RE: My new YouTube video about atheism
September 24, 2020 at 10:29 pm
(This post was last modified: September 24, 2020 at 10:33 pm by GrandizerII.)
(September 24, 2020 at 5:58 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote:Grandizer Wrote:Way to shit on decades of work in the social sciences.
I am not saying doing social science research doesn't sometimes require a lot of effort. I am just saying the conclusions social scientists end up with are way less certain than those in natural sciences.
So? That doesn't make the research less scientific. There are still controlled double-blind trials involved in some of these fields, along with objective measures constructed to measure variables of interest (and even the means to establish their reliability and validity). And some of these trials, believe it or not, are true experiments. That said, surveys and quasi-experiments still often work fine for their particular purposes, even if conclusions on causality should not be as confidently made. People tend to deride surveys but they don't realize a lot of effort is often put to ensure they work as intended (including, for example, adding questions just to test whether the respondent is taking the survey seriously and/or being generally honest in their answers - or even via rigorous analysis of the answer patterns). And often surveys are not conducted in isolation and are a part of wider study that may include true experiments and such. Some studies are done to build hypotheses, and other studies are done to test them. It's a variety of things.
So less certainty, maybe, but science doesn't operate on absolute certainty anyway. Plus, given enough time, technology, and further research, there will hopefully be more certainty regarding various aspects of human nature, both individually and collectively, presently and historically.