Are cognitive sciences actually being... scientific?

Question

I came here searching a board to ask psychological (or rather psychiatric) questions. But I mean scientific questions - that's why is something happening based on evidence - not an opinion.

I've read some answers here and most of them are quite obviously thought up. If this happens on stack overflow it's all right. All programs are thought up actually. If it happens on Chemistry.SE my room might blow.

To the point, besides the not so reliable answers, I've seen questions that are definitelly opinion based and not scientific:

1. Can artificial intelligence be creative?
2. Can you give advices on spirituality as a psychologist?

Yet I can see no flags on the questions (maybe because of my low reputation?) and generally no notion that their are off topic.

I think we can't blame the users so much though. I always read the /on-topic when joining a new meta and this time my reading wasn't much helpful:

There's already some post about the FAQ being unsatisfactory. I have (had at the time of reading) no idea what the cognitive science is, aside from etymological assumptions I could make right away. The information should be right in /on-topic instead of being scattered all around. Most people do not read the /on-topic. Give a little chance to those who do.

I also think even active users (or I) have some conundrum what's on topic and what's not.
In the link user is saying that self-help questions are off topic here. As a Biology.SE user I agree, but you should really first include it in FAQ (/dont-ask). However don't think my question as off topic anyway as I'm not asking for help or advice but that doesn't matter now. ¹

_{The text bellow is not very important.}

Now to be a little psychological I'd like to note that you might not feel so good about this post if you're on of the active participants on this meta. I noticed people can feel so uneasy that their judgement might be a little clouded when I criticise something they hold dear. If this describes you please keep in mind that I like this Beta and I mean no harm.

You might also say I could do better instead of criticising but I don't think so. I have no education in either of the things that are supposed to be on topic here. I'm however an active user on several beta scientific sites and while I couldn't enrich the sites with the knowledge I don't have I did my best do give others an inspiration to do so.

I'd like to refer you to this post too, as the poster - unlike me - actually has an idea how to make the site more scientific.

_{1. if you have a different opinion on that matter post a comment to the relevant question, not here please. This post is to serve a different purpose.}

Answer 1

I read your post, but I wasn't entirely clear about what your question is, but I'll focus on your main title question: "Is cognitive sciences stack exchange scientific?"

The site is scientific in several respects:

• most of the users with the most reputation have scientific qualifications in cognitive sciences
• answers that get upvoted tend to have a scientifically reasoned answers typically with reference to the primary scientific literature
• questions that are answerable in a scientific sense tend to get upvoted

Of course, it is a broad site. We get a lot of questions from people with little to no knowledge of the cognitive sciences. We also sometimes get answers that lack adequate scientific reasoning.

If you review meta discussions, we have generally been critiqued for being too strict. I.e., closing too many questions and being too eager to down-vote poorly reasoned answers.

General points

• With poorly worded questions, we often do try to improve the questions through editing, but we are fairly strict about self-help questions that wont generalise.
• With poorly reasoned answers, I think we generally rely on voting mechanisms to downvote poorly worded answers, except in more extreme cases.

So if you'd like to contribute to maintaining scientific standards on the site, I encourage you to engage in such activities (e.g., editing poorly worded questions, flagging inappropriate questions, downvoting invalid answers, upvoting valid answers, etc.).

Answer 2

Good point. I think Biology SE has a higher level of 'scientificness' in that the users actively encourage the use of citations in answers by downvoting those that don't. Also, consistently commenting on those answers that lack proper citations helps. Promoting the use of citations to articles and not wiki pages (although admittedly I use wikipedia pages in my answers still) increases 'scientificness' even further. I think that reviewers are key to bring the level of answers up. Also, poorly defined questions should be edited or put on hold, or transferred to another SE. These practices are more common in Biology SE than Cognitive Sciences I have noticed.