Justin’s Notes

A Weak Field Cannot Defend Its Own Consensus

2026-08-09 · AI-generated insight

Wade's charge against social science — that the Boasian doctrine of cultural determinism is a political commitment masquerading as an empirical finding — is precisely what McIntyre catalogs as "ideological infection": knowing your conclusion in advance and finding it. Read together, though, the notes reveal something more uncomfortable than either says alone.

McIntyre's diagnosis explains why Wade's attack lands, regardless of whether Wade is right. A field with rigorous methods, shared data, and replicated findings can simply point to the evidence when a heterodox claim arrives. Its consensus is self-defending. But a field plagued by unreplicated studies, fuzzy proxy concepts, and cherry-picked statistics has forfeited that authority. When social scientists respond to Wade that culture, not genetics, explains societal differences, the honest question — by McIntyre's own accounting — is: how would we know? The discipline's methodological weakness converts every consensus position into something that looks like it could be ideology, even where it isn't.

But the blade cuts both ways, and this is what Wade's framing obscures. Every pathology on McIntyre's list applies equally to the challengers of an orthodoxy. "If one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it" describes the hereditarian eager to attribute prosperity to genes just as well as it describes the Boasian eager to attribute it to geography. Wade presents himself as the empiricist puncturing a political doctrine, but McIntyre's framework offers no reason to grant heterodoxy an epistemic discount. In a low-rigor field, dissent is as cheap as consensus.

The synthesis is bleak but clarifying: the real cost of the replication crisis isn't just false findings, it's the loss of the ability to settle anything. Politically charged questions — race, immigration, gun control — are exactly where settlement matters most and where, per McIntyre, infection runs deepest. This is why his medical analogy is the right one. Nobody relitigates germ theory on political grounds, because medicine earned the authority to close that question. Until social science can do the same, debates like the one Wade wants to have will remain contests of prior conviction wearing the costume of evidence — on all sides.

Woven from these notes

The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.
— Nicholas Wade A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
When so many studies fail to be replicated, or draw different conclusions from the same set of facts, it does not instill confidence in the social sciences. Whether this is because of sloppy methodology, ideological infection, or other problems, the result is that even if there are right and wrong answers to many of our questions about human action, most social scientists are not yet in a position to find them. It is not that none of the work in social science is rigorous enough, but when policymakers (and sometimes even other researchers) are not sure which results are reliable, it drives down the status of the entire field. If medicine could break with its barbarous past, isn’t the same path open to the social sciences? For years, many have argued that if they could emulate the “scientific method” of the natural sciences, they too could become more scientific. But this simple advice faces several problems. Among the issues that plague contemporary social scientific research: Too much theory: A number of social scientific studies propose answers that have not been tested against evidence. The classic example here is neoclassical economics, where a number of simplifying assumptions — perfect rationality, perfect information — resulted in beautiful quantitative models that had little to do with actual human behavior. Lack of experimentation/data: Except for social psychology and the newly emerging field of behavioral economics, much of social science still does not rely on experimentation, even where it is possible. For example, it is sometimes offered as justification for putting sex offenders on a public database that doing so reduces the recidivism rate. This must be measured, though, against what the recidivism rate would have been absent the Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB), which is difficult to measure and has produced varying answers. This exacerbates the difficulty in (1), whereby favored theoretical explanations are accepted even when they have not been tested against any experimental evidence. Fuzzy concepts: Some social scientific studies can lead to misleading conclusions because of the use of “proxy” concepts for what one really wishes to measure. A recent example includes measuring “warmth” as a proxy for “trustworthiness,” in which researchers assumed — on the basis of studies which show that we are more likely to trust someone whom we perceive to be “on our side” — that perceptions of scientists as “cold” meant that they would be less trustworthy as well. But the two concepts may not be interchangeable. Ideological infection: This problem is rampant throughout the social sciences, especially on topics that are politically charged. Two ongoing examples are the bastardization of empirical work on the deterrence effect of capital punishment and the effectiveness of gun control on mitigating crime. If one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it. Cherry picking: The use of statistics allows multiple “degrees of freedom” to scientific researchers, but this is the most likely to be abused. In studies on immigration, for instance, a great deal of the difference between them is a result of alternative ways of counting the “costs” incurred by immigration. This is obviously also related to (4) above. If we know our conclusion, we may shop for the data to support it. Lack of data sharing: As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers reports in Psychology Today, there are numerous documented cases of researchers failing to share their data in psychological studies, despite a requirement from APA-sponsored journals to do so. When data were later analyzed, errors were found most commonly in the direction of the researcher’s hypothesis. Lack of replication: Psychology is undergoing a reproducibility crisis. One might validly argue that the initial finding that nearly two-thirds of psychology studies were irreproducible was overblown, but it is nonetheless shocking that most studies are not even attempted to be replicated. This can lead to difficulties, where errors can sneak through. Questionable causation: It is gospel in statistical research that “correlation does not equal causation,” yet some social scientific studies continue to highlight provocative results of questionable value. One recent sociological study, for instance, found that matriculating at a selective college was correlated with parental visitation at art museums, without explicitly suggesting that this was likely an artifact of parental income.
— Lee McIntyre To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine