Here's a brief summary of sociology, in case you aren't sure what it is.
Huh. But that's not any more split into factions than Psychology or Biology or anything else. Or History for that matter, I assume.
I see sociologists in the elevator a lot but it's hard to tell what they do just by looking at them.
I think it is. The sub-disciplines are mutually incompatible in a way that I don't think that biology's are and to a greater extent than the sub-disciplines in psychology and history.
I see sociologists in the elevator a lot but it's hard to tell what they do just by looking at them.
That's how you differ from the sociologists. They had you pegged from your shoes and your posture.
Anyhow my ill-informed understanding had been that postmodernism and critical theory kinds of approaches had gotten their hooks into sociology much more so than the other social sciences (except anthropology, maybe?) and this led to a lot of schisms and bad feelings and claims of anti-scientific tendencies and counter-claims of cultural hegemony and so on. Psychology evaded this by spending the relevant period staring intently at pigeons (and later LISP) and economics evaded this by pretending to be physics.
Look at that wrapped up all nice with a bow.
I used to work for a sociologist, but not in sociology. He was great to work for.
And economics is reinventing itself as psychology and psychology is reinventing itself as the methods section of a neuroscience paper. No idea what sociology is doing, but it appears to involve a lot of math about networks, which seems neat.
The sub-disciplines are mutually incompatible
The sub-disciplines as the four traditions in the link in 1? What makes them incompatible? I mean, most mathematicians can't really talk to each other about their work, either.
that postmodernism and critical theory kinds of approaches had gotten their hooks into sociology much more so than the other social sciences
What about compared to history? (I really have no idea, and only the shakiest grasp on what "postmodern" and "critical theory" actually mean, anyway.)
Max Weber, Goffman, and Joseph Gusfield are all well worth reading IMO. There are a bunch of other people who write interesting books at the periphery of sociology-- Silvan Tompkins, Alexander Tarasov.
Some people who call themselves sociologists try to describe contemporary phenomena that historians will take up later.
I actually often use the heuristic that sociology is economics in real life.
No one's mentioned political science. Several years ago I had a historian roommate who liked to make fun of some poli-sci papers that contained "equations" like "National security = diplomacy / conflict + GDP," or something along those lines. I don't know how widespread that is, though.
Oh, I do also find those equations hilarious.
No one's mentioned political science.
Modeling in political science is very widespread, but not at that kind of bizarrely high level of a DV. I have no opinion on how well it works, just that it provides useful training should you happen to want to move to another field. Nobody will pay you for having an opinion about the Cold War.
I'd rather eat a Fowler's toad than major in biology,
And social psych is worse than either psych or sociology.
Nobody will pay you for having an opinion about the Cold War.
Some people might pay you to shut up your opinions about the Cold War.
Nobody will pay you for having an opinion about the Cold War.
I've always felt sorry for the folks who invested years getting credentialed in "Soviet studies" type stuff and graduated in 1989.
What makes them incompatible?
IANAS, but it seems to me that they're all arguing for completely different frameworks to describe the social reality in which we live. IOW, society is either all about power relationships, or it's all about economic competition, or all about cultural values, but it seems incoherent to say that it's all about all of those things at once.
Needless to say, it's probably true that each sub-discipline has a part of the truth, but that's not how individuals within those sub-disciplines are likely to argue.
Actually, wait, sub-discipline is a misleading word. It's not like the power people are studying one area while the economic people are studying another. They're all looking at society as a whole*, but from different premises. That's why it's incoherent: all 4 will look at the same phenomenon and confidently describe it in mutually incompatible ways.
Astrophysicists and particle physicists probably have trouble talking to each other, but it's not like they'd look at the same phenomenon and have incompatible explanations.
* well, little bits of society as synecdoches for society as a whole
20: "In considering this strangely understandably neglected topic ..."
that's not how individuals within those sub-disciplines are likely to argue.
So the problem is that the factions are more dogmatic than in other disciplines? It seems obvious that those are all useful frameworks for understanding society.
21: For certain strange, perverted charming values of "okay".
Sometimes two groups will hate each other because they're close enough to sort of recognise themselves in the other, but not far enough away to be indifferent. Maybe sociologists have studied this phenomenon.
re equations, I always liked Chalmers Johnson's formula for revolution, something like: elite intransigence + multiple societal dysfunctions + some catalyst = revolution.
