Thursday, July 20, 2017

#MoreSocialThanScience

8 comments:

Art Deco said...

It's women's studies, which is not a social research discipline. This particular course is in the realm of something akin to theatre criticism. About 0.5% of the baccalaureate degrees awarded each year in this country are given out in victimology programs. You'd inconvenience very few people by closing them all down. That's apart from the question of whether they have a valid research subject and whether or not preliminary affirmations you have to make to enter those disciplines do not invalidate their standing.

If you're concerned about the state of social research, I'd focus my attention on the ruin of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology (which are authentic disciplines).

Tom Van Dyke said...

Well, the course advertises itself as "interdisciplinary," tainting all the other departments and fields as well. The first finger to be pointed is at all the liberals who handed over the academy to the raceclassgenderqueer frauds of the left, who now operate with impunity, if not dominance.

As for social psychology, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has already called that out, that liberals outnumber conservatives 10-to-1. Or worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html

And of course, the Rreproducibility Crisis leaves their work tremendously vulnerable to charges of confirmation bias so deep that their work is virtually useless--another fraud.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/09/how-the-reproducibility-crisis-in-academia-is-affecting-scientific-research/#1066eeea3dad

As for the study of history itself, I share the opinion that "critical theory" has also tainted that to the point of uselessness as history, having transformed it into sociology and ethno-cultural anthropology, but without the statistical rigor required of genuine science. Thus the Zoroastrian lesbians of frontier Wisconsin assume as much study and significance as the DWMs who won the Revolution and drafted the Constitution.

Erstwhile gold standard Gordon Wood took much heat from this new generation of historians for his observation that any meaningful historical narrative has been lost in a sea of ethnographic trivia.

https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/01/21/where-have-you-gone-gordon-wood/

Academic reviews, as they were for "Radicalism," were harsh, with some of them approaching the line between critique and disrespect. The reviews of Empire of Liberty by John L. Brooke in The William and Mary Quarterly and Nancy Isenberg in the Journal of the Early Republic exemplify how many historians of the generation (or two) following Wood’s see him. Brooke sees Wood’s work as “rooted in Bancroft’s celebratory-Progressive historiographical imperative,” i.e., teleological beyond repair and unabashedly triumphalist. Isenberg attacks his tone as becoming increasingly “preachier in trumpeting the American dream.” They seem to see Wood as having sold his academic soul for a position as the popular prophet of the founding so many Americans want, i.e., a founding devoid of inner conflict, one that removes the founders’ culpability and, therefore, the readers’ guilt over the Indian removal, slavery, and race and gender relations.

jimmiraybob said...

Thus the Zoroastrian lesbians of frontier Wisconsin assume as much study and significance as the DWMs who won the Revolution and drafted the Constitution.

You'll be real glad to know that "Zoroastrian Lesbians of Frontier Wisconsin*" as well as "Politicizing Beyonce" are (or were) upper graduate level elective courses with a likely attendance rate of 4-6 per semester. The Beyonce course is/was not a course available to the general undergrad population where the DWMs who won the Revolution and drafted the Constitution are still safe and mainstream to the thousands who trod through the general history courses every semester (but likely subject to a more realistic understanding than the 1950s mythic status).

Rage on my brother.

* yes, I am aware this is a made up course but I'm going with the comedic flow.

Tom Van Dyke said...

Read the Junto post. Research the Gordon Wood "controversy." You may agree with the desirability of mutating history into ethnography and raceclassgender ideology, but let's not deny it's the truth.

jimmiraybob said...

”As for social psychology, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has already called that out, that liberals outnumber conservatives 10-to-1. Or worse.”

First of all, this is a NY Times article and obviously fake news.

Possible objections:

Haidt cites no study. He appears to be relaying a guesstimate based on an anecdote about a head count at a meeting. The article is dated 2011, old by scientific criteria. It is an example of a scientific field calling out apparent shortcomings within that field – we call that policing the community. It’s not a vast conspiracy in that conservatives themselves are likely the cause of imbalance by self-selecting into other areas such as engineering, finance, law, politics or seminary. Please cite more recent relative studies.

jimmiraybob said...

”And of course, the Rreproducibility Crisis leaves their work tremendously vulnerable to charges of confirmation bias so deep that… --another fraud.”

Rage! Rage against the machine! Or, you could go to one of the articles that Price cites and see what the authors have to say.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html#t1

Some morsels:

”Many factors are responsible for the high failure rate, notwithstanding the inherently difficult nature of this disease. Certainly, the limitations of preclinical tools such as inadequate cancer-cell-line and mouse models2 make it difficult for even the best scientists working in optimal conditions to make a discovery that will ultimately have an impact in the clinic. Issues related to clinical-trial design — such as uncontrolled phase II studies, a reliance on standard criteria for evaluating tumour response and the challenges of selecting patients prospectively — also play a significant part in the dismal success rate3.”

”The term 'non-reproduced' was assigned on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme.” This does not render the “unreproducible data worthless in advancing some understanding but that the preclinical research doesn’t necessarily translate to clinical needs.

”These results, although disturbing, do not mean that the entire system is flawed. There are many examples of outstanding research that has been rapidly and reliably translated into clinical benefit.”

This is a corrective paper within the research community about that research community - while there may be actual fraudulent data the vast majority is not fraudulent. – we call that policing the community via the scientific method.

jimmiraybob said...

”Erstwhile gold standard Gordon Wood took much heat from this new generation of historians for his observation that any meaningful historical narrative has been lost in a sea of ethnographic trivia.”

Intramural wrangling. As you say, lots of push back.

”80-90% of all lawyers and those that associate with lawyers are crooks” .... Some people say.

Hey, if somebody said it, it must be so.

Art Deco said...

KC Johnson has been writing for some time about the damage sustained by American history, in which whole lines of inquiry are disappearing. He remarked on a court case which referred to a monograph published in 1977 as an authority. Per Johnson, that's actually one of the more recent publications in what was once a vibrant subdiscipline. Military history, diplomatic history, conventional political-institutional history are all in danger as their practitioners retire and are replaced with race-class-gender sectaries. See Johnson's critique of Sarah Deutsch. Some of these characters have no business being in a classroom.

I'd take an interest in social relations because it is one of the most populous of academic majors. The victimology programs can disappear tomorrow and those inconvenienced (on a campus of ordinary dimensions) will be those employed to teach those subjects and a few dozen students. Social relations is not the most well-subscribed academic major (IIRC, psychology, biology, and English are), but still a ton of youths do follow courses in it. Survey research going back at least 3 decades has indicated that sociology and anthropology faculties are hopelessly unbalanced and Haidt has testified that it's as bad in social psychology. Under those circumstances, the discipline decays into an apologetical pursuit as inquiries incongruent with the interests of the SJW set are ruled out a priori. Individual studies may be conducted properly, but the body of studies is of scant value. Sociology faculty who do think outside the box are subject to professional harrassment. (Mark Regnerus and M.S. Adams to name two).

One of the people critiqued a decade ago by Johnson was Eduardo Bonilla Silva.

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/07/group-profile-eduardo-bonilla-silva.html

This creature has actually served a term as president of the American Sociological Association.


It's a deeply corrupted discipline. And it's too bad.