That's why we're not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a _shared_ map that reflects the territory that we are—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (_e.g._, sex, race, and class) are _exactly_ those for which we face the largest incentive to deceive and self-deceive. Counterintuitively, I might not _want_ you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship (or the disutility of my animosity), for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to _get the right answer for the reasons_, but also to _trust_ that your fellow so-called "scholars" are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-aggrandizing lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over. You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other", because almost no one is that oblivious. To write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_ of how your work fits in to [the war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the shared map.
That's why we're not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a _shared_ map that reflects the territory that we are—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (_e.g._, sex, race, and class) are _exactly_ those for which we face the largest incentive to deceive and self-deceive. Counterintuitively, I might not _want_ you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship (or the disutility of my animosity), for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to _get the right answer for the reasons_, but also to _trust_ that your fellow so-called "scholars" are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-aggrandizing lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over. You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other", because almost no one is that oblivious. To write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_ of how your work fits in to [the war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the shared map.