I've always felt sorry for the folks who invested years getting credentialed in "Soviet studies" type stuff and graduated in 1989.
If they were really good at what they did they would have seen it coming and got out.
22: Needless to say, it's probably true that each sub-discipline has a part of the truth, but that's not how individuals within those sub-disciplines are likely to argue.
I'd assume that if they're not nuts, they would recognize that their sub-discipline only gave a partial perspective: probably everyone overvalues their own specialty to a certain extent, but you'd have to be crazy to be a critical social theorist and completely discount economic forces, and similarly crazy to be economics-focused without realizing that power relations have some explanatory force.
I can't see how sociology could be anything but incoherent in this sense if it were going to have any explanatory validity -- society isn't anything like as simple as the physical world. Someone who had a valid, theoretically coherent sociology would be Hari Seldon, predicting the next thousand years of the Galactic Empire.
My (highly biased) experience of sociologists is that their worldviews are a lot more compatible with reality than many of the other subject areas I deal with on a regular basis.
Then again, I have a really strong bias toward practicality.
30.1: But they are arguing about what is to be the content of the main text and what will be the footnotes/appendices. Not a context in which anyone's personal reasonableness cones to the fore.
I can't see how sociology could be anything but incoherent in this sense if it were going to have any explanatory validity -- society isn't anything like as simple as the physical world.
I'm totally confused. Biology is very descriptive and has a much harder time predicting things than Physics does, but it's not incoherent. It's just a complicated topic.
I don't know that 22 captures it, necessarily? I think that there are larger divisions, where some sociologists would say that (for instance) an empirical, network or modeling based framework for studying social structures is inherently useless, whereas others would say that critical theory-style approaches completely eliminate the field's ability to say anything valid about the world at all.
But, you know, I'm talking about my ass as much as anybody else is.
I wish we had, like, a sociologist and a historian who commented here, and they would show up and battle each other.
33: Sure, but sociology is way more complicated than biology still.
32 seems exactly right.
I wish we had, like, a sociologist and a historian who commented here, and they would show up and battle each other.
This would be a sad, sad followup to Lion v. Orca.
33: Sure, but sociology is way more complicated than biology still.
What? No it's not.
30.2: Paul Krugman just had an interview in the Boston Globe where he (again) related how Hari Seldon inspired him in his youth. (He was re-reading the trilogy to write an introduction to a new edition coming out.)
Yeah, I'm not sure how 35 would follow.
34.1 makes plenty of sense as well, but I'd guess that the kind of approach-based fault lines you suggest effectively map onto the subdivisions that orgtheory maps out. IOW, the econosociologists favor empiricism, while social constructionists focus mostly on textual evidence and power theorists are always doing metastudies. Or whatever.
There would be overlap, of course, but I bet there's actually self-reinforcing disagreements.
17: Dependant variable. Sorry for jargoning.
37: I'm talking out of my ass here, without any rigorous basis for it. But think about the difference in practicality of being an experimental biologist and an experimental sociologist. You can take cells, or tissues, or organisms, and do stuff to them and largely rely on the next batch of similar cells, or tissues, or organisms, to do the same thing under the same circumstances. On the other hand, you can do something to a society, and look at the results, and all you can say is that those are the results you get this year, in this country, under these exact circumstances -- you can surmise that similar interventions would get similar results under similar circumstances, but good luck seriously controlling the experiment for what exactly similar means.
This isn't a flaw in the academic discipline of sociology, I don't think. Just a recognition that their subject matter is wildly less tractable than a biologist's.
37, 39: Because there's both physically tractable elements (say, resource competition) and intractably psychological ones (such as how people react to perceived unfairness).
Not saying I agree, but I see where she's coming from.
Look, if LB wants to respond for herself, I'm not going to waste my time trying to make sense of her ramblings.
IOW, pwned.
Someone who had a valid, theoretically coherent sociology would be Hari Seldon
Soros thinks of himself as an applied philosopher, as does Nassim Taleb. So does Clay Shirky, who makes a very good living as a media figure.
I mean, when I'm making fun of economists, largely what I'm making fun of is their claim to be more rigorous than sociologists. If I were redesigning academia, I'd think it would make much more sense to define economics as a subdiscipline of sociology, called something like "Sociology of Resources" or whatever.
But you're comparing a lab experiment in biology to a field study in sociology. You can do field studies in biology, and lab studies in sociology, as well, and each would have the appropriate limitations.
As a high school student I was sure that sociology meant "anthropology, but about modern advanced societies".
Now it seems like a form of applied psychology. You learn about how the mind works by looking at how people act.
46.
????
Macroeconomics (interest rates, exchange rates, maybe bank regulation) is applied systems dynamics. Response functions, control theory, the same tools that are used to assemble complex circuits or factories applied on a larger scale.
I bet it's mainly rivalry for rivalry's sake. Lots of people seem to enjoy that kind of thing.
Again, talking out of my ass here. But my sense is that most of what's important and useful about biology comes out of a lab (not everything by a long shot, there's vitally important field research. But anyone getting a Nobel Prize is probably not collecting species in the New Guinea highlands.) And even field research tends to be replicable in the absence of drastic environmental change.
Sociology, most of what's important and useful is going to be large-scale observation, not lab work, and it's going to be very hard (not impossible, doing this sort of thing is part of the point of doing sociology at all) to reliably apply observations made in one context to say something about other contexts.
You can do field studies in biology, and lab studies in sociology, as well, and each would have the appropriate limitations.
ISTM that at least some bio can be done more rigorously than any sociology. Maybe in practice everything in modern bio is so advanced as to be hazy, but your basic, "How does NaCl react with slugs?" is going to be a lot more definitive than even a pretty narrow study of how people react to some social situation.
But maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, most mathematicians can't really talk to each other about their work, either.
Well, yes, but sociologists are assumed to be reasonably articulate.
Sociology's bad reputation stems (at least in part) from the fact that its key observations seem (to the average non-sociologist) to be either obviously right, or obviously wrong. Certain key insights of sociology have assimilated into popular consciousness so completely that they now seem trivially obvious ("peer dynamics affect rates of teen drug use"), while the rest fail to become assimilated because their implications are too shocking to contemplate. Your stereotypical empirical sociology paper either confirms something everyone believes to be true, or disproves something everyone believes to be true. Either way, the sociologist isn't going to win a lot of acclaim.
OK, among contemporary mathematicaly-oriented sociologists, who is worth reading? JD Montgomery and TJ Fararo are both prominent. Does anyone know the work of either, or is someone else better as a starting point?
Zipf had one brilliant insight and then descended into very eccentric interests.
50: Works a lot better in factories than in economies, doesn't it? I'm not saying that economists should be blamed for not doing better, just that you don't get the same sort of agreement within the field about what an economy is going to do under a given set of circumstances than you do when you get a number of experts looking at the same factory. Part of that is political hackery, but part is just that when you're predicting the aggregated actions of large groups of people, you've got a genuinely hard problem.
Response functions, control theory, the same tools that are used to assemble complex circuits or factories applied on a larger scale.
Well, kinda. I mean, yes, but the question of where the application of control theory to massively nonlinear feedback systems made up of units which obey unknown, plausibly constantly shifting rules breaks down does not have a completely obvious answer.
47: I'm reasonably sure "lab studies in sociology" are called "social psychology". Could be wrong.
but your basic, "How does NaCl react with slugs?" is going to be a lot more definitive than even a pretty narrow study of how people react to some social situation.
I mean, science is always being done at the limit of what's known, so the answers are never this clearcut. You may hypothesize a mechanism to explain what's going on inside a cell, but how to actually test it in the lab can be totally opaque. And then the available techniques are all giving you partial information, and all of them appear to contradict each other, and somehow the actual mechanism is complicated enough to be consistent with everything.
57, 58 Yes, IMO macroeconomics is not much of a discipline, but there's huge demand for any kind of guiding principle, even a shitty one. I'm only responding to the question of how the field fits into the taxonomy of disciplines, not making a case for it, which I can't do. This since I don't understand much beyond the observation that there is strong disagreement about fundamental questions.
But my sense is that most of what's important and useful about biology comes out of a lab (not everything by a long shot, there's vitally important field research.
Not if you're taking your medicine that worked really great on rats and seeing if it will work on people.
