Thursday, December 29, 2005
Hard vs Soft Science
Titled at the risk of getting some porn links, but what the hey ...
I lived in this mindset all the time in my college days. Most of my friends were "hard" science majors, like me: physics, engineering, biology, geology, and the like. We all ridiculed psych majors and their kind. We wanted our world well-defined, known, and explained by a mathematical model, or the closest thing to it.
Regarding the "soft" sciences, Tony suggests, "Because the results are not verifiable, and are basically people's opinions without hard data, they are susceptable to be spun any way that people want them to."
Let me clue you in: "hard" scientists do the same. Lots of people cannot verify results to an absolute degree of satisfaction: theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, among others. Two scientists can have the same package of data, hard facts, if you will, and arrive at two different conclusions.
Additionally, we must concede theology is a "soft" science as well. There is no data to tell us homosexuals are depraved, immoral, and flawed. None at all.
Are you aware that there are some psychologists who not only claim that pedophilia is normal and natural, but that it's beneficial to the children too?
I am. But did you not get my baseball or alcohol analogies? The whole point is that some people have already arrived at their conclusion without sufficient data, then go off in search of observed phenomena to reinforce their own beliefs. That's not hard science.
The ease of promoting the latest psychological theory without any requirement of hard data makes the entire "discipline" suspect.
The link between latest theories and the positive stature of an entire discipline has not been proved. We don't know why small Saturnian moons have geological activity. Does that make the science of astrogeology suspect? We don't know why the universe behaves differently than the gravitational pull of observed matter would suggest. Does that put the kabosh on physics?
