“Quasiscience” may be a useful term for a field somewhere between science and pseudoscience. The foundations are dubious and the whole thing may be nonsense. There well may be some real stuff there, but it’s impossible to sort out which, given the methods used.
Conversation
Quasisciences address problems everyone wants answers for, but for which no good methods are available. Practitioners collude to obscure the foundational problems. Funders want answers and choose to overlook doubts.
Identity communities form around the field’s outputs.
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Hmm. Seems like you’re conflating application métis and fan theories a bit? Most programmers don’t understand semiconductor manufacturing but build their theories atop abstractions that they trust up to a point. Programming lore does not appear to be a quasiscience in your sense.
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There is a spectrum going from programming lore on one end (based on strong, nearly leakproof abstractions) through fMRIology to social psych and say startupology. The abstractions they depend on get progressively leakier, and conclusions shakier.
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Fandom seems almost like an epiphenomenon of shaky foundations but not in itself an indictment of the foundations. You look for more social reassurance when your truths have a half life of 5 years rather than 50. But that’s degree, not kind.
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This sounds like an interesting thread of questions, but I’m not sure I understand what it is. Is the point that there’s a continuum from reliable science to pseudoscience? Yes definitely. “Quasi” refers vaguely to the middle ground there.
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There are fields that haven’t quite managed to get into a normal-science groove yet, because the methods are still shaky or there’s still ontological problems. Kuhn called them “pre-paradigm”.
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Pre-paradigm science is great (only place I personally want to be; normal science, however valuable, bores me).
Quasisciences are ones that are pre-paradigm but are treated as normal due to public desire for answers. That’s pathological.
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Ah okay I get that. And fans are partly responsible for that unjustified extension. Perhaps the practitioners too out of ‘hard science’ envy/insecurity (as in psych and econ) leading to mathematization of dubious value. Spherical cow math on real cow phenomenology.
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It is interesting for me to overhear this discussion. The way clinical sciences treat fMRI is *very very* different from the way cognitive neuroscience/psychology treat fMRI. The degree of skeptical/methods heavy content increases in the latter community.
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I know you tweeted some stuff and papers about it, but is there a tldr/ELI5 of the key difference there?
Quite! What is valued in a paper being written by an NSF funded basic science lab to be published in a basic science/psychology journal is extremely different from being funded by NIH for collecting clinical data that you plan to publish in a medical journal.
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