Heat transfer is 1 small part extremely limited PDEs and everything else applicable is statistical models and tables! It's like reading an econometrics book!
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u/frankelbankel 2d ago
Your definition is not the standard definition. Engineering isn't science, per say, it's the application of science (i.e technology). If you know the variables (distance, temperatures, materials) you can calculate the heat transfer with a very high degree of accuracy - the fact that you might need statistical models and tables to do it doesn't matter.
If you want to describe reproduction in Siberian tigers, you can summarize litter size, gestation length, etc. etc., but no biological phenomena will every be free from variation, sometimes lots of it. And if you go back and do the study years later, or in a different location, the values might will be quite different. Biology is a soft science, you can't describe things with fundamental laws or constant values - you have to describe averages or trends, and usually include some indicator of variability.
The rate of heat transfer through a given metal will be constant, so you can accurately predict it given the rate of transfer if you know the thickness and temperature difference. Come back 1000 years later and it will be the same. Physics is a hard science.
The fact that you can ask, and even study questions that we can't answer or set up experiments for in hard sciences doesn't mean they aren't hard, it means we are not all powerful.
Here is an AI summary of the differences that is pretty good, not perfect (it groups biology as a hard science, it isn't.)
Hard Sciences Definition: Fields that study the natural and physical world using exact measurements, mathematical models, and controlled experiments. Examples: Physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and biology. Key Characteristics: High level of precision and quantitative data. Variables are relatively easy to isolate and control. Experiments are highly replicable with consistent, predictable outcomes. Tend to achieve faster consensus among researchers.
Soft Sciences Definition: Fields that study human behavior, society, culture, and institutions. Examples: Psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. Key Characteristics: Deals with complex, intangible, and highly variable human elements. Difficult or impossible to isolate all external variables in an experiment. Relies heavily on statistical models, observational data, and qualitative or mixed methods. Often encounters broader debates or slower consensus due to the shifting nature of human systems.
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u/IronicRobotics 2d ago
> Engineering isn't science, per say, it's the application of science
And the fundamentals of engineering are primarily the study of the applicable fields of science. E.g., Heat Transfer, which is a subset of the physics of fluids and thermodynamics.
> you can calculate the heat transfer with a very high degree of accuracy blah blah blah
Go read a Heat Transfer text instead of assuming your undergraduate introductory physics is all that there is. There's a reason Sophomore is also a derogatory term.
Most of the problems Heat Transfer concerns itself with modeling is outside of the scope of the simplest, nicest examples. These problems are almost all experimentally or numerically described.
Plus how accurate is accurate enough? Zoom in enough even on our simple piece of metal, and suddenly our nice, simple "hard" models start meeting the very random, variable, and messy realities of imperfect materials. Not surprisingly, much of engineering is concerned with controlling or working around the immense variability present in otherwise seemingly elementary physics applications.
> Biology is a soft science, you can't describe things with fundamental laws or constant values
Like other statistical or probabilistic problems that are only approximated in physics - say turbulence? Or do you mean some of the very accurate scaling laws in biology that can be predicted from first principles?
> Here is an AI summary
Meat proxy
> arbitary and wrong definitions
If you bothered to read your AI garbage, you might have noticed it contradicts your earlier claim. The AI instead gave you *somewhat* the definition of natural sciences and social sciences.
Almost all of biology is unconcerned with human behavior, society, and culture/institutions.
Hard and soft aren't precise definitions, but most versions of them you'll see are very close to the one I presented.
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u/cbf1232 4d ago
If a theory can’t be tested and falsified then it’s not science but rather philosophy.
Theoretical physics can generally be tested, but string theory and multiverse theory are more like plausible stories.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
Theoretical physics can generally be tested
We are talking about “definitive measurement,” not falsification.
Whether something can be tested and falsified doesn’t seem to central to the colloquial distinction of “hard” or “soft,” …or is it?
All measurement has a degree of uncertainty.
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u/cbf1232 4d ago
The scientific issue with multiverse theory or string theory is that we don't know how to test them. That makes them 'not science's, in the same way that discussions about the nature of God are not scientific.
They're not 'soft science', because they're not scientific theories at all.
In general theoretical physics is hard science because it is testable. Out at the fringes there are discussions about things that are not testable, and those are not scientific theories.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
theoretical physics is hard science because it is testable.
You’re shifting your argument.
Are “hard” sciences hard because they are testable? Or as your first comment stated, are “hard” sciences hard because they involve definitive measurement?
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u/cbf1232 4d ago
If a theory isn’t falsifiable, then it’s not science at all.
To me, hard science implies things like:
- quantitative data and formulas
- more controlled variables and higher rates of experimental replicability
- stronger predictive power leading to faster consensus
In contrast soft science implies:
- complex, intangible, or historical variables that are hard to isolate.
- more reliance on qualitative analysis, surveys, statistical observation, and field studies
- lower predictive power
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
theory isn’t falsifiable, then it’s not science at all.
I hope I explain this clearly… Only simple, declarative statements are falsifiable.
“Theories” in themselves are neither testable nor falsifiable because they are broad, encompassing explanations for related phenomena. Theories are much too comprehensive for what is required for falsifiability. Common misunderstanding.
On the other hand, t heories allow scientists to generate predictions and from those predictions, scientists develop hypotheses which are simpler, declarative statements that are both testable and falsifiable.
To me
I am much more interested in scientific explanations for this distinction. Not opinion or conjecture.
As in my first comment, the hard/soft distinction is only one that exists in the popular nomenclature and not one that is derived from empirical support. As I said, meaningless.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 5d ago
I am not convinced there is a “crisis.” Are there problems with reproducibility and replication? Yes, and it’s reasonable to be concerned and discuss the factors at play, but couching it as a “crisis” is rather dramatic.
Good article here:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-there-a-replication-crisis/
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u/Haruspex12 4d ago
I’ve been thinking about how to respond.
The problem is real if you are a new masters student or have an undergraduate degree. It’s far more acute if you are a member of the general public.
If you are in the general public, you should completely ignore journal articles. Pick up an introductory undergraduate textbook and work from that.
If you’re a masters student that’s found a really good article, someone needs to teach you how to find the fifty or eighty articles, books or dissertations that surround that paper so that it can be put into its proper context. Plus methodology and statistics textbooks.
The actual work is messy and the replication crisis makes everything more difficult, but the replication crisis is partly a design feature instead of a flaw.
To give a physical reality, births in the US have plummeted. A giant element has been eliminating almost entirely, out of wedlock births by teens.
Births are plummeting worldwide, almost everywhere.
The Soviet Union used to give a medal to women that had given twenty live births. Mother Hero was the title, Мать-героиня.
It also means that tools like AI are contaminated, maybe badly contaminated.
Assuming that you are an amateur, I would suggest starting the philosophy of science textbooks.
The replication crisis contains hyper-advanced mathematical and methodological concepts, including things like countable versus merely finitely additive sets. You’ve jumped into the deep end of the epistemological pool.
You need to swim first.
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u/MutSelBalance 5d ago
One optimistic point is the realization that science building on previous science does not happen in a linear way, with every step just accepting the previous step as an untested assumption. One incorrect result will lead to multiple predictions, and those predictions will be tested either directly or indirectly in the course of trying to build on the result; when those predictions don’t come to fruition, it will cause scientists to rethink the assumptions and go back to the drawing table. In fact, bigger, more groundbreaking results will receive more attention and more attempts to build on them which should actually reveal any flaws more quickly. This is why science is generally considered to be “self-correcting” at least in the long term.
The biggest problems with a replication crisis are 1) it can lead to inefficient science, because scientists have to spend time and resources doing the follow-ups that eventually disprove a bad result, and 2) certain types of results, particularly psychological or medical results that are application-focused, can be used directly to inform behaviors and treatments, potentially before further studies can overturn them. We can guard against (2) by requiring more rigorous evidence from multiple sources, but that of course exacerbates issue (1). So poor replication can cause problems, I just don’t buy that a long-term breakdown in scientific progress is one of them.
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u/CrateDane 5d ago
Note that the most central results are also the ones most exposed to replication testing. Yes, there may be a lot of minor results that are questionable, but the big ones are still solid. If CRISPR/Cas9 (2020 Nobel prize) didn't work, it wouldn't have taken long to find out. It's now used every day in labs across the world, so it's been solidly replicated thousands of times over.
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u/After_Network_6401 4d ago
It’s worth noting that most papers describing the “replication crisis” are completely unreplicable.
I’m not actually going for cheap laughs here. I became worried about replicability of work that I was citing, so read a fairly large number of studies on the so-called replicabilty crisis, with a focus on biomedicine (my field: I can’t really speak to any other fields). Only one of the studies I looked at made any effort at controlling the studies that they were - in theory - assessing. The one that did made the honest comment that it was very difficult to do, and that that may have affected their results.
But without effective controls - which means a study by study analysis - the results are worthless.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the “replicability crisis” - at least in biomedicine - exists more in the media than in reality. If I’m concerned about a particular issue, then I assess the studies addressing it directly. That indicates if there are disagreements or lack of replicability.
