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How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self-Reflection
It seems like most of what we read about the academic social sciences in the mainstream media is negative. The field is facing mounting criticism, as canonical studies fail to replicate, questionable research practices abound, and researcher social and political biases come under fire.
In response to these criticisms, Matt Grossmann, in How Social Science Got Better , provides a robust defense of the current state of the social sciences. Applying insights from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and providing new data on research trends and scholarly views, he argues that, far from crisis, social science is undergoing an unparalleled renaissance of ever-broader understanding and application. According to Grossmann, social science research today has never been more relevant, rigorous, or self-reflective because scholars have a much better idea of their blind spots and biases. He highlights how scholars now closely analyze the impact of racial, gender, geographic, methodological, political, and ideological differences on research questions; how the incentives of academia influence our research practices; and how universal human desires to avoid uncomfortable truths and easily solve problems affect our conclusions. Though misaligned incentive structures of
course remain, a messy, collective deliberation across the research community has shifted us into an unprecedented age of theoretical diversity, open and connected data, and public scholarship.
Grossmann's wide-ranging account of current trends will necessarily force the academy's many critics to rethink their lazy critiques and instead acknowledge the path-breaking advances occurring in the social sciences today.
In response to these criticisms, Matt Grossmann, in How Social Science Got Better , provides a robust defense of the current state of the social sciences. Applying insights from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and providing new data on research trends and scholarly views, he argues that, far from crisis, social science is undergoing an unparalleled renaissance of ever-broader understanding and application. According to Grossmann, social science research today has never been more relevant, rigorous, or self-reflective because scholars have a much better idea of their blind spots and biases. He highlights how scholars now closely analyze the impact of racial, gender, geographic, methodological, political, and ideological differences on research questions; how the incentives of academia influence our research practices; and how universal human desires to avoid uncomfortable truths and easily solve problems affect our conclusions. Though misaligned incentive structures of
course remain, a messy, collective deliberation across the research community has shifted us into an unprecedented age of theoretical diversity, open and connected data, and public scholarship.
Grossmann's wide-ranging account of current trends will necessarily force the academy's many critics to rethink their lazy critiques and instead acknowledge the path-breaking advances occurring in the social sciences today.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published September 6, 2021
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112 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 3, 2023
I had high expectations for this book as a corrective against the often cynical, broadly negative characterizations we often hear about the social sciences. However, the gap between what the book promises to show and what it delivers left me fairly unsatisfied. When you claim to show how X got better, I expect some data – preferably of the longitudinal variety, or at least some before-and-after data at various points in time – to clearly show how X has indeed gotten better over time, like how Steven Pinker or Hans Rosling would.
Instead, Grossmann’s book is largely narrative-driven, drawing from various interviews he’s done with scholars in the field who report their impressions of how social science has progressed. This is often supplemented with results from surveys of scholars who report how things have changed in their field. While this is interesting, it doesn’t really come close to being on a par with longitudinal data that would clearly document a historical trend.
This is rather disappointing, because 1) I am generally sympathetic to Grossmann’s thesis (even if we acknowledge the seemingly growing left-leaning ideological monoculture in parts of the social sciences) and 2) I am aware of some data that would clearly make Grossmann’s point for him (e.g., how the problem of publication bias is alleviated through pre-registration of trials).
Often, the book is written in highly abstract passages without specifics, such that it’s difficult to entirely figure out what Grossmann is talking about some of the time—at least for an outsider (statistician) like me. For example, on p. 75, discussing the philosophy of science’s impact on the social sciences:
“Philosopher Adrian Curie argues that philosophy of science has been hobbled by its focus on physics and biology, because it has learned from their fixations rather than all fields. 'Philosophy of science would have looked very different if it took paleontology or archeology as its representative case,' Curie argues, **where middle- range theories predominate and researchers cannot assume generalizability across time and space.102 Most sciences seek to unify their traces of evidence, slowly testing for coherency and consilience by creating localized models and finding the extent of regularities.**”
I have little idea what Grossmann is talking about here, especially the parts in double stars. At other times, he uses jargon that requires knowledge in certain expert domains (e.g., statistics, machine learning), which is fine if you have that background, but it may lose some readers since he doesn’t stop to explain the jargon.
Overall, my impression of the book can actually be summarized by a section from Grossmann (on p. 65): “To put it simply, if we want to assess how widespread or long-standing a phenomenon is, we need more data; if want to see how consistent a pattern or relationship is, we need more data; if want to see if something is increasing or decreasing, we need more data. Human counting, sorting, and tracking— and numeric representations of abstract concepts— helped expand culture and advance social life.” I just wish he followed his own advice for the trends he was hoping to convey to his readers!
Instead, Grossmann’s book is largely narrative-driven, drawing from various interviews he’s done with scholars in the field who report their impressions of how social science has progressed. This is often supplemented with results from surveys of scholars who report how things have changed in their field. While this is interesting, it doesn’t really come close to being on a par with longitudinal data that would clearly document a historical trend.
