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Hi Stephen,
The baby and bath water ought not to be thrown out together.  Admittedly the two op-Ed pieces are provocative and argumentative.  The Nature article however is not, and I don't think the APA's attention is misdirected. And the mathematically directed meta-analysis of prior results, is exactly the driver of the Nature critique.  It should give one pause to reflect.

Publications, and in fact NSF and other funding agencies, typically push for "new," "different," and interesting results, novel strategies, etc. in there program guidelines, and to be sucessful people get very good at claiming them, finding them and demonstrating their impacts.  It's a completely rational and logical outcome, but it doesn't necessarily get at the truth, nor make for repeatable findings.  

We live in interesting times.
C

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On Jun 24, 2012, at 1:40 PM, Stephen Uzzo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> 
> What is interesting is how "unscientific" the approach in these articles are. The problem with social sciences is not that they are too "soft" but that many of the examples they use to illustrate what social science is, are the wrong examples--throwing out the baby wit the bathwater. Just because the wrong methods are applied to look at a problem, doesn't mean the whole discipline is flawed. Social sciences are benefitting from an explosion of successful research, primarily in the field of social network analysis and network science. This kind of research is in its infancy but is leading the way in making amazing findings in social sciences. I just got back from one of the network science conferences. Here are some of the researchers and research topics, a significant number of which are social science.
> http://netsci2012.net/?page_id=75
> 
> 
> Stephen Miles Uzzo, PhD.
> VP, Science & Technology
> New York Hall of Science
> 47-01 111th Street
> Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY 11368 USA
> V +1.718 595.9177
> F +1.718.699.5227
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 24, 2012, at 3:15 PM, Richard O Brown wrote:
> 
>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
>> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
>> *****************************************************************************
>> 
>> Thanks, Charlie.  That Washington Post Editorial you mentioned, while
>> focused on "political science", bluntly asserted, "the NSF shouldn’t fund *
>> any* social science." (
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/congress-should-cut-funding-for-political-science-research/2012/06/04/gJQAuAJMEV_story.html
>> )
>> 
>> It's been a very interesting year for the status of "social science".  A
>> provocative news feature in *Nature* last month looked at the deep
>> structural problems in psychology, and described the major Reproducibility
>> Study currently underway to assess how just bad that problem is (
>> http://www.nature.com/news/replication-studies-bad-copy-1.10634).  I
>> attended last month's convention of the Association for Psychological
>> Science, and there was a lot of talk about fundamentally changing the
>> field's approach to establishing and replicating new results, in
>> recognition that the current system is broken.
>> 
>> Of course, the basic question of whether "social science" is really science
>> is as old as the field.  In 1974, Richard Feynman famously tagged
>> educational and psychological studies as "cargo-cult science", and he
>> explains why he calls them pseudoscience in this clip from the wonderful
>> 1981 documentary, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out":
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY
>> 
>> I think the question of what's really science is also an important one for
>> science museums to consider.
>> 
>> -Richard
> 
> 
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