The real problem with discourse surrounding social issues.
I have some thoughts on why the social sciences are particularly subject to the beliefs that we critique here, and in my belief it stems from one core issue: the social sciences dress themselves up in the aesthetic of science while not practicing anything remotely scientific. For one, according to Popper, the strict demarcation between science and pseudoscience is that science is falsifiable: if a theory is truly scientific, then the proponents of the theory must be able to propose the exact set of experimental data that would falsify the theory. If a theory fails to be falsifiable then it is not science. We see this so much with feminist "theory": the theory is unfalsifiable because it is concerned more with projecting semantic descriptions onto reality first and foremost rather than beginning by looking at data and attempting to accurately describe and explain phenomena. The patriarchy is a mystical catch-all theory that explains all phenomena through ad hoc adjustment: if men commit crimes it's proof of the patriarchy oppressing women; if women do the exact same thing then it is also proof of the patriarchy. Popper explicitly warned that one mechanism by which a theory avoids falsification is through becoming so broad in its scope that any and all phenomena can be explained, at which point a theory ceases to be scientific and ceases to even attempt to rigorously explain reality.
Additionally, if we look at the other demands of rigorous science, namely reproducibility and methodological rigour, the social sciences largely fail these criteria as well. Routinely, papers are published that suffer from circular methodology and sampling bias (like using police arrest data to proclaim that men commit DV at rates that are significantly higher than women), or once again relying on semantics (such as defining sexual assault in a arbitrary manner that inflates numbers or prevents women from being recorded as perpetrators). This is not to mention the issues of reproducibility. It is well known that the majority of published journal papers are not reproducible, but in the social sciences this issues is even worse, as the degrees of freedom are unconstrained by any physical law, unlike in the hard sciences, where the environment itself is a constant arbiter to some extent. In the hard sciences, it is much more difficult to explain away a null result or failed experiment.
Instead of treating this extreme variability with a proportional increase in methodological rigor, the discipline has done the exact opposite. It has institutionalised a culture of selective reporting, p-hacking, and arbitrary data-filtering to force erratic human datasets into neat, narrative-friendly boxes. The peer-review process within these fields has degenerated from an aggressive, adversarial error checking phase into a collaborative gatekeeping mechanism, where members of the same ideological paradigm happily stamp a paper's conclusion without ever demanding access to the raw data or testing the replication parameters. By severing the connection between publication and reproducibility, social science has effectively abandoned the core of scientific progress.
Ultimately, if people were actually concerned with the truth above all else, then we would hold everyone to the strict standards laid out by the seminal thinkers in philosophy of science. But because social issues are unique in the sense that people feel deep personal investments in a theory, the standard tools of rationality are routinely abandoned in favor of emotional self-preservation. When a hypothesis transitions from a description/explanation of data into a foundational pillar of an individual's moral identity, any attempt at falsification is no longer treated as a healthy academic audit; it is perceived as a direct, existential assault. Because social science operates in this highly volatile environment of human ego and political utility, its practitioners have built an entire institutional fortress out of semantic gatekeeping and unfalsifiable, circular loops. They have created a system where protecting the comforting, self-serving narrative is prioritised over radical pursuit of truth above all else. Until we call this out directly by critiquing the house of cards that the entire field is built upon purely through the lens of philosophy of science/epistemology, rather than engaging in ideological back-and-forth over semantics, nothing will change.