Ever since that thing in 2020 we're not allowed to mention by name on the internet, we have been bombarded with claims by "science" and scientists. Now that it's over you will still hear them, but they will be about different topics. Today's rant is inspired by a woman I saw on Youtube claiming that "studies prove that unmarried women are happier". I can't find a study that deals with that. I found an article from the UK that references a website called Mintel ( a market research firm) and a book from a guy named Paul Dolan that has been fact checked into oblivion, but I couldn't find a single scientific study. There aren't any. This is not scientific, at least not in the classic sense. You can't study this with physics or chemistry or biology. This is a matter of "social science" which is not "science" as most people understand it. To be scientific it must pass certain criteria, as I teach my students every semester.
Science must be measurable. I'm not talking about talking to people and collating responses in a market survey. I mean you must collect data with instruments in metric values that can provide mathematical value for trendlines and ANOVA. How many liters are there in a unit of happiness? How many grams of mass does happiness have? Happiness is not an item that science can measure. It's SUBJECTIVE. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. There are no machines or metric units that can measure happiness. Science cannot measure preference, belief, sophistry, or opinions. It doesn't measure religion. There is a good reason some things are not validated by the FDA. There is no way to do so.
Science is repeatable. Theoretically, if something is causal, it is always causal. This means that every woman would have to be happier if she never married. This means that marriage must lower the happiness value of every woman who married and do so every time she married by the same amount. Since you can't actually test on the same woman multiple times without having residual effects from previous experience, there will be artifacts that skew the future data. We also don't usually experiment on PEOPLE in science. It must be testable by everyone, repeatable by everyone, and applicable to everyone, or at least with a 95% confidence level.
Science must be falsifiable. This does not mean that we make up fake data. This means that you must leave room for the possibility that you might find results that counteract your presuppositions. In fact a well designed scientific experiment doesn't prove anything. You write a hypothesis and a null hypothesis. The hypothesis would be that "unmarried women are happier" the null hypothesis would be "marriage has no effect on happiness". Assuming you could test this, you would design an experiment to disprove the null hypothesis, collect data, and see if marital state affects happiness. With sufficient data you could then reject the notion that marriage has no effect, but that does not prove your hypothesis. It merely means you can reject the null hypothesis. You repeat until you test every other null hypothesis and then can claim, if and only if you reject every possible null hypothesis, that by default your hypothesis cannot be disproven.
I tell my students every semester the same thing. "Science never proves anything. It removes all other possibilities until only the truth remains". That is a direct quote from me to them. So any time anyone claims that science has proven something, I know they are paid liars. They can't possibly have tested everything on everyone and found that is is always true for every specimen. They can't possibly have tested every null hypothesis. In the end, I will accept when someone says, "evidence suggests" because that is more carefully couched in measurements and data, and it doesn't claim that there is no room that they might be wrong. You don't test your hypothesis. But most scientists are sponsored by someone and have an incentive to prove their sponsor's investment was wisely spent. As Arthur Conan Doyle warned in A Study in Scarlet "It is useless to theorize before you have facts otherwise you start bending facts to fit theories" which is exactly what most "scientists" do. Everyone wants to be relevant, but most "science" is anything but. Most of it is marketing.
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