Missed this one a while back, but worth noting: From Erin Ross at Nature:
“In the past, I’ve done armchair activism — you know, ‘hashtag activism’,” says Bradley, who works at Pennsylvania State University’s Brandywine campus in Media. But this year, he says, “I felt it was important to get involved on the ground.”
His trip to Capitol Hill was organized by the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). For the past three years, the group has invited linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists from across the country in Washington DC, for a brief training session before a whirlwind day of meeting with members of Congress and their aides to advocate for science funding. This year, participation set a record: 70 researchers attended the training before fanning out to meet with 80 members of Congress More.
If I were an elected official, I would ask why social sciences are so easily hoaxed, just to start.
Of course social science isn’t a science. Nothing about it is anything like a science, except for th use of graphing software.
Social science might be useful as a first draft of history, of course, but most efforts along those lines are not serious and the useful ones are likely to be squashed by partisanship.
Not to worry: To the extent that social sciences exist to generate research that supports the policy aims of expansive governments, their funding will not be cut. The scandals will just go on.
And now that post-modernism is hitting actual sciences, the social scientists will not even be lonely any more.
See also: Sokal hoax 20 years old.
All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences
Seven myths of social psychology
and
Nature: Stuck with a battle it dare not fight, even for the soul of science. Excuse me guys but, as in so many looming strategic disasters, the guns are facing the wrong way.