History Main / HardOnSoftScience

* In ''Webcomic/SkinHorse'', [[http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/skinhorse/series.php?view=archive&chapter=33564#strip5 Dr. Lee thinks very little of the "soft sciences"]], including psychology. Tip is forced to show her the error of her ways by using psychology to effortlessly seduce her.

Many "[[SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness hard]]" ScienceFiction authors, trained as they are in the hard sciences, tend to take digs at the softer sciences in their works. The reasons for this vary, but the most common criticism is that it's much harder to perform repeatable experiments. Scientists strive towards empiricism and the "scientific method", and many humanities or social sciences are trying to study things that cannot easily be studied strictly and subjected to experimentation, which makes writers feel justified in considering them as "pseudoscience".

Many "[[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness hard]]" ScienceFiction authors, trained as they are in the hard sciences, tend to take digs at the softer sciences in their works. The reasons for this vary, but the most common criticism is that it's much harder to perform repeatable experiments. Scientists strive towards empiricism and the "scientific method", and many humanities or social sciences are trying to study things that cannot easily be studied strictly and subjected to experimentation, which makes writers feel justified in considering them as "pseudoscience".

* Occurs in SpeculativeFiction: writers and readers of ScienceFiction on the harder side of the scale sometimes look down on soft SF or -- even worse -- ''{{Fantasy}}.'' This even occurs within fantasy with the debate of hard vs. soft magic systems. Fantasy youtuber [[https://youtu.be/Xg42d7fcvSs Daniel P. Green outlines it here]]

* Computer scientists and I.T. disciplines are generally benign for the most part in non-tech matters, but are notorious for thinking everyone but them (excepting a select few) is completely hopeless when it comes to operating a computer, with extra treatment given to non-STEM degrees. Shows like ''Series/TheITCrowd'' reinforce this stereotype, and they tend to be remarkably self-aware of it. Amusingly enough, a computer science journal was also the subject of a Sokal hoax when someone managed to get the paper [[http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List]] published, which is nothing but the title over and over again, even on charts and graphs. It was considered a failing of the pay-to-play publisher, similar to some of the other hoaxes, than the field as a whole.

* Physicists in particular have a reputation of being contemptuous of every other scientific discipline and other people in general.

* Deliberately inverted in Creator/SeananMcGuire's short story "Laughter at the Academy"; a mad psychologist, disgruntled by the lack of respect for her field, repeatedly sparks [[ScienceRelatedMemeticDisorder Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder]] in previously-stable hard scientists to make a point about where true power lies.

** On the other hand, the ''de facto'' main character of the trilogy is a ''philologist'' (one who studies language), and his ability to communicate complex ideas ends up being ''extremely'' important, and the main villain of the first two books is a physicist. Said physicist expresses much derision for any discipline that isn't a physical science.

* The Institute of ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' practically has this as their M.O., and they come off as a massive advertisement as to why the social sciences should exist. Everything they do is the result of asking themselves the question [[ForScience "Can we do X?", but never "SHOULD we do X?".]] As a result, practically everything they do is either a waste of time for them (making synthetic gorillas for some inane reason and flashy laser weapons weaker than your average pipe pistol) and a neverending nightmare of paranoia for the surface. It's quite telling that despite being the only organization in the Fallout universe that was completely protected from the effects of the War and therefore never lost any scientific knowledge, they're still the technological inferiors of several other factions. In fact, the ''only'' true breakthrough they've made has been the creation of third-generation Synths—which [[spoiler: they wouldn't have been able to do without DNA from Shaun]]—and even then, the only use they could think of for a truly sentient ArtificialHuman that was physically indistinguishable from a normal person was for menial labor. Whenever evidence is screaming at them that they should change their policies, [[IRejectYourReality they perform mind-boggling mental gymnastics]] to [[NeverMyFault avoid taking any responsibility for their actions.]]

** Munroe takes another swipe at Economics in his famous spoof of the MajorGeneralSong, [[http://xkcd.com/1052/ "Every Major's Terrible"]]: ''By dubbing Econ "Dismal Science", adherents exaggerate/the "dismal"'s fine, [[BaitAndSwitchComment it's "science" where they patently prevaricate.]]'' Mind you, [[SubvertedTrope the hard sciences don't come out looking much better.]]

-->-- '''Nobel-laureate physicist Ernest Rutherford'''

* Occurs in SpeculativeFiction: writers and readers of ScienceFiction on the harder side of the scale sometimes look down on soft SF or - even worse - ''{{Fantasy}}.'
** This even occurs within fantasy with the debate of hard vs. soft magic systems. Fantasy youtuber [[https://youtu.be/Xg42d7fcvSs Daniel P. Green outlines it here]]

** The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair Grievance Studies hoax]], or "Sokal squared", similarly produced ludicrous papers mimicking the tropes of humanities, in particular gender studies.

