"Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems." - Heinz von Foerster.
Humans like quote like the one above because the wordplay is appealing. They make sense to our primitive brains since the same words are used interportably and...whatever. It sounds good! It is the same reason "oppa gangnam style" became the most popular video/song in human history. It is the same reason candy tastes so good. It is also the reason why the above quote seems to make so much sense but in reality is utterly nonsensical. What sounds or tastes good, is not necessarily good.
This brings us to another subject. The person whom the quote comes from; Heinz von Foerster, was a philospher that also aspired into science. He was an "accomplished" fellow and we, as humans, tend to respect things accomplished people have said. They must have known something more right? Well, not necessarily. Accomplishments are like a government position. Once you are in, you are in. You advance forward with almost no effort. This is why most people are easily fooled by quotes. Instead of dealing with what is being said, we choose to judge by whom it had been said.
Hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, math, are successful because (leaving all philosophical bullshit aside) they produce results. They are successful because their do this on a repeatable basis. They are successful because they can power machines and make the entire world go round. They are not subject to bullshitology and interpretation where everyone can be "a little correct". Something either works, or doesn't and there is a way to test it. This is why engineering, the epitome of all hard sciences, makes the entire world go round. There is almost no room of error and this is also why only a handful of human beings can perform them accurately. This is also why hard sciences are valued so much in the real world when it comes to employment and investments. This is how we know something works. Needless to say, they solve the really hard problems. If you doubt this then compare how much we have advanced since the industrial revolution by exactly employing hard sciences and nothing else.
Compare this to soft sciences like psychology, sociology, women's studies and the like which, no matter the age, seem to be caught up with the same petty inquisitive loops that humans have faced for millenia. They are not struggling. They simply do not work consistently because they do not follow epistemic principles. In other words, they are rarely replicable or falsifiable and every single person that comes in touch with them can produce their own narrative/results depending on the era one chooses to interpret them. Hard sciences on the other hand, work the same whether the experiment was performed 500 years ago or today.
Soft sciences don't deal with hard problems. In fact, they don't deal with any problems at all. Take for example sex, the basic biological need to procreate. Science is pretty clear on that and there is little to no room in between for interpenetration, unless ofcource one wants to dive into narratives to explain the poignant "why's". Humans have sex for pleasure, dominance and procreation. What we call love is nothing magic but rather a combination of chemicals and neurotransmitters that makes us do what we do. We choose to give so much depth to the subject because it is central to our existence. We choose to analyze pointless details because most of us cannot deal with how cruel and unforgiving the mechanism of sex is. We would rather create stories and interpretations around it so we can deal with its harsh and cruel reality.
This is why soft sciences claim to be dealing with hard problems. There are not really problems that plague humanity. Rather there are realities that most humans are not able to cope with and seek to cut corners around it. Given the fact that humans of any age tend to clump together and believe narratives that their group aspires into, soft sciences are constantly political. They are all about social manipulation through convincing. They are not about science at all. This is why results are all over the place to the point that we talk about "replicability" crisis. It is still an understatement since there can't be a crisis in a field that calls it self "science" without even following the basic forms of what science actually is.
Humans do what they do in open, uncontrolled environments with myriads of factors directly influencing them, constantly. It is impossible to replicate the same conditions so that one can come up with laws like hard sciences do. This is why fields like psychology let the patient define if they have a problem. The latest DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lets the patient decide if they are disturbed by their door or the tree outside their building. Almost anything can be a disorder if the "patient" chooses to be "sick". Now compare this to real medicine. You can't choose to have a fungal infection. There are actual tests one can take and no matter how much they lie to them or try to mentally control the outcome, the fungal infection will still persist. There are hard science biological facts that can't make us interpret the fungal infection as an allergy or vice versa so we can "deal with it".