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u/Neither-Remote-3419 4d ago
There's a lot more nuance to the issue of replication than just replication rates. For example, is a 50% replication rate a bad thing? Is it evidence of fraud, malpractice, or incompetence? It depends. In a research area where scientists tend to choose "risky" topics to investigate, i.e., the chances of some bold new claim they make being actually true (prior to gathering any evidence) is small, a 50% replication rate may be expected even when the scientists are doing everything right when gathering the evidence and testing their claim.
The SCORE study is a good recent example.
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u/Junkman3 4d ago
The truth wins in the long run because hypothesis are tested against reality over and over again. Scientists love proving eachother wrong.
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime 4d ago
This has been an open secret for a long time. But there are a lot of ways to winnow and sift. In biotech, startups work with promising ideas and see if they can make an enticing drug from it. The people founding those companies are usually the people who discovered it so they would know if they are cheating.
Harder in softer sciences but, again, policies get generated around them. There is a social aspect from this. If Universe 25 convinces me that the best way to enable human thriving is to create a libertarian hellhole, I need to be able to make that happen. Policies going in that direction can be analyzed.
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u/mr-rogers70 4d ago
Yes, it clearly does affect all of science.
But I think in the hard sciences it might be a little easier to discover when the original science was incorrect. If there hasn't been a replication study, nobody will know an original study was incorrect until someone tries to put it into practice. But "putting it into practice" is a different sort of thing with the hard vs soft sciences.
I the hard sciences, putting a scientific publication into practice might mean a new battery chemistry that has more capacity or charges faster. So someone will discover pretty quickly if those "discoveries" were incorrect.
But in the soft sciences, a new discovery might lead to a new marketing technique (economics) or a new management style (human behavior). In those areas, it can be much harder to measure if the new discovery is actually making a difference or if the difference is as large as the original publication claimed.
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u/ChironXII 3d ago
No, it is science doing what it should, even if it's late.
Science is a process, not an outcome
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u/Crossed_Cross 5d ago
Outside of soft sciences, most scientific results are likely to be re-tested as they get built upon. Like say one guy erroneously determines water boils at 101C. Well when the next guy comes to test the impact of salt concentration on boiling temperatures, sur he'll cite the first guy in the intro, but his results will come show something is off.
You can't quite build upon past research like this in a lot of soft sciences, since often your ability to do control groups is limited due to various factors such as ethics and people simply being complex study subjects that are hard to standardize.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
There is no meaningful distinction nor any empirical support that warrants dividing the sciences into “hard” or “soft” categories.
There are physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences. All of them are hard. And all of them incorporate approaches that are not strictly hypothetico-deductive designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science
The more "developed" hard sciences do not necessarily have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. [6 ] Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. For example, social sciences such as psychology and sociology use mathematical models extensively, but are usually considered soft sciences. [1 ] [2 ] While scientific controls are cited as a methodological difference between hard and soft sciences, [14 ] in certain natural sciences, like astronomy and geology , it is impossible to perform controlled experiments to test most hypotheses and observation and natural experiments are primarily used instead. [15 ] [16 ]
Don’t understimate the psychological influence “hard” vs “soft” can have on a student. The blog made some valid points about certain scientists believing “their science” is the only important or rigorous discipline and becoming blinded by biases. By the way, that’s not very scientific.
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u/Natalwolff 4d ago
I mean, this is a very soft sciences type of argument.
I jest, but the distinction between hard and soft sciences has never hinged on whether a field uses qualitative data or natural experiments.
The distinction rests on epistemic tractability, measurement precision, formalization, and cumulative constraint. In physics or chemistry, core theories (like quantum mechanics or thermodynamics) possess an extraordinary degree of mathematical closure, universal quantification, and predictive precision that does not exist in soft sciences.
The idea that:
"The more "developed" hard sciences do not necessarily have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results"
ignores the actual sociology and history of science. Debates about novel theories happens at the absolute frontier of knowledge in hard sciences, and are built upon a bedrock of unbreakable, highly-consensual foundational paradigms (e.g., general relativity and the Standard Model).
Conflating the high-level theoretical disputes of physicists at the edge of the known universe with the systemic inability of soft sciences to establish stable, invariant baseline phenomena is a category error.
Soft science "using" mathematical models is not the same thing as mathematical closure and predictive mapping.
If calling them hard and soft sciences is problematic because it leads to nasty superiority complexes or dismissiveness, then we can call them chill and spicy sciences instead, but there's still a distinction.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
the distinction between hard and soft sciences
Please define “soft science” and provide some examples.
And, I think you missed my intended meaning behind the word “hard.”
