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A Brief Description

Death by Assumption: How an Obsession Is Slowly Killing the Social Sciences states the obvious, that the social sciences have become obsessed with causality, and it’s leading them straight to their own irrelevance. It is an intellectually provocative, public-facing critique of how causality, experimentation, and methodological sophistication became the ruling ideals of modern social science. But while these ideals were once a good idea, now they are an obsession. What began as an effort to make social research more rigorous hardened into a professional culture that is too often mistaking analytical sophistication for scientific explanation itself.

Written by a longtime professor of statistics and research methods, the book argues that many disciplines have elevated causal inference and technical design into institutional markers of “good science” - thus to be taught, rewarded, published, funded, and unquestioned. But this is not only a story about ‘why does X cause Y’ but also a human story about how useful ideas become sacred, how prestige systems protect themselves, and how intelligent people become trapped by assumptions they can no longer see. Combining philosophy of science, insider storytelling, and accessible explanations of experiments, causality, and prediction, Death by Assumption argues for a more honest and intellectually humble vision of social science built around description, causality, and prediction together.