(no subject)
In the past I've briefly mentioned my hatred of the soft sciences, and I felt it was time to expand upon that. Soft sciences are pools of bad thinking that allow for such things as libertarianism, communism, men's rights theory, and feminism's evil bizarro twin, radical feminism(and especially trans-exclusionary radical feminism). The way these philosophies fester is that people put together a set of conclusions which are drawn by taking ideas that are true SOME of the time and assuming that they are true ALL of the time. Tongodeon expands upon an example of this phenomenon in his post "Libertarians Are Right About 80% Of The Time" which I would link to but I'm having trouble finding it right now. At any rate, these ideas can become popular because when the supporters of them are relating them to a potential convert, usually the confirming situations come to mind instead of the contradicting situations, especially if the speaker has a few canned examples to give.
Hard sciences, of course, don't have these pitfalls, since they have labs and research and experiments to find any and all of the cases where an idea doesn't work. This is how socially controversial theories such as evolution have held up to massive amounts of public scrutiny: Of all the mountain of biological data available, 100% of the evidence supports evolution as an explanation for what we see in biology. Contrast to the more questionable ideas of radical feminism(and especially trans-exclusionary radical feminism), which have only survived because anyone and everyone who criticizes them is branded as a rape apologist(a practice which, in itself, cheapens the severe tragedy endured by rape survivors, but getting into that would be another post entirely).
This post is already going on way longer than I had planned, so I'll just sum it up with this: Fuck soft sciences.
Hard sciences, of course, don't have these pitfalls, since they have labs and research and experiments to find any and all of the cases where an idea doesn't work. This is how socially controversial theories such as evolution have held up to massive amounts of public scrutiny: Of all the mountain of biological data available, 100% of the evidence supports evolution as an explanation for what we see in biology. Contrast to the more questionable ideas of radical feminism(and especially trans-exclusionary radical feminism), which have only survived because anyone and everyone who criticizes them is branded as a rape apologist(a practice which, in itself, cheapens the severe tragedy endured by rape survivors, but getting into that would be another post entirely).
This post is already going on way longer than I had planned, so I'll just sum it up with this: Fuck soft sciences.