And it is really hard to come up with a fungal infection solution because one has to understand in a great extent how a fungus works from a biological perspective. Experiments have to be performed consistently using tools like math and statistics which they can only be interpreted one way - the accurate way. On the other hand, it is really easy, extremely easy, to perform social science experiments. In fact, anyone can be an arm chair psychologist and there is no degree needed. Questionnaires do most of the work, and much like we all know well, people lie. In fact, they lie so good that our best liars become actors and we love them for it. Yet, somehow, we think questionnaires and interviews can cut it. Psychology and sociology deal with stories, politics and most importantly, rhetorics. It is all about being able to manipulate the being in front of you into believing something. This is like altering the environment in which you have your fungus study in order to make it work for you. Exactly what we are not allowed to so in science.
Yet, despite all that, these pseudosciences are becoming more and more popular. Why? Because simply most humans are able to deal with them with ease. They are far too easy to become an "expert" with them. We don't see failed psychologists becoming MD's or engineers. What we observe is the exact opposite. Very few can perform the real thing. If they can't deal with the reality and objectivity of numbers and facts, they move into the realm of narratives, politics and chit-chat. Everyone, anyone can have issues and there are armies of unemployed starbucks philosophers to serve those customers. There are so many soft science practitioners at the point where supply trumps demand by factor of 100. Yet. there is still lack of real doctors, engineers and actual scientists. Like Ayn Rand said; You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
They are not becoming soft science practitioners because they want to deal with the "hard" problems society has. They are becoming soft science practitioners because this is where failed hard sciences eventually end up. Colleges and Universities are businesses. They just found a way to monetize social manipulation and arm chair chit-chat into "social science". This is why you see priests being indistinguishable from psychologists and in fact many pivoting from one field to another incognito. Sure, they "help" people "deal" with "problems" but so are dogs, flowers and video games. There is no science to that. During the 1950's and 60s hard science practitioners like Richard Feynman criticized the hubris of the self crowned "soft sciences" as nonsensical. Today, we see the same thing with absurdities like gender and women's studies which, publish under scientific journals and demand to be labeled as sciences as well. They don't deal with problems. They create ones so they can solve them and stay relevant. This is exactly what politics is all about. Not science. And this is really the actual "problem".
People who attended a university in the past where people who really solved problems or they where trying to do already at their home. They where individuals that dealt with hard problems, hard sciences and needed an institution to aid them. Relativity was discovered in a postal office while madam curie gained two Nobel prizes with work done in her kitchen. Compare that to the en-mass higher education hysteria that is so popular today where everyone has to get a degree, or worse, where college has become a supermarket where you can "chase your dreams and become what you want". This mentality is what has brought us today to so many people wasting so much money for nothing and an economic crisis that can bring the entire economy down. The student debt and college bubble has popped so hard that major companies in Silicon Valley do not need a college degree anymore. They just want to see proof that you can deal with hard problems by dealing with reality. They have realized that the word science has become so pointless and corrupted there is no real reason to deal with the actual institution that fosters it to begin with.
Note:
I seldom write lately as you can see because I am extremely busy with other things. Sometimes though I receive emails from random people asking me to comment or write about stuff they saw somewhere. Opinions like mine are not popular nor they will ever become popular because of the dynamics of our world works. Nobody wants to hear that their field is useless. I wrote an article about 5 years ago that one day college will become pointless for this very reason and I was laughed at. Nobody wants to deal with dismissive accusations and realities that are too hard to face so they ignore it until it is too late. I also rarely use references because in science, whatever you can find supporting one side, you can almost always find supporting the opposing one. Most researches never even double check their references, or worse, their reference, references. We just came to believe that it looks nice to put them there. It gives automatic credibility even if something its utter bullshit. Almost all the articles that claim to deal with science, collect an amount of references that support their own narrative, choose a catchy title and work their way towards the solution. This is what armchair sciences do whether they are called philosophy or psychology and it is also the reason I left academia. You either choose to swallow the bullshit pill and provide the masses with comfortable lies and ridiculous narratives or choose to deal with uncomfortable truths and realities that, at the end of the day, won't make you that popular and rather create obstacles for you. I will always take the later. It makes things more interesting.