By the way, from above:
intractably psychological ones (such as how people react to perceived unfairness)
No reason this should be intractable. Or rather, this specific question has shown itself reasonably tractable.
61: That was sort of my point -- as a separate discipline, it's got grandiose claims about a rigorous theoretical underpinning that don't work very well. If it were Sociology of Resources, it might be humbler, less theoretically coherent, and better at coming up with useful results.
Wasn't it common for Sociology to catch flack from other disciplines even back before it absorbed various flavors of postmodernism.
My vague impression is that a big part of the history of Sociology (at least in North America) involved
a) Spending much of the 50s and 60s churning out uninspired "quantitative" work in a desperate bid to prove that they were as rigorous as the physicists and thus entitled to their share of the cold war pie
and
b) Being snickered at by other disciplines for the attempt
what's important and useful about biology comes out of a lab
Prions and the biochemistry of sulfur-eating bacteria and tubeworms are recent counterexamples. Similarly Kimura's theory of neutral mutation came out of surprising empirical data.
60, 62: Are you arguing around the edges, or really disagreeing that the subjects of sociological research are generally less tractable than the subjects of biological research?
Macroeconomics has settled, for a variety of reasons with varying degrees of justification, on the tool of applied systems dynamics. That doesn't mean they aren't a branch of sociology.
I've always felt sorry for the folks who invested years getting credentialed in "Soviet studies" type stuff and graduated in 1989.
Sure. I also have lots of sympathy for African Americans who grew up in the Jim Crow South. Yet paradoxically, I am unable to muster much sympathy for Condoleeza Rice.
I agree that 65 would give a better framing for macroeconomics even if it used the same tools.
Are you arguing around the edges, or really disagreeing that the subjects of sociological research are generally less tractable than the subjects of biological research?
I'm saying that research occurs on the edge of what's understood, and the smart people are probably equally smart in both fields, and thus (tautologically) battling equally intractable problems. (And that both have easy, watered-down problems that you can hand to a graduate student.)
What I was contesting was that sociology was more complicated than biology.
Of course biology and sociology are equally complex. As LB says, maybe we field biologists won't be getting any Nobel prizes (for one reason, our work doesn't fit under the umbrella of any of the prize categories), or very many publications in Nature and Science. But the field studies of ecology are basically sociology (which is just behaviour or ethology, right?) of animals except they also involve chemistry, evolution, genetics, whatever.
Anyway, I think the major difference between human and animal/plant focused studies is that for people we often care 'why' or more precisely, we ask people 'why' they did something. With animals or plants, we can't rely on their self-reported reasons for doing anything. For example, if you're studying human divorce, you can't follow ~100 couples for 10 years and watch how many times they mate (with each other or others) and how many children they have. If you do that with animals, you can suggest that divorce occurs because of bad parenting or not enough pair bonding. With humans you don't get the individual data that would allow you to make those links so you have to rely on correlations at a population level. There isn't a difference in complexity, just what you're allowed to study.
Or rather, this specific question has shown itself reasonably tractable.
I picked this specific example because, although I know that interesting results have come of it, I'm not sure how rigorously defined they are. As in, we know that, in the experiment with splitting $10, if the person receiving the split share thinks the splitter was being unfair, they'll take $0 rather than $1 to ensure that the splitter also gets $0. But do we know exactly where the cutoff is (to the penny)? Can we track it with SES? Can we track it with cultural background?
I'm sure these things have been looked at, but my suspicion is that the results are fuzzy. Whereas you could reliably and precisely calculate exactly how much salt is needed to shrivel a slug of a given mass (or, more likely, surface/volume ratio). See what I mean?
And I acknowledge that 75 is probably exaggerating the precision of which hard science is capable.
Whereas you could reliably and precisely calculate exactly how much salt is needed to shrivel a slug of a given mass (or, more likely, surface/volume ratio). See what I mean?
Unless it's something that operates probabilistically, right? I mean, statistics are reliable and precise, if you're using them correctly.
What I was contesting was that sociology was more complicated than biology.
Isn't it rather commonplace among physicists to argue that their discipline is simpler, for certain values of "simpler," than other sciences? Some quick Googling around gives me this rather unsatisfying quote on the subject from Einstein:
Einstein was once asked, "Why is it that when the mind of man has stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom we have been unable to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us?" He replied, "That is simple, my friend, it is because politics is more difficult than physics."
