Sorry. There
are good and critical researchers working in those fields. I've had the pleasure of working with some of them. I definitely don't intend to malign the people working in those disciplines
as a whole. I do fault some of the training that they are given, however, since it seems to lead to misunderstandings in how the scientific method is supposed to work...
I definitely think there is value in being able to trend-spot or to think outside of the causation box that scientists tend to live inside, though. That's where new ideas come from.
It's just that too much social science research doesn't design experiments so as to
allow for the hypothesis to be proven
incorrect. (Yes, it's a problem in some science disciplines now, too, as I'm well aware- positive results get published and funded, and nothing else seems to matter, which doesn't serve the discipline very well.) It's possible that it is merely publication bias, but I don't really think so, having seen what ed researchers cook up in experimental design.
But then again, experience also suggests that the maxims about scientists lacking basic social skills is also generally more often true than not...
so there's that.
Hopefully there are exceptions to THAT, as well.
Again-- apologies to any of the
good social scientists out there that I may have inadvertently offended. I really do have a great deal of respect for my friends and co-authors from the other side of the campus, I promise.
