My new YouTube video about atheism

[FlatAssembler]

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.

the article specifically is related to psychology but all the same

No, it's not really the same. Sociologists and economists (and sometimes, but not always, linguists) assume psychology is true and make hypotheses that presuppose that. Therefore, the conclusions of sociologists and economists can only be true if their assumptions about psychology are true, and are thus less certain than psychology is. And not all parts of psychology are the same. You just can't compare the levels of scientific rigour in social psychology with the rigour in psychophysics, and it should be obvious why.

We can forget about law.

I am not sure what you mean.

And history.

History is usually not considered science. But if you want to, I guess you can say it's the softest science or one of the softest sciences. Using history to argue against sociological or economic theory makes you sound silly, right?

And geography.

Geography is a multi-disciplinary field of many sciences, some rather hard and some very soft.

Sociology

And what has sociology done useful? What has it even reached a consensus about? Has sociology ever made a prediction that proved to be correct?

psychology

Some parts of psychology are a useful hard science (psychophysics), some border with pseudoscience (social psychology). And psychology as a whole isn't exactly a social science.

education

I am not sure what you mean.

economics

How has economics helped us? Economists basically never predict recessions. They always talk about fairytales of eternal economic growth, and, when that proves wrong, they search for some smart-sounding post-hoc explanation for how it could happen. Sorry, but that's not science. Sure, not all of economics is equal. Austrian School of Economics is arguably not even coherent, it obviously contradicts basic game theory. Microeconomics is certainly more scientific than macroeconomics is, but comparing it to physics, or even to linguistics, is absurd.

none of these disciplines have ever contributed as much to the human condition as corresponding 'ha' to a short 'a'

It's not very useful, but at least it very strongly suggests the De Saussure's model of language that made that prediction was somewhat correct. There appears to be nothing like that in other social sciences.

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Come on guise.

Instead of just disparaging a blanket claim about the social sciences, educate him on why they're useful.

If he can’t doesn’t already grasp why economics, law, education and sociology are both important and useful, I honestly doubt I’ll be able to get through to him.

Boru

If economics and sociology could be studied scientifically, then they would be useful. But that doesn't seem to be the case. See, when you make a well-known economic or sociological model, you influence peoples behaviour with that model. Social scientists can't be passive observers, no matter how hard they try. People generally act in a way that makes the models less true just because they know about them. So, you can't know if your model had a kernel of truth to it or not.