by csnover | 2026-01-23 19:53:23+00:00
> real scientists’

This is a classic “no true scotsman” fallacy.

Some people working in genetics allow their personal politics to draw conclusions about racial superiority. Some people working in medical science allow their personal politics to draw conclusions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other medicines, or about the health effects of certain diets or body weights. Some people working in geology allow their personal politics to draw conclusions about the age or shape of the Earth, or about the safety of extractive industries. Some people working in biology allow their personal politics to draw conclusions about the origin of life. Some people working in computer science allow their personal politics to draw conclusions about the likelihood of AGI and the emergence of machine sentience.

Does this mean genetics, medicine, geology, biology, and computer science “fake” sciences? Of course not. The fact that some people in a field are engaged in scientific malpractice doesn’t invalidate the premise that some subject is worth studying in a scientific way. There are many in the social sciences who publish research that runs counter to their own personal politics because they are, in fact, doing science.

Setting that aside, what even is the relevance of a distinction between “personal politics”, and, say, someone who is willing to accept money in exchange for publishing favourable research in any direction? Or someone who engages in fraud in order to feed their ego? Or people who spend 30 years down the amyloid plaque rabbit hole due to fraud and what appear from the outside to be very unhealthy group dynamics (which might not be so unhealthy if they took some cues from the social sciences)?[0]

But let’s set all that aside for a moment.

If we were to do as you propose and “denounce and defund” whatever you define as the “social sciences”, what method should be used instead to guide our lawmaking and personal decision-making about important questions that fall under that umbrella? Majority rule? Might makes right? Whatever fable we learn as children must be true and remain unquestioned?

What you are proposing is to take a system that at least attempts to be objective some of the time, and say it should be destroyed in favour of… what, exactly?

I cannot object to the premise that there is a lot of junk science in the social sciences. I wish it were better. It is deeply ironic that you are here using research from a social science field as proof for your claim that social sciences should be denounced and defunded.

Getting back to your original claim. Perhaps a big reason why something like physics may seem as though “personal politics don’t determine the outcome” is because most of it is sufficiently abstract that, today, there is rarely some direct conflict with any deeply ingrained cultural belief. Social sciences, on the other hand, usually point the spotlight directly on things people hold as sacrosanct. This is a double-edged sword, since it means researchers are also more likely to put a thumb on the scale—which is exactly what this research suggests. But there is no fundamental error in the idea that the scientific method can and should be used to look at humans and human systems, so a call to “denounce and defund” is reactionary nonsense.

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/11/amyloid-hypothesis-alzhe...