Shit Your Mom Could've Told You

There's a joke that isn't mine and it goes like this:

A man goes to get a Ph.D. in economics. Because he is a good son, from time to time he calls his mother.

His mother asks him the same question she has asked for more than 20 years now:

"So what are you learning in school" 

He then begins to explain search models of unemployment.

"You need to go to grad school to learn that people don't want shitty jobs? I could've told you that!"

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And indeed she could have. Because in the social sciences every result is one of two kinds: shit your mom could've told you, and shit your did tell you but she was wrong.

And neither of these is a failure!

Any sort of scientist will be pleased to explain why the second kind is good news - you're exploring the frontier of knowledge, publishing new papers, winning grants, etc.

But in the social sciences, the first is also good news! Because it means that your (implicit) mental model of human behavior, of the society in which you live, isn't off. It means that you haven't been making systematic mistakes in your dealings with the system which above all others sustain your life!

Thus the only bad result is one that can tell you neither - which means that the experiment was underpowered and probably shouldn't have been done in the first place. 

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You might disagree with the importance I have put on a good mental model of other people.

Witness the tremendous persistence of "woo" and "pseudoscience" in the modern age. A person can walk about misinformed and ignorant about half a hundred things, with no notion about how electrons spin, or evolution happens, or electricity works, and it is of no consequence to their life success, so long as they have a good intuitive model of how human social intuition works.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of being able to do this intuitively. With keen interest in human behavior and much study in social sciences I feel I have enough wit and understanding to be able to sit down and work out what people are thinking and what they will do. But I have a developmental disorder, and so cannot do so intuitively. So I might, reflecting on my memories, realize five years after the fact that a woman was asking me out on a date. Of course, in the moment I was unaware. My life feels littered with these moments, and has surely been shaped by them - more for the worse than the better, I feel.

Compare this egregious failure of intuition to another:

It is a well replicated result that students, even those with some relevant schooling, make systematic mistakes in mechanics problems. Even professors fail to solve these basic problems when forced to think on their feet. Indeed, a certain kind of hands-on introductory physics involves identifying and correcting these misapprehensions.

And physics is important! And intuitive understanding of stuff in the physical world, of the how thrown objects work is important! For hundreds of thousands of years a key to human success has been being able to throw things at other things and actually hit them. Ever see an elephant try to throw something? They're terrible at it! Hell, even chimps have shit accuracy compared to humans. And still, still, people's intuitive model of physical reality fucks up.

But faulty intuition of mechanics don't cripple a person the way a faulty (or absent) intuition of human social behavior does.

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Your mom (probably) couldn't tell you how quantum mechanics work. But she can tell you people don't want shitty jobs - because she has an implicit, intuitive model of human nature, and that's what her model tells her. It tells here that this arrangement of facial features means a person is happy, that this phrase is a gesture of friendship, except with this person in that context, in which case its a trap.

But just because that model exists, and even works in familiar contexts, doesn't mean its correct.

So rejoice at the unsurprising result in social sciences! It means your mom wasn't wrong, that the model of human behavior that you inherited from her isn't wrong. It means that you can trust your instincts about people and the social world, that you more can freely use that intuition. Intuition which to me looks more like telepathy than anything else...