alt Hacker NewsI have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
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> Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:
> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”
I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.
Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.
There's plenty of results in math and physics that are true, in the sense that the math checks out, but are useless, in the sense that the authors claim they've made a breakthrough, but actually they've just tweaked a few parameters of an existing unverified theory and constructed a new unverified theory. (If you've ever read a news headline like "physicists now believe reality may actually have 400 dimensions!", they were probably citing one of these papers.)
There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.
Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.
Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too
If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science
If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
If it has the word "science", it's notOh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.
I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).
Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.