Double-Standards in Sociology (Rant)

[CaptainChewbacca]

So, did this woman's paper get peer-reviewed and published, or did she just show it to you? I mean, if its published, it means there's an entrenched bureaucracy of feminists getting this stuff to print, and that's worse.

[Durandal]

That varies from school to school. I have a bachelors in Psych and I can tell you that at the school I went to the failure rate in the junior and senior level courses as well as the dropout rate (meaning changed majors out of psychology) was very high. History, Anthro and Archeo were the same way. People get into them, thinking they are 'easy' and change majors rapidly when the realize the volume of info they need to know just to get through sophmore classes.

Sadly, Soc is not as such. I know a lot of people from many different colleges who picked up soc as a double-major with whatever else they were doing because it's such an easy course-run. The hardest courses tend to be basic statistics courses.

That's the impression I get from psychology programs. I took one psychology course, and the professor's understanding of mathematical modeling was rudimentary and trivial at best.

Many psychologists are obsessed with "1 to 10" scales and just don't get that arbitrary quantification is not better than no quantification at all. Quantifying something without units is simply useless, yet it's an approach which psychologists routinely take. I've seen garbage published by Ph. D. psychologists that I'd expect from high school freshmen, but not people who have supposedly contributed significantly to their field. A perfect example is something that was posted here a while back. Some psychologist had supposedly found a way to quantify what the "worst day of the year" was using an equation whose units couldn't even come out right and that generated some completely meaningless unit.

[Lord Zentei]

Dimension analysis. Prerequisite for your work being worth shit. I mentioned this in an earlier thread, I think.

[Master of Ossus]

So, did this woman's paper get peer-reviewed and published, or did she just show it to you? I mean, if its published, it means there's an entrenched bureaucracy of feminists getting this stuff to print, and that's worse.

I'm not entirely sure. She was advertised as having "extensively studied" culture in gyms and health clubs, so I figure that she's published SOMETHING on a similar topic even if she just used two of our local gyms as examples.

[Trogdor]

I can honestly say, I had no idea that soc was that biased. I've taken Intro level courses, and I'm in the humanities, but I honestly thought standards were higher.

If the humanities improved their standards, the result would be millions more college drop-outs throughout the US. I have yet to meet anyone who's ever failed out of a sociology or psychology program because they're both so deplorably easy that one has to wonder why they're four-year programs.

I sort of know of someone. I'm took an intro level course and the professor took a liking to me (he's a really good guy and a great teacher BTW, though from this thread it sounds like he's in the minority amoung soc profs, sadly enough), and one time he mentioned to me how someone totally BSed his sociological autobiography; wrote he had his first sexual encounter at 11 and had slept with literally hundreds of women since then, and that he has his own secretary at Princeton University for some reason, apparently totally ignoring the issue of why the hell anyone who's the big man at Princeton would go to The College of New Jersey.

[sketerpot]

So, did this woman's paper get peer-reviewed and published, or did she just show it to you? I mean, if its published, it means there's an entrenched bureaucracy of feminists getting this stuff to print, and that's worse.

Tangentially related: have you heard of the Social Text affair? If not, here's a summary: a physicist managed to get an article of meaningless gibberish published in a peer-reviewed journal of literary criticism. Here's an excerpt:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of "objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality'', no less than social "reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

[sketerpot]

Tangentially related: have you heard of the Social Text affair? If not, here's a summary: a physicist managed to get an article of meaningless gibberish published in a peer-reviewed journal of literary criticism. Here's an excerpt:

Edit: that should be "cultural studies", not literary criticism. I was getting it confused with How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, which is also a good read.

[Tzeentch]

That's the impression I get from psychology programs. I took one psychology course, and the professor's understanding of mathematical modeling was rudimentary and trivial at best.

Many psychologists are obsessed with "1 to 10" scales and just don't get that arbitrary quantification is not better than no quantification at all. Quantifying something without units is simply useless, yet it's an approach which psychologists routinely take. I've seen garbage published by Ph. D. psychologists that I'd expect from high school freshmen, but not people who have supposedly contributed significantly to their field. A perfect example is something that was posted here a while back. Some psychologist had supposedly found a way to quantify what the "worst day of the year" was using an equation whose units couldn't even come out right and that generated some completely meaningless unit.

You know, I raised this issue with a friend of mine who's a (very intelligent) psych professor, expecting him to leap to the defense of his profession. Instead, he told me that only about the top 10-15% of his field actually accomplish anything meaningful, and that he just filters out most of the bullshit. He also said that there is a sizeable group of psychologists who do flawed studies that difficult to distinguish from legitimate work - until the flaw is pointed out to you. Unfortunately, the people good enough to pick out the subtler flaws would rather be doing research than editing journals. Doesn't explain why the obvious BS is published, though.

As for sociologists, I suspect that their real problem stems from the absolutely retarded concept of scientific relativism that they were kicking around in the 80s. That has mostly percolated out of the system at this point, but clearly its dregs are still around in the form of the worst aspects of pomo.

[fgalkin]

The problem is not sociology, the problem is pomo. The reason why pomo is bad is explained very well in Valdy's post. But if you're still not convinced, allow me present the postmodernism generator, a tool that generates completely random and totally meaningless essays. Enjoy!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Tzeentch]

The problem is not sociology, the problem is pomo. The reason why pomo is bad is explained very well in Valdy's post. But if you're still not convinced, allow me present the postmodernism generator, a tool that generates completely random and totally meaningless essays. Enjoy!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Tarring all of pomo with the same brush doesn't really make any sense. All that postmodernism is is a rejection of modernism. Since there's no cohesive concept of modernism that stretches accross all the arts, there's no cohesive postmodernism to criticize. The Simpsons and Family Guy are both postmodern comedy for the way they reject the conventions of the comedy that came before. Alan Moore's Watchmen is deconstructionist because it takes the conventions of the superhero genre and makes them 'read' differently.

I'm inclined to agree with the essay sketerpot linked to: that the original postmodernist lit-crit authors had something interesting to say (that's how they became canon, after all), but that most of their successors are intellctually lazy and/or stupid. At the very least, I'd like to read Derrida or Foucault before ripping into them.

[Lord Zentei]

The problem is not sociology, the problem is pomo. The reason why pomo is bad is explained very well in Valdy's post. But if you're still not convinced, allow me present the postmodernism generator, a tool that generates completely random and totally meaningless essays. Enjoy!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

LOL! This is fucking brilliant. I wonder if anyone has gotten away with using it at least as a template.

[Keevan_Colton]

LOL! This is fucking brilliant. I wonder if anyone has gotten away with using it at least as a template.

I've handed in an essay using Fight Club, Stephen King's Dark Tower and a host of other novels and films as evidence to support a theory that sociology is full of shit...and they gave me a mark that translates as around an A- in the US way of doing things...

I mean, I've made it a policy to use Wikipedia for a source for these numbnuts because they're about as accurate themselves.

[Illuminatus Primus]

At the very least, I'd like to read Derrida or Foucault before ripping into them.

Derrida and Foucault? Their works are nothing but inscrutiable garbage using confused and misused terminology and jargon for the purposes of dubious agendas.

Its one thing to extend a pomo philosophy toward the creation of art and media, like comedy, film, theater, prose, etc. Its a completely different thing to let it intercede into regions requiring logical, scientific, or any sort of intellectual discipline and rigor whatsoever. These people are their garbage is not suited toward attempting to analyze anything serious productively.