Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.