** Heartily mocked in the author's note for [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-09-24 this strip.]]
** In [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-05-27 this]] strip Liz comments on how the trope attitude has resulted in her studies in memetics, linguistics, and sociology landing her a fast food job. In fact, [[{{Irony}} she studied this very meme in school]].

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair Sokal hoax]] was a TakeThat from a physics professor to postmodernist social studies academics, or more specifically, the tendency of po-mo theorists to pepper their writings with nonsensical scientific analogies to make their work sound more rigorous than it is. Sokal sent a paper of pure drivel which would embarrass a second year physics student, but wrote it so it agreed with the political and social views of the journal Social Text. Sokal's paper (in brief - the real paper contains more nonsense than can be discussed here) argued that a properly free mathematics would free us from the social constructs which are implied by our rigid, unyielding, dogmatic, anti-feminist, capitalist, and unjust theory of ''gravity''. Of course, they ''did'' publish it of their own free will...

* Occurs in SpeculativeFiction: writers and readers of ScienceFiction on the harder side of the scale sometimes look down on soft SF or - even worse - ''{{Fantasy}}.''

* The Institute of ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' practically has this as their M.O., and they come off as a massive advertisement as to why the social sciences should exist. Everything they do is the result of asking themselves the question [[ForScience "Can we do X?", but never "SHOULD we do X?".]] As a result, practically everything they do is either a waste of time for them (making synthetic gorillas for some inane reason and flashy laser weapons weaker than your average pipe pistol) and a neverending nightmare of paranoia for the surface. It's quite telling that despite being the only organization in the Fallout universe that was completely protected from the effects of the War and therefore never lost any scientific knowledge, they're still the technological inferiors of several other factions. In fact, the ''only'' true breakthrough they've made has been the creation of third-generation Synths, which [[spoiler: they wouldn't have been able to do without DNA from Shawn]] and the only use they could think of for a truly sentient ArtificialHuman that was physically indistinguishable from a normal person was for menial labor. Whenever evidence is screaming at them that they should change their policies, [[IRejectYourReality they perform mind-boggling mental gymnastics]] to [[NeverMyFault avoid taking any responsibility for their actions.]]

** The ContentWarning at the bottom of every page reads, "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

** "''[[PrecisionFStrike Fuck]]'' [[RunningGag Computational Linguistics]]," starting in [[http://www.xkcd.org/114/ strip 114.]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxe7bpaT8o And he sticks to it in public, too.]]

* ''Webcomic/SkinHorse'', [[http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/skinhorse/series.php?view=archive&chapter=33564#strip5 here.]]

** In [[http://xkcd.com/1520/ "Degree-Off"]] a physicist is taken aback by a harsh remark made by a biologist. The alt text reads "I'M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE 'SQUISHY' SCIENCES, [[SelfDeprecation I ASSUMED YOU'D BE A LITTLE HARDER]]"[[note]]Sadly, the physicist does not counter that Pestilence was ''never'' one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or even a petty remark about drug-resistant illnesses making the pop culture Horseman ''stronger''.[[/note]]

** Institutionalized in the governance of the Iranian higher education system, where the government has repeatedly "crack[ed]down" on social science professors for [[http://chronicle.com/article/Social-Science-on-Trial-in-/48949/ spreading western and "insufficiently Islamic"]] ideas and ideologies. For similar reasons as above, the far more apolitical hard sciences don't attract that scrutiny.

Compare and contrast ScienceIsBad and ScienceIsWrong. See MDEnvy and NotThatKindOfDoctor, which can be related. There may also be a bit of overlap wit ADegreeInUseless, as students of the hard sciences may consider degrees in soft sciences to count as one.

* In 2012, an atheist philosopher from Belgium [[http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/09/28/philosopher-pulls-a-sokal-on-theology-conferences/ duped a theology conference with a Sokal-style hoax]]. The philosophers who were doped acknowledged they thought the paper was bupkis, but admitted it wasn't out of [[JerkassHasAPoint the range]] of what they had previously published.
* Evolutionary psychology seems to be the go-to field (or approach) for many people who want social norms and mores explained, but dislike the nature of fields like sociology or social anthropology.
** And many other psychologists, and also biologists (who, after all, came up with the theory of evolution in the first place) are detractors of evo psych and accuse it of being reductionist, essentialist, or lacking in evidence. Evolutionary psychology adherents, on the other hand, accuse them of being politically correct and rejecting its evidence due to this contradicting pet theories.

*** Even in less autocratic places, biology is often politicized thanks to its basic concepts, like evolution and genetics, clashing with the religious views of certain groups. Similar problems exist in medicine, with certain religious groups objecting to things like birth control, artificial insemination, vaccination, and stem-cell research, to say nothing of those who object to ''all medicine''.