My current (maybe boring) view is that any academic field where the primary mode of inquiry is applied statistics (much of the social sciences and medicine) is suss. The fields where the primary tool is mathematics (pure mathematics, theoretical CS, game theory, theoretical physics) still seems safe, and the fields where the primary tool is computers (distributed systems, computational modeling in various fields) are reasonably safe. ML is somewhere in between computers and statistics.
Fields where the primary tool is just looking around and counting (demography, taxonomy, astronomy(?)) are probably safe too? I’m confused about how to orient towards the humanities.
I don’t think this is a sufficiently complete way of looking at things. It could make sense when the problem was thought to be “replication crisis via p-hacking” but it turns out things are worse than this.
The research methodology in biology doesn’t necessarily have room for statistical funny business but there are all these cases of influential Science/Nature papers that had fraud via photoshop.
Gino and Ariely’s papers might have been statistically impeccable, the problem is they were just making up data points.
there is fraud in experimental physics and applied sciences too from time to time.
I don’t know much about what opportunities there are for bad research practices in the humanities. The only thing I can think of is citing a source that doesn’t say what is claimed. This seems like a particular risk when history or historical claims are involved, or when a humanist wants to refer to the scientific literature. The spectacular claim that Victorian doctors treated “hysteria” using vibrators turns out to have resulted from something like this.
Outside cases like that, I think the humanities are mostly “safe” like math in that they just need some kind of internal consistency, whether that is presenting a sound argument, or a set of concepts and descriptions that people find to be harmonious or fruitful.
My current (maybe boring) view is that any academic field where the primary mode of inquiry is applied statistics (much of the social sciences and medicine) is suss. The fields where the primary tool is mathematics (pure mathematics, theoretical CS, game theory, theoretical physics) still seems safe, and the fields where the primary tool is computers (distributed systems, computational modeling in various fields) are reasonably safe. ML is somewhere in between computers and statistics.
Fields where the primary tool is just looking around and counting (demography, taxonomy, astronomy(?)) are probably safe too? I’m confused about how to orient towards the humanities.
I don’t think this is a sufficiently complete way of looking at things. It could make sense when the problem was thought to be “replication crisis via p-hacking” but it turns out things are worse than this.
The research methodology in biology doesn’t necessarily have room for statistical funny business but there are all these cases of influential Science/Nature papers that had fraud via photoshop.
Gino and Ariely’s papers might have been statistically impeccable, the problem is they were just making up data points.
there is fraud in experimental physics and applied sciences too from time to time.
I don’t know much about what opportunities there are for bad research practices in the humanities. The only thing I can think of is citing a source that doesn’t say what is claimed. This seems like a particular risk when history or historical claims are involved, or when a humanist wants to refer to the scientific literature. The spectacular claim that Victorian doctors treated “hysteria” using vibrators turns out to have resulted from something like this.
Outside cases like that, I think the humanities are mostly “safe” like math in that they just need some kind of internal consistency, whether that is presenting a sound argument, or a set of concepts and descriptions that people find to be harmonious or fruitful.
In this incident something was true because the “experts” decided it must be true. That’s humanities in (almost?) every incident.