Scientific method, what scientific method. Is more like are really.
If you're talking about social sciences, you do have a point, but that has got more to do with the quality of the people entering the field than anything else. I could write a book about my experiences with some professors that knew how to play the publis-or-perish game very wll, but had basically nothing to say. It is the reason I started working in the private sector instead of going for an academic career.
Fortunately, you have less of this kind of probelms in the exact sciences
I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yes, but here you're looking at the problem in isolation. Teaching methods my have improved, but there is more to learning than the strict school environment. And pedagogy is one of the softest applied sciences you can find (i would hardly call he field scientific).
Concerning how to treat criminals you're again talking about one of the softest
sciences you can find. Again, I wouldn't call criminology scientific. They may sometimes use statistics, but that's as far as it goes.
In both cases, they shun the use of the recent findings of evolutionary psycology (or sociobiology if you fancy that name) and neuroscience.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
You are so right on that one. The expertise of these so-called experts is founded on hot air in many cases. E.g. t's amazing how much many psychologist stil rever Freud and how psycho-analysis is sugarcoated in a scientific
sauce
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South American Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Nice story. Good analogy
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards.
Integrity is the key point here. Social sciences allow you to muddle the waters way too easily by using jargon.
For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
If you're in an experimental context, it is far easier to control for these factors. E.g. sociology does not give you that kind of luxury. It is paramount that your paradigmatical assumptions are very explicit in the construction of your quesionnaires and that you insert enough control points to test for the validity of these assumptions.
But then again, I think it has more to do with the general quality of the people entering the field than with a lack of integrity on the part of the participants.
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