A recent survey of 100 social science studies discovered that 60 of them failed to replicate. (I’d like to reproducibility with that girl on the left.) In scientific terminology, that’s called a “poor showing”.
The new analysis, called the Reproducibility Project, found no evidence of fraud or that any original study was definitively false. Rather, it concluded that the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed.
The reasons given for the… oh what shall we call it… INCOMPETENCE of social scientists are:
- Pressure to publish novel research and “make a splash”.
- The misuse of replication studies by (often younger) scientists who want to attack the original author.
- Small sample sizes.
- Small methodology differences between the original and reproduced studies. (This would sometimes redound in favor of the original study’s findings.)
I’d like to offer another two possibilities for the wretched state of social science, that I believe more parsimoniously explain the weak and sometimes utterly useless “discoveries” that the field generates on a near-daily basis:
Diversity™ and Equalist Bias.
Diversity is the King of All Moral Crusades in 2015 America, which in practice means that too many non-Whites and women of dubious talent are replacing White men with obvious talent. Corruption, incompetence, and ethnic nepotism are fast becoming the rule rather than the exception in the West as the fields most susceptible to the Diversity™ siren call fill with diversity-quota hires and empty of skilled White men.
Equalist Bias corrupts a field that is dominated by Leftoid Equalists. Social Science has some good eggs (David Buss) but most social scientists are flaming liberal cranks and feminists who simply entered the field eager to co-opt a creeeeeedentialist imprimatur for their preexisting blank slate race and sex creationism religion. This is why CH has said that one’s working assumption should be that 99% of any social science research which comes out of a university with a large and well-funded women’s studies department is worthless drivel. The source matters. Shitlib emotional bias isn’t something the modern social scientist tries to overcome; it’s something she tries to back-rationalize with her work.
The cure for social science is clear: Less Diversity™, More Realtalkers. Hope this hurts.