73: and the smart people are probably equally smart in both fields, and thus (tautologically) battling equally intractable problems.
Yeah, this is where we disagree. I don't think the jump from 'equally smart' to 'therefore they've found equally intractable problems to work on' is a tautology.
I don't know about the rest of youse guys, but I'm just waiting for Kieran Healy to run out of bubble gum and come in here and kick a whole lot of ass.
79: So you think there's more sociologists spinning their wheels, and more biologists determining accessible answers?
Also, there is a lot of useful questions that get addressed using field data.
If you're doing lab work, you could be doing genetics. My friends do a lot of cutting edge (Nature-worthy) genetic stuff to reconstruct phylogeny. They collect their samples in the field, rather than using clone mice or mustard plants, so it could be considered 'fieldwork'. How important is this work to society? Well, I mean, it's cool that things are related to each other differently but I'm pretty sure I couldn't identify one of these worms in the field if it bit me (they don't really bite).
On the other hand, I'm in an applied department where we work on a lot of questions relating to deer, game birds, endangered species, lumber, pests. We are probably what you think of when you think of fieldwork but we also do a lot of computer work (and a wee bit of lab work). People (government and conservation groups) actually come to us to help them address problems. We can work on hunting regulations, reserve design (where to put conservation areas), how to mix human activities with animal populations in parks, climate change effects, etc.
Anyway, I don't know what I'm arguing here any more. I guess it seems like there isn't a lot of knowledge about the range of activities that encompass 'biology' so, here's some info.
74: I didn't mean to be putting down field biology, and I apologize if it sounded that way. But even if you're talking about studying animal behavior, isn't it self-evident that for any given species, the repertoire of possible behaviors for any individual is much more restricted than it is for humans, and the extent of its interactions with other members of its species is likewise much more restricted, and so the possible realm of behaviors to study is much simpler than sociology. A wolf isn't going to start a religion or become an anime fan or join a fashion trend.
That doesn't make biology simple, just enough simpler that the problems are more tractable than those that sociology is dealing with.
81: Sort of. I think it's much much harder for a sociologist to tell if they're spinning their wheels or doing something useful than it is for someone in the harder sciences.
the repertoire of possible behaviors for any individual is much more restricted than it is for humans, and the extent of its interactions with other members of its species is likewise much more restricted, and so the possible realm of behaviors to study is much simpler than sociology. A wolf isn't going to start a religion or become an anime fan or join a fashion trend.
But within a given study, the people generally don't have that many options, either, as defined by the study. Did they become more productive? Less productive? Spend more money? It's not within the parameters of the study to see if they started a religion/anime cult/fashion trend, unless the study is narrowly defined to target that thing.
Also, salting slugs is not something that biologists are often called upon to answer. Because, you know, that was answered a while ago and we've moved on. To questions like, do animals have a sense of fairness?
Hm.
The first four or five pages of this might be of some interest. (Context: written for a handbook of political philosophy.)
Here's a schematic way of thinking about the soc/history comparison. History has protected its disciplinary coherence by eschewing overt theory wars. There are of course schools of theory within the field, but the combination of specialization by period and valorization of knowledge of one's archive/sources (methodologically) and a good narrative style (in one's writing) has been the bulwark against the sort of fragmentation that's evident in sociology and has nearly killed anthropology. At the other extreme, economics expelled its heretics and standardized on a core set of methods and tools. This standardization allows for a lot of heterogeneity in substantive arguments, but you have to play by the official rules and there's a very strong hierarchy. Political Science, finally, was insulated by the fact that it has a substantive and relatively narrow focus--government and its institutions--but it had its theory wars, too. The lack of a strong theoretical core to the field left it open to being pulled closer to economics. Sociology, again, has never lacked for soi disant strong theory programs (including technical/formal ones of various kinds), so it hasn't been overrun by economics. At the same time, none of the programs that jostle inside it have ever succeeded in taking over the field.
See what I mean?
I don't, no. So I think first of all that the slug example is a strange one, as it is really more a question of chemistry than biology, but anyhow, sticking with it: empirical studies (or models) can give you an estimate of the amount of salt that will be required to shrivel up a slug of a given size by a given amount. This estimate will have some degree of error. If you do your study right, somebody will be able to replicate your results within the margin of error that you have established. It's exactly the same thing with studies of human behavioral response to unfairness.