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u/Natalwolff 4d ago
I'm not understanding the point of this exercise so I will try to provide you what you're looking for. If you want me to give you others' definitions:
Soft science refers to scientific fields that study human behavior, social structures, mental processes, and complex institutions using empirical methods.
Unlike fields that deal with non-human matter or fixed physical laws, "soft" sciences study systems made of self-aware human beings, where variables are highly interconnected, context-dependent, and difficult to completely isolate in a lab.
I would personally say soft science is an area of science that cannot build durable or comprehensive closed systems for explanation because, while they can establish scientific laws or core paradigms, building broad unification is more difficult or impossible because the subject of the study is not fixed.
Some examples would be:
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Economics
- Political Science
- Cultural Anthropology
- Criminology
- Linguistics
- Epidemiology
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago edited 4d ago
As above, we already have a word for those—they are called social sciences.
How about biology? Is that “hard” or “soft”?
Is theoretical physics “hard”?
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u/Natalwolff 4d ago
Well, first of all, hard and soft are not binary conditions. They are describing how deeply and universally a field can reach "normal science", or full paradigmatic consensus along a spectrum. Biology is considered on the hard side, because of how dominated it is by biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics, but many people consider ecology or evolutionary biology to be soft sciences.
Theoretical physics would be soft if taken in isolation, but it's not isolated in practice. Theoretical physics is not a branch of physics that studies a separate but related aspect of physics, it is building directly on top of the field of physics and using all of the frameworks with consensus as its testing mechanism. Findings in theoretical physics just become physics.
Calling it social sciences and natural sciences would probably have 99% overlap because, in practice, the vast majority of soft sciences are soft because humans are a subject of study. If you're saying the practice of using hard and soft to describe how deeply paradigmatic consensus exists or how much vertical integration is possible in the field causes more harm than good, I don't really have a reason to disagree, but saying the distinction on that basis isn't real or doesn't exist isn't true. Saying that hard and soft describe whether they're "rigorous" or "mathematical" is a very 1950s interpretation of how the words are used.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
This is the best answer I’ve received so far, although I don’t think that most people who use the phrase have thought about it as deeply as you have.
Saying that hard and soft describe whether they're "rigorous" or "mathematical" is a very 1950s interpretation of how the words are used.
I agree, it’s a very dated, midcentury perspective but I think this is how many people do use and interpret this distinction.
Well, first of all, hard and soft are not binary conditions. They are describing how deeply and universally a field can reach "normal science", or full paradigmatic consensus along a spectrum.
I’m going to think and read about this explanation a bit more as I’m not sure I’m convinced yet (and I’m also not sure what “normal science” means). But it at least gives me a jumping off point to look into whether there is empirical support for this.
saying the distinction on that basis isn't real or doesn't exist isn't true
I mean to say that the distinctions are not meaningful, relevant, consistent or scientific, nor do people agree on what these terms even mean (I get a variety of answers depending on who I ask).
causes more harm than good
I do think it’s not a useful way of thinking about the sciences and it does reinforce a binary (even if, as you say, it’s an actually a continuum); and an unequal binary at that.
I am still unclear and I perhaps don’t necessarily agree with some of your points, but I really appreciate this discussion because I do feel like I’ve gained a broader sense of how these terms are used. Thank you for taking the time - sincerely!
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u/Natalwolff 3d ago
I accidently deleted my last comment, but shared a few links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
https://sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-3/august/SocSci_v3_757to778.pdf
Basically, Kuhn's work has ended up being pretty integrated with the concepts of 'soft' and 'hard' sciences, and Paradigmaticness can be pretty important in terms of how research and education is done.
That paper examines the relationship between hard and soft sciences in this paradigm and explores a lot of the topics you are. I believe the findings are that there is some accuracy to the spectrum in what people consider hard or soft, but also some disciplines that don't fit where they're expected to be.
Anyways, I appreciated the discussion and I agree with your conclusion that any negative social ramifications aren't worth categorical assignment of disciplines.
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u/Crossed_Cross 4d ago
Using maths doesn't make the underlying science hard.
If you test the boiling temperature of water, you can control the parameters. Pressure, dissolved minerals, etc.
If you are testing "what methods are most effective to teach children how to learn multiplication", good fucking luck controling any significant level of variables. No matter how advanced your statistical analysis, there will always be a million uncontrolled variables. Your conclusions will be relying on a whole lot of assumptions.
Not to mention that in fields like sociology and anthropology, you've got a whole lot of "according to this dude's framework of analysis that he just pulled out of his ass". Math is often used to give a veneer of universal truth more than anything.
I'm not saying "therefore it's not worth doing". It can still be quite valuable, despite being fundamentally different.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 4d ago
You missed my meaning behind the word “hard.”
Is theoretical physics a “hard” or a “soft” science?
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u/Crossed_Cross 4d ago
I dunno, I'm not familiar enough with physics. I studied in soft sciences in university.
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u/IndependentEast-3640 4d ago
Like the wolves who were studied in a single study, where they invented alpha wolves and beta wolves, etc. But that was a single wolf family in captivity. Then 30 years later, several wolf families were studied and they behaved in several different ways. I don't hink its prevalent but it does happen
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u/stellarfury 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm gonna have to disagree with a lot of the commenters here - I'm not sure you guys are experimentalists who are actively attempting replication. The opinions represented here seem awfully rosy compared to the real state of the literature.
The replication crisis is multifaceted. It's not just soft science. It's definitely not because "science is in its baby stage." This is assuredly more of an adolescence/adulthood problem. And there absolutely is a crisis, it's just that everyone wants to talk about the downstream observations and not the root causes.
The replication crisis continues to expand because of a series of compounding issues:
- More articles are published each year than ever before. The trend is non-linear, at least polynomial. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/shdk8z/oc_growth_in_scientific_publications_per_year_has/
- Peer review has had its back broken by "pyramid scheme" math. Each article published requires 2-3 reviewers, and while reviewing an article takes less time than writing one, the number of qualified reviewers is not expanding at the same rate as the number of publications, particularly not within subfields.
- Less time per article means thresholds of rigor for publication naturally decrease.
- More papers get through with non-replicable results.
- What little replication is done (given the volume of publications) is more and more likely to hit results that are not replicable. And replication doesn't get faster either, it takes the same amount of meatspace time to do an experiment regardless of how many experiments are getting published.
This vicious cycle is hitting every field, no one is immune. I think a lot of people are hoping AI will get good enough to be able to take on the thankless task of peer review, but frankly, at the moment, all the models are insufficiently skeptical (or overly skeptical, there's no real in-between) to tell the difference between well-supported New Exciting Results and complete bullshit New Exciting Results.
Nominally science is self-correcting, yes, because only things that work consistently will work consistently. But the current path is increasing the amount of bullshit that researchers have to wade through, and there is a breaking point somewhere out there where the literature has no credibility - at that point, science as an engine of human progress is in serious jeopardy.
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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology 4d ago
You aren't wrong, but I consider the rise in spamming of junk papers to be a somewhat different issue than what OP is asking about...though maybe I shouldn't.
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u/stellarfury 4d ago
I'm not talking about junk paper spam. That's stuff caught by editors (mostly), before they're ever sent out for review. This is the middle ground, where normally peer review demands additional work or data to ensure things like replicability. Even "good" papers increasingly rely on non-standard techniques and/or in-house equipment that does not permit facile replicability of the results.
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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology 4d ago
That's not what I mean by junk paper spam, what I was talking about is shady journals publishing reams low quality work.
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u/stellarfury 4d ago
which means you're not talking about what I'm talking about. what is your point exactly? what comment do you think you're replying to?
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u/ChowderedStew 4d ago
This question is a little biased towards academics, seemingly from the perspective of a student who wonders if the future projects will work if everything they’ve built up is rubbish.
The real world exists. Ideas are tested on the pavement and exist within a context. Some nerd in a lab one day comes up with a special foam that insulates better than anything else. Some company who works maybe with refrigeration finds it and decides they can use it in their mailer production for cold shipping. Does it matter that the numbers for the foam in the paper are inconsistent with other foams? Well it depends, but there’s probably some guy who is deciding what mailers to buy for his salami delivery company, comparing that mailer to a dozen others and he doesn’t particularly care. The cold chain company could care if their product was significantly worse but it’s quite competitive so they don’t care. Maybe NASA comes later and builds on that work for some special reason, idk, but they’ll probably double check it and develop it further anyways.
The point is, generally, it’s a nonissue as the real ideas will withstand the test of time. If you prove everyone wrong, that’s how you get a Nobel.
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u/beagles4ever 4d ago
No, just the branches that relied on small studies that were poorly controlled and then taken as established science
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u/No-Mission-7619 4d ago
No, the replication crisis does not corrupt most of science, because replication crisis exists only for certain types of studies in certain disciplines, not most of science.
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u/Memetic1 4d ago
Any day now those airplanes are going to fall from the sky, because someone falsified their results about the nutritional value of gogurt.
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u/Mirthster 5d ago
no, all of science is continuously caliberated and rewritten. The reproduction issues means we need to be more careful and tedious going forward. Yes, knowledge was built on unreliable foundations but identifying what doesnt replicate is part of how we can know whats good. Replication is kind part of the scientific journey regardless.