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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
On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Charlie Carlson <[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.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>
> Congress is considering eliminating NSF funding for all Political
> Sciences. It passed the house and is on its way to the Senate. The
> discussion and debate runs the gamut, and certainly bears some relationship
> to the scientific value of many other aspects of the social sciences, where
> many similarly parallel situations and observations arise. It will be
> interesting to see how the arguments play out on the American political
> stage. The NY Times ran an op-ed piece of interest, and the Washington Post
> had one a couple of weeks back, June 6th. I found the NY Times a bit
> surprising.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/political-scientists-are-lousy-forecasters.html?ref=nationalsciencefoundation
>
> There's some truths in many of the accusations and claims by both sides
> (and I'm sure we all have our own opinions), and I agree with the likely
> fact that all science basically comes to something ultimately unknowable.
> But one key factor, after many years of NSF research support, is that
> apparently prediction and foresight still amount to something equivalent to
> random chance when it comes to human social behaviors.
> C
>
>
> The opinions and thoughts expressed here are my own and should in no way
> be construed or attributed to the Exploratorium or related organization,
> and do not represent an institutional position.
> Charles Carlson
> Senior Scientist
> exploratorium
> 3601 Lyon St.
> San Francisco, CA 94123
> [log in to unmask]
> Tel: 415-561-0319
> Fax: 415-561-0370
> http://blogs.exploratorium.edu/whyintercept/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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