Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies
Stop treating non-sciences like sciences.<p>The social sciences have a certain hypocrisy to them. "We do not need to be as grounded in math as the other sciences" runs up against "Our results are mathematically significant and deserve the same respect as the other sciences."<p>Doing statistics in the hard sciences is easy, yet we study them at a graduate level. Setting up variable controls in hard sciences is easier, yet we spend years training people on eliminating even the smallest chance of error through rigid lab protocols. The hard sciences allow you to collect enough data-points, that a large effect size is almost always statistically significant... yet we report p-values religiously every step of the way.<p>Social sciences have none of those affordances, yet they somehow get away with even less mathematical and statistical rigor. I mean this both in training and in practice. The social sciences are harder to control. It is a 'science' that can say very little about anything (purely due to difficulty of setting up controlled experiments). Yet, social science produces a disproportionate number of 'spicy' results.<p>Not all fields will produce 'ground breaking' work and that should be fine. I'm not sure where the incentive/impetus for it comes from, but social scientists build storied careers on results that would get rejected from any respected science journal for lack of rigor. It is as if there is this pressure on every academic to prove something fundamental about human nature few years, all while it's plainly clear that we as humans know almost nothing about human nature. If centuries of work in this field has not been able to find a few foundational facts (fancy alliteration), then maybe the field needs to reconsider its ambitiousness and self-assured confidence.