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AABoyles comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong
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As a social scientist (who spends a LOT of time and effort developing rigorous methodology in keeping with the scientific method), I find your dismissal of my entire academic superfield disgraceful. Perhaps you've confused social science with punditry?
What kind of social science do you do?
Computational Social Science (which is extremely methodology-oriented). I was trained in Political Science, but the lines between the social sciences are pretty fuzzy. I do substantive work which could be called Political Science, Sociology, or Economics.
The definitions that I found are very wide and very fuzzy, and, essentially, boil down to "social science but with computers!". Is it, basically, statistics (which nowadays is often called by the fancier name of "data science")?
I doubt you can find a widely-acceptable definition of Data Science which is any less fuzzy. Computational Social Science (CSS) is a subset of Data Science. Take Drew Conway's Data Science Venn Diagram: If your Substantive Expertise is a Social Science, you're doing Computational Social Science.
Statistics is an important tool in CSS, but it doesn't cover the other types of modeling we do: Agent-Based, System Dynamic, and Algorithmic Game Theoretic to name a few.
Ah, I see, so you're coming from that direction.
But let me ask a different question -- in what kind of business you're in? Are you in the business of making predictions? in the business of constructing explanations of how the world works? in the business of coming up with ways to manipulate the world to achieve desired ends?
I'm in the business of modeling. I do all three of those tasks, but the emphasis is definitely on the last.
Could you give examples of successful interventions that you field has come up with, that wouldn't otherwise have been put into practice?
Nope! Not to say that an intervention proposed by a computational social model has never influenced policy in real life--I just don't know of any examples. That said, I'm workin' on it.
Perhaps you were exposed to better education. In Latin American universities, the humanities are plagued with antipositivism. If you've managed to stay away from it, kudos to you.
Oof. You just trampled one of my pet peeves: Social Science is a subset of the Sciences, not the Humanities.
There's still a persistent anti-positivist streak in the Humanities in the US, but mostly positivism has just been irrelevant to the work of Humanities scholars (though this is changing in some interesting and exciting ways).
More importantly, the social sciences in the US are overwhelming positivist, even amongst researchers whose work is not strictly empirical. I wish I could take credit for those good influences, but I think you're probably the one deserving of kudos for managing to become a rationalist in such a hostile environment.