What are Laws of Nature?

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't see that hard sciences as being 'macho'. They are simply more tested and reliable.

Too often in the 'soft' sciences, the numbers involved in the studies are not nearly enough to give a high degree of reliability to the studies. let's face it, a standard significance level of p<.05 is crazy. For any serious consideration, it should be more like p<.0001 or less.

But my point was the those that study humans are more likely to be harmed by the biases because they are studying humans. That means that the biases are much more likely to be due to ego, societal assumptions, and political positioning. That means that conclusions that are not actually supported are more likely to get adopted and taught as 'science' when they are not actually supported by the scientific method.

Bias attacks from the front and rear in social sciences.  It's not just the biases of the observers, but the biases of the subjects making reports - and not just the biases of males.  However....we don't think that the moon, for example, is conspiring to or suffering from human biases by presenting itself as a particular size.

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Just to continue along with that - we might attempt to reconstruct the circumstances and psychology of pagan religious practices as an issue of academic interest. To do so..however, we have three main points of reference distributed into two groups of extant people or sources (by and large). The contemporized points of view of modern people ( pagan and otherwise) - the reports of christianized monks, and the silent or quasi silent historical pagans, themselves - both the subject of inquiry and a mute party to the same.

As to whether or not these things are accounted for - our simple knowledge of their existence compellingly suggests otherwise. The only debate is to whether they're adequately accounted for, and the consensus amongst social scientists in this regard is not only that they aren't - but that they literally cannot be - largely due to no3.

Pursuant to all of this, we can see that human sacrifice, whatever it was, was emphatically not an issue of people doing bad things for bad reasons. It was not maladjustment or disordered thought. Consequently, we can determine that it did not take a sick or unwell human being to engage in such practices or even volunteer as a sacrifice, despite all later protestations to the contrary arising from cultural and historical bias. Even the idea that the "soft sciences" are not sufficiently scientific is a relic of the past. Nowadays, when people want to know whether or not a group of pagans were bloodthristy savages -or- whether a ragtag judeans wandered the desert for forty years - they do the work.

Turns out, they weren't...and they didn't - and you can assign whatever level of certitude you have towards the size of the moon towards that in equal measure. I'd even go so far as to say that poly, in his own way, is subject to the biases of the past (and not without reason) when it comes to the very idea of so-called soft science. The "hard sciences" reliably predict the outcome of the rocket, the soft sciences reliably predict human response to said rocket to a stunning degree of accuracy, as measured by the entire industry of predicting and leveraging human response for profit. That we have many potential responses to a single inculcating event clouds that realization, but it's there nevertheless.

It's certainly true that alot of what we thought we knew about the prehistoric world is upended by, say, LIDAR - but I don't expect to see poly arguing against the conclusions that people might arrive at about prehistoric peoples on the basis of LIDAR data, no matter how divergent they may be from notions thought to be settled before it's use. Turns out that many prehistoric settlements were orders of magnitude larger than we thought by just kicking up dirt and referring back to magic book. That's consequential, just as the change in methodology from bible and spade to observational data and physical experimentation was consequential. Turns out..if you really wanna know about early people..you shoud invest in some scuba gear and be ready to make exhaustively well documented dives over and over again. On and on and on.