85: But if you're doing sociological research because you're interested in the behavior of society -- the aggregated behavior of people in the wild -- you need to know that their propensity to become anime fans or to decide that they're never going to cook dinner at home again or that they're afraid of unfamiliar people in one category and respectful of unfamiliar people in another category is unimportant to what you really want to know about, or you have to incorporate it into what you're studying. And that's hard when you're dealing with people.
I would guess that the short answer is no, on the question of a general rift between disciplines. There are longer answers.
89: That just doesn't make a well-defined study, though, if every aspect of your study can be all over the place. If you're considering life trajectories, then yes, you need to consider who starts a new religion. If you're looking at home dynamics, then who cooks dinner is relevant. The question you're studying has to be well-phrased if you're going to design a meaningful study that answers it, and then you have to do so.
Historians have mostly resisted huge rifts over theory by hewing closely to a shared methodology. Given that, even when I'm talking to an early modernist who studies Italy, we almost always have a methodology in common that we accept as a shorthand for best scholarly practice. That's just not true of Sociology, Political Science, and especially Anthropology. Economics seems to have some centralized authority that churns out questions for the discipline to answer. I don't quite know how that works, but it seems that very few scholars in the discipline deviate from the norms.
Also, thanks Kieran.
So sociology is more fragmented than other disciplines - is that likely to be the source of the complaints?
My friend rattled off a sentence or two which I honestly didn't catch, but I thought the gist of it was that the studies were hopelessly context-specific, unlike history in some way that didn't make sense to me.
Oh man, 87 and 92 are just viciously attacking each other.
Or, oh, no, they say exactly the same thing.
Dammit!
I knew that Anthropology was given to agonized "What the hell is Anthropology anyway?" debates. I didn't know that the same went on in Sociology.
Too bad the anthropologists can't export some their excess angst to Economics. If ever a group could do with some soul searching...
91: Right. That's exactly what I'm saying -- that's it's innately harder in sociology to develop a research program that's both tightly controlled enough to gather reliable data and incorporates enough variables to be of any broader interest at all. If you're looking at people with all the behavioral options and influences they have in the real world, it's very difficult and messy to learn about them reliably. If you're controlling your subjects so that their options are simple enough to be easily studied, you're not learning much about society, just about the artificial situation you've set up.
I really should shut up, though, as I've said repeatedly, i don't know what I'm talking about.
Oh, for fuck's sake, that will teach me to step away from the computer in the middle of composing a comment. Anyway, what Kieran said is a more helpful version of what I was trying to say. His point about periodization is especially useful, I think.
Finally, I don't think most historians know very much at all about contemporary sociology. I mean, there are whole sub-disciplines of historians who are very interested in anthropology, economics, and political science -- among other disciplines -- but I don't believe there's as large a group of historians who work with sociology. Which is to say, heebie, I'm not sure I'd take what your friend said as indicative of a larger rift between the disciplines. I mean, sure, historians make fun of sociologists all the time (though not as often as they make fun of economists, political scientists, and anthropologists), but I don't think that kind of cross-disciplinary mockery means much of anything, other than historians are big nerds.
95: arguably the intrusion of behavioral economics has caused some angst in the econ world, right?
92: I'm actually really curious about how it would be that history doesn't have methodological disputes; aren't there, like, Marxist economic historians who have their own thing going, or people who argue that written primary sources are inevitably misleading and have to be interpreted in a specific, non-canonical way or whatever?
that's it's innately harder in sociology to develop a research program that's both tightly controlled enough to gather reliable data and incorporates enough variables to be of any broader interest at all. If you're looking at people with all the behavioral options and influences they have in the real world, it's very difficult and messy to learn about them reliably.
This is what grad school training is - how to create and run a well-designed study. In sociology or in biology or any other field. You learn what you need to know in order to do it, in that field.
99: I haven't got anything else useful to say (not that I'd commit to what I've already said being useful). I think we're talking past each other, but I'm not sure how to stop.
98.2: yes, sure, but not all that many of them, at least when compared to the methodological schisms that one finds in other disciplines. That's oversimplified, certainly, and there's a deeper history to the discipline that's moderately interesting, but the shorthand I've offered works well enough.
I think we're talking past each other, but I'm not sure how to stop.
New mouseover?
There's some very real senses in which social sciences are more difficult than say physics. First, it's more difficult to isolate the variables you want to isolate. Second, you're constrained by ethical considerations. Third, for many experiments it's really hard to get a large sample size.
Obviously there's some variations in the physical/biological sciences on these items as well. In a lot of ways paleontology is more like history, and ecology is more like sociology (as pointed out above).
96: But if you're considering wild animals in the wild, it seems like it would be equally complex? Not complex in the same way of course. But for example, if you were interested in wolf behaviour, you'd have to take into account prey populations (and then the plant-prey interactions), family dynamics/relatedness within the group, other near-by wolf populations, weather, human activity (hunters, ranchers, but also things like roads).
And because this is a wild population, it would be hard to get all of that information - just off the top of my head you'd have to collect scat (diet and genetics), run small mammal traps, behavioural observations, telemetry, meetings or surveys to get human-related data, land cover data from satellites. Those are all actually from different biological disciplines. In practical terms, if seems easier to survey a bunch of people about their comic book reading habits.
I think we're talking past each other, but I'm not sure how to stop.
Usually when this happens I wait for LB to arrive and clarify what both sides are trying to say. So we might be at an impasse.
I think hydrobatidae is the comity-bringer. I mean, is it harder to control variables in field studies than it is in lab studies? Yes. Can you learn things in field studies that you cannot in lab studies? Yes. Can you control (to a reasonable standard of reliability and replicability) for confounding variables in field studies? Basically, yes. Do the same methodological issues arise in field studies in the biological and social sciences? Basically, yes.
Yeah, 106 gets it right.
I was curious recently to what extent history and historical sciences are growing closer together. Cheaper DNA analysis, development of techniques like pollen analysis, etc. makes it seem like you'd expect history as a discipline to incorporate more and more techniques taken from science in addition to more standard text-based techniques. To what extent is that happening, and to what extent has it already happened?
I bet Tim Burke has an eminently reasonable, synthetic, and long take on this. Is there a Tim Burke signal?
Swathmore Swathmore Swathmore
Africa Africa Africa
Videogames Videogames Videogames
Should I go to graduate school in the humanities?
104: But for example, if you were interested in wolf behaviour, you'd have to take into account prey populations (and then the plant-prey interactions)...
What I'm saying seems so wildly obvious to me that the fact that you don't immediately agree with it suggests that I'm wrong. But never let me say that being probably wrong stopped me from shooting my mouth off.
You're talking about, e.g., prey populations, because they're important to how wolves hunt, which is how they feed themselves. And that's a complex and interesting field of study. But still, if you want to know how wolves feed themselves, you know that they hunt prey -- a number of different species, but a countable number of different species. And they hunt that prey through a number of different behaviors, appropriate to different contexts, but still, a not ridiculously large variety of methods. And then they eat it without significant preparation.
If you want to know how people feed themselves, you have to look into literally every way people acquire resources: working in machine shops, hairdressing, hunting and gathering, inheriting family money, theft (with all of its subcategories), being a cartoonist, and so on. And then how they spend that money on food, and how they prepare the food, and how they eat the food, and so on.
For an equivalently broad question about wolves and humans, the complexity of what you're looking at is, while it's going to be great for wolves, going to be vastly greater for humans.
I think of Economics as a branch of Theology. It certainly was where I got a BS in it. Cue actual scientists: A BS. Isn't that precious!
it is really more a question of chemistry than biology
Oh come on, Tweety. Name me some things that happen inside animals that aren't pretty chemistry-intensive.
It's exactly the same thing with studies of human behavioral response to unfairness.
See, and I'm just not buying this, despite your ability to assert it. I mean, sure, within some margin of error, these things will be replicable. But you're not going to run into a batch of slugs that, due to their strict Calvinist (or whatever) upbringing, react to salt differently. The biochemistry is what it is, and the margin of error will be pretty narrow.
To me, the equivalent test isn't in the comparison of large groups (X slugs require Y ±z grams of salt, 100 people will demand an average of $3.21 ±$0.07); it's how useful the predictions are with the individual. Give me a slug, let me measure it, and I'll give you exactly how much salt you need, to within a few grains. But if you give me a person, how precisely will I be able to tell you how much to offer her? Even if I'm able to ask questions about SES, culture, etc., I'm not going to get very close to the marginal dollar amount - the range is bigger, and the confounding factors more numerous.
And again, maybe I'm vastly overstating the precision with which modern biology operates. Maybe the answer would be "between a teaspoon and a half cup". But my sense is that the people who are designing custom genes aren't using ballpark guesstimates.
In practical terms, if seems easier to survey a bunch of people about their comic book reading habits.
And much, much lamer.
There's a lot of variation in biology. It's the only reason evolution works. For something simple like salt and slugs the distribution might be pretty narrow, but for more complicated things that are still pure biochemistry there's way more variation (think about variations in how large a dose is effective for medication, or variations in people's reactions to birth control pills).
To what extent is that happening, and to what extent has it already happened?
Other than in environmental histories and histories of Native people, I'm having a hard time thinking of any examples of this. It may be, though, that I don't really know what "this" is.
Name me some things that happen inside animals that aren't pretty chemistry-intensive.
Borborygmi!
Toxicology studies usually end up telling you the "LD50". This isn't the dose that kills all the animals, this is the dose that kills half the animals. That's because you get some animals that survive an amount that kills most of them.
Same thing with the sort of infection studies I do. We can indeed say that there's a certain dose of the virus (through a certain route of infection) which should never kill the animals. But when we change something about the system we aren't looking for all of the animals to die. If 3 out of 10 die, instead of 0 out of 10, that's an effect. Why didn't the others die? I don't know, maybe they had 25% more of a certain type of white blood cell, or they had a slightly higher body temperature. All this stuff is stochastic even among inbred mice.
108: Is it the misspelling of Swarthmore that summons him?
And yes, I know the slug example is utterly silly, but the fact that it's a settled question doesn't make it less relevant. If the defense of sociology* is that they haven't yet reached the slug/salt level of certainty, that isn't much of an argument that the field is every bit as tractable as biology.
What I'm hearing from hydro is that the more complex questions in biology are comparable to simpler questions in sociology. If you really narrow down the question, sociology can get you a reasonably precise answer. But the equivalent to the fairness question isn't the one about wolf behavior in the wild: it's observing whether a wolf in a cage chooses a live rabbit or a dead deer.
* I don't mean that to sound like sociology is under attack, and losing. I mean "defense" strictly in terms of this back and forth
A BS. Isn't that precious!
I don't know if it remains true, but in the days of my youth London University (effectively an agglomeration of universities with certain common facilities) used to award BSc in hard sciences and BSc (Econ) in economics, sociology, pol. sci. etc. Something to toy with. (I suspect the answer lay in the influence of the LSE in the committees which decide such things.)
Can biology tell me whether the awful smell in my kitchen is from a dead mouse under the fridge or under the floorboards?
120. As long as it isn't actually in your fridge it'll go away in a day or two.
108: Is it the misspelling of Swarthmore that summons him?
In concert with everything else, yes.
What I'm hearing from hydro is that the more complex questions in biology are comparable to simpler questions in sociology. If you really narrow down the question, sociology can get you a reasonably precise answer.
This isn't at all what I'm hearing! That in both fields, you must ask a very narrow question to get a well-designed, executable study.
And it is two groundhogs and a possum.
I don't think I'm arguing complex ecology questions = simple sociology questions. I'm arguing complex questions = complex questions. I don't really understand why the equivalent question is about captive wolf dietary preferences? That's equivalent to what in sociology?
I'm also trying to note how much complexity is in a basic question like 'why did the wolf cross the road?' (which is not really the study I was thinking of but I couldn't resist). Maybe another difference between sociology and ecology (besides the research permissions allowed which I'm going to highlight again) is that basic information isn't reliably available. Actually, there are very few studies about what wolves eat in the wild and the seasonal and geographic variation is probably even more poorly known.
Or like bird migration. I mean we all know birds migrate and we can see them on their breeding and wintering grounds. But for all the thousands (millions?) of birds that have been banded over the years, the returns for non-game species are in the hundreds. So you're trying to make predictions about the carry-over effects (or patterns of who migrates where and in what order