This is rather disappointing, because 1) I am generally sympathetic to Grossmann’s thesis (even if we acknowledge the seemingly growing left-leaning ideological monoculture in parts of the social sciences) and 2) I am aware of some data that would clearly make Grossmann’s point for him (e.g., how the problem of publication bias is alleviated through pre-registration of trials).
Often, the book is written in highly abstract passages without specifics, such that it’s difficult to entirely figure out what Grossmann is talking about some of the time—at least for an outsider (statistician) like me. For example, on p. 75, discussing the philosophy of science’s impact on the social sciences:
“Philosopher Adrian Curie argues that philosophy of science has been hobbled by its focus on physics and biology, because it has learned from their fixations rather than all fields. 'Philosophy of science would have looked very different if it took paleontology or archeology as its representative case,' Curie argues, **where middle- range theories predominate and researchers cannot assume generalizability across time and space.102 Most sciences seek to unify their traces of evidence, slowly testing for coherency and consilience by creating localized models and finding the extent of regularities.**”
I have little idea what Grossmann is talking about here, especially the parts in double stars. At other times, he uses jargon that requires knowledge in certain expert domains (e.g., statistics, machine learning), which is fine if you have that background, but it may lose some readers since he doesn’t stop to explain the jargon.
Overall, my impression of the book can actually be summarized by a section from Grossmann (on p. 65): “To put it simply, if we want to assess how widespread or long-standing a phenomenon is, we need more data; if want to see how consistent a pattern or relationship is, we need more data; if want to see if something is increasing or decreasing, we need more data. Human counting, sorting, and tracking— and numeric representations of abstract concepts— helped expand culture and advance social life.” I just wish he followed his own advice for the trends he was hoping to convey to his readers!
February 16, 2023
It's easy for me to become disenchanted with social science when so much of what I read about it is selected from the most pessimistic and controversial reports.
With this book, Grossmann helped me to correct my biased view of the field. While plenty of valid criticisms have been made about social science, many of the complaints lobbed against it are little more than straw men.
Grossmann offers a sweeping overview of the progress that the field has made over the past few decades. His tone is optimistic and hearkens back to Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature, while maintaining a rigorous (but dry) style akin to the less controversial sections of Robin Hanson's Age of Em. Throughout the book, Grossmann aims to outdo even Wikipedia in his use of a neutral point of view.
Politics and biases have marred efforts to understand some important topics. Science helps mitigate these biases. By science, I don't mean the features that typically come to mind first when thinking of science in politicized contexts. Grossmann highlights the importance of empiricism and reason in scientific inquiry, rather than authority.
Grossmann reaffirmed some of my hopes that most people who call themselves scientists use enough empiricism, and enough scientific heuristics, to improve on human knowledge, in spite of biases.
Most of the book focuses on the quality of the scientific literature, rather than whether the average person has become more knowledgeable thanks to science over the past few decades.
Good Trends
"Bayesian and frequentist assumptions, while hardly reconciled, are more regularly compared".
P-hacking is not getting worse. Researchers are focusing less on statistical significance, and more on evaluating the sensitivity to assumptions.
Researchers have been moving away from rational choice models, grand theories, and Marxism. They're replacing those with increased empiricism.
High level disagreements between, e.g. Charles Murray and his critics have been largely replaced by more specific and more civil disagreements over narrower issues, with more precise claims on each side reducing the misunderstandings and more closely approaching the kinds of disputes that get resolved empirically.
The Replication Non-Crisis
Replication failures have uncovered systemic problems with wide areas of science.
Far from dooming those fields, they represent both a symptom of increasing rigor, and a cause of additional effort to improve the quality of research.
One really nice replication failure (which didn't get enough publicity for me to notice at the time) was The Grievance Studies Affair. Researchers tried to replicate the Sokal hoax. Their falsified (and mostly silly) gender studies papers got a very mixed reaction. Four were published in low impact factor journals. They were exposed as frauds, more than a year after the first one was published, but before the project planned to reveal the hoax.
That's evidence that even in areas where I expect ideology to often trump science, there are many somewhat competent people who are limiting the harm done by ideology.
Fact Checks
I didn't check Grossmann's claims very carefully. My impression is that they're mostly quite good. One exception stood out: he mentions "overpoliced communities". He cites a paper that rants about problems with police and with research about police, but which doesn't seem to document overpolicing. More likely Grossmann cited the paper for its claims about research, and carelessly assumed that communities were overpoliced.
The research that I've found which bears directly on overpolicing says the US seems underpoliced.
To repeat: this seems like an exception. I expect it would be hard to find more similarly bad claims, even though the book contains an unusually high number of factual claims.
Another reference that I checked was about why peer review became seen as crucial for scientific legitimacy. Grossmann cites Scientific Autonomy, Public Accountability, and the Rise of “Peer Review” in the Cold War United States as saying peer review was "adopted largely to justify public scientific support".
The paper documents that the codification of peer review was quite political. Casual refereeing was moderately common before 1970. There was a sudden shift to formal, mandatory peer review in the 1970s in the US. That coincided closely with a decline in the Cold War related consensus behind government funding of science. The paper provides evidence that some rather arbitrary political considerations were key forces behind the elevation of a minor part of scientific publishing to a sacred ritual. Grossmann's summary of this is mostly true, but the details sound more petty and short-sighted than Grossmann led me to expect.
Concluding Thoughts
The book is not exciting, eloquent, or controversial enough to become as influential as Pinker.
It's likely somewhat biased toward only showing the positive trends in social science. But that's what I needed, to remind me that, for many areas where I'm not actively researching topics, my other information sources have been strongly selected for a focus on what has gone wrong recently.
I highly recommend reading the first few chapters. I'm unsure whether to recommend reading the whole book.
With this book, Grossmann helped me to correct my biased view of the field. While plenty of valid criticisms have been made about social science, many of the complaints lobbed against it are little more than straw men.
Grossmann offers a sweeping overview of the progress that the field has made over the past few decades. His tone is optimistic and hearkens back to Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature, while maintaining a rigorous (but dry) style akin to the less controversial sections of Robin Hanson's Age of Em. Throughout the book, Grossmann aims to outdo even Wikipedia in his use of a neutral point of view.
Politics and biases have marred efforts to understand some important topics. Science helps mitigate these biases. By science, I don't mean the features that typically come to mind first when thinking of science in politicized contexts. Grossmann highlights the importance of empiricism and reason in scientific inquiry, rather than authority.
Grossmann reaffirmed some of my hopes that most people who call themselves scientists use enough empiricism, and enough scientific heuristics, to improve on human knowledge, in spite of biases.
Most of the book focuses on the quality of the scientific literature, rather than whether the average person has become more knowledgeable thanks to science over the past few decades.
Good Trends
"Bayesian and frequentist assumptions, while hardly reconciled, are more regularly compared".
P-hacking is not getting worse. Researchers are focusing less on statistical significance, and more on evaluating the sensitivity to assumptions.
Researchers have been moving away from rational choice models, grand theories, and Marxism. They're replacing those with increased empiricism.
Rather than consider one gold standard of experiments, Kubinek says we should consider three silver standards, judging each by how much they reduce uncertainty around our causal knowledge; experiments, qualitative process training, and observational analysis could all play a role depending on the current state of research.
High level disagreements between, e.g. Charles Murray and his critics have been largely replaced by more specific and more civil disagreements over narrower issues, with more precise claims on each side reducing the misunderstandings and more closely approaching the kinds of disputes that get resolved empirically.
The Replication Non-Crisis
Replication failures have uncovered systemic problems with wide areas of science.
Far from dooming those fields, they represent both a symptom of increasing rigor, and a cause of additional effort to improve the quality of research.
One really nice replication failure (which didn't get enough publicity for me to notice at the time) was The Grievance Studies Affair. Researchers tried to replicate the Sokal hoax. Their falsified (and mostly silly) gender studies papers got a very mixed reaction. Four were published in low impact factor journals. They were exposed as frauds, more than a year after the first one was published, but before the project planned to reveal the hoax.
That's evidence that even in areas where I expect ideology to often trump science, there are many somewhat competent people who are limiting the harm done by ideology.
Fact Checks
I didn't check Grossmann's claims very carefully. My impression is that they're mostly quite good. One exception stood out: he mentions "overpoliced communities". He cites a paper that rants about problems with police and with research about police, but which doesn't seem to document overpolicing. More likely Grossmann cited the paper for its claims about research, and carelessly assumed that communities were overpoliced.
The research that I've found which bears directly on overpolicing says the US seems underpoliced.
To repeat: this seems like an exception. I expect it would be hard to find more similarly bad claims, even though the book contains an unusually high number of factual claims.
Another reference that I checked was about why peer review became seen as crucial for scientific legitimacy. Grossmann cites Scientific Autonomy, Public Accountability, and the Rise of “Peer Review” in the Cold War United States as saying peer review was "adopted largely to justify public scientific support".
The paper documents that the codification of peer review was quite political. Casual refereeing was moderately common before 1970. There was a sudden shift to formal, mandatory peer review in the 1970s in the US. That coincided closely with a decline in the Cold War related consensus behind government funding of science. The paper provides evidence that some rather arbitrary political considerations were key forces behind the elevation of a minor part of scientific publishing to a sacred ritual. Grossmann's summary of this is mostly true, but the details sound more petty and short-sighted than Grossmann led me to expect.
Concluding Thoughts
The book is not exciting, eloquent, or controversial enough to become as influential as Pinker.
It's likely somewhat biased toward only showing the positive trends in social science. But that's what I needed, to remind me that, for many areas where I'm not actively researching topics, my other information sources have been strongly selected for a focus on what has gone wrong recently.
I highly recommend reading the first few chapters. I'm unsure whether to recommend reading the whole book.
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