Social Scientists Ashamed but Still Ask for Trust

One of the largest ever studies of predictions by
social scientists shows an embarrassing failure rate

 

— Social Science: a non-prophet enterprise that relies on the gullibility of the public —

Three psychologists from three different universities have a confession to make. Social science is a failure. They know it, because they just ran the largest-ever test of predictions by social scientists. What they got was a mess: a confusing hodgepodge of contradictory guesses that were mostly wrong.

Wait; wasn’t “science” supposed to make predictions?

The limits of expert judgment: Lessons from social science forecasting during the pandemic (The Conversation, 19 March 2023).

This article by Igor Grossman (University of Waterloo), Cendri Hutcherson (University of Toronto) and Michael Varnum (Arizona State University) could be summarized by a cartoon of failing student trying to get out of being grounded by telling his parents, with fingers crossed behind his back, ‘I know I was bad and let you down, but I’ll do better from now on.’

Social science incorporates sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Most in secular academia who practice these ‘sciences’ are ardent materialists and Darwinists. Keep that in mind as you evaluate the penance of the three authors. Together, they have “decades of combined experience studying decision-making, wisdom, expert judgment and societal change” in academia. Yet after putting their peers to the test, here is what they concluded:

Imagine being a policymaker at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. You have to decide which actions to recommend, how much risk to tolerate and what sacrifices to ask your citizens to bear.

Who would you turn to for an accurate prediction about how people would react? Many would recommend going to the experts — social scientists. But we are here to tell you this would be bad advice.

The three ran “the largest forecasting initiative in the field’s history” during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. They were embarrassed at their colleagues, to say the least. This came at a bad time, too. They were already aware that

Our discipline has been undergoing a crisis due to failed study replications and questionable research practices. If basic findings can’t be reproduced in controlled experiments, how confident can we be that our theories can explain complex real-world outcomes?

The photo at the top of the article shows a fortune-teller with a crystal ball. It sounds like a policymaker might have better success going to Madame Rosinka’s palm reading and tarot card shop than to trust “the experts – social scientists.” Are we in a new mystical age, where national leaders put their trust in 21st century Delphic oracles?

The three asked social scientists at the beginning of the pandemic for quick guesses of how society would respond. Then they asked 100 teams to compete in month-by-month forecasts of what would happen next as the pandemic unfolded between May 2020 and May 2021.

Our findings, detailed in peer-reviewed papers in Nature Human Behaviour and in American Psychologist, paint a sobering picture. Despite the causal nature of most theories in the social sciences, and the fields’ emphasis on prediction in controlled settings, social scientists’ forecasts were generally not very good.

In both papers, we found that experts’ predictions were generally no more accurate than those made by samples of the general public. Further, their predictions were often worse than predictions generated by simple statistical models.

But You Can Trust Us Now

Would anyone keep going to a fortune-teller with a record like that? Good grief. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the proverb goes.

The three psychologists admit this really looks bad. They promote a “call to action,” making recommendations to tape together their house of cards and firm up the quicksand on which it stands. ‘See? We’re going to do better from now on,’ they say, using the failed student’s tactic. “Our studies did still give us reasons to be optimistic,” they say with a forced grin, looking frantically for some rescue device, as if the student responds, ‘But I did get a D- in art.’

These findings suggest that, despite the poor performance of the social scientists in our studies, there are steps scientists can take to improve their accuracy at this type of forecasting….

Listen to their squeamish plea to avoid punishment.

… social scientists still have some wisdom to offer, reminding us of the uncertainty and the need for humility when forecasting the future.

If this were a failure of a small business engaged in some non-essential thing like miniature golf or cotton candy, the public could dismiss it with a smirk. But social scientists are the ‘experts’ that government leaders often depend on when making policy that affects our lives.

These results are a call to action for the scientific community to continue developing better methods for predicting societal change so the public can rely on scientists in times of crisis.

How likely are social scientists to develop the humility that the three psychologists recommend? If humility is a product of natural selection, it is not humility at all. It is selfishness as a tactic to win the competition for fitness.

Oh, but don’t read the Proverbs of Solomon, or search the Scriptures for principles, or pray to God for help. That would be ‘religious.’ We have social ‘science.’

Anybody who goes to a psychologist for advice should get his head examined. (Yes, that is intended as an ironic joke.) They can offer a bonus if you still accept the ‘wisdom’ of these social quacks: a resort vacation on the Isle of DeBris. This not the first time CEH has reported on massive failures in social science. See these examples:

• • Social sciences flunk science test (13 April 2022)
  • Evolutionary anthropologists fail big time (22 July 2020)
  • Psychologist, fix your own problems (6 Oct 2019)
  • More criticisms raised against psycho-science (6 Aug 2019)
  • Don’t trusts scientists who were wrong; fire them (25 June 2017)
  • Scientists blind to their failings (4 April 2017)
  • Psychiatry ascribes empty names to clusters of symptoms (23 Feb 2016)
  • Reproducibility crisis in psychology (5 Sept 2015)
  • Is science a special-interest group for one party? (2 Jan 2013)

or search on keywords: psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, etc.

Speaking of quacks, Science Magazine on April 6 reviewed a new book by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, If it Sounds Like a Quack. As usual, it gave the leftist-Darwinist rag a chance to ridicule the political right over “America’s snake oil problem.’ Reviewer Christopher Kemp does note that both Republicans and Democrats (some deservedly so) fell for conspiracy theories during the pandemic, but the bulk of the review, using the either-or fallacy and card stacking rhetorical tactics, portrays conservatives and Trump supporters as rubes who fall for anything. Well, Mr. Kemp, read this report about ‘social science.’ Physician, heal thyself.

If social scientists had laws of nature to rely on, their principles wouldn’t evolve. They could state them as laws, and make predictions that would succeed every time. The Bible’s moral teachings, such as the Ten Commandments and the Greatest Commandments taught by Jesus, transcend history. Circumstances may change, but the same principles apply at all times and places. Jesus stated one principle as a metaphor of biological science:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits.” —Matthew 7:15-19

Social science’s house of cards would quickly collapse and sink into its foundation of quicksand if it had to face up to champions of Biblical scholarship and Christian historians, counselors, pastors, politicians or NGOs with expertise on government policy. Any of them (and there are many) would likely be shouted down by radical students at universities. Not even common sense is welcome in today’s cancel culture. Just recently, female swimmer Riley Gaines was screamed at, harrassed, punched and nearly kidnapped for ransom by radical students at San Francisco State before even speaking, because she believes that female athletes should not have to compete against biological men.

We can appreciate the exposé by Grossman, Hutcherson and Varnum, and their willingness to shame their colleagues, call for reform and exercise humility. That’s their God-given conscience speaking. But because academia has closed off scholarship to all Darwin skeptics, expect the false prophecies to continue, and for the losers in social science to continue snickering all the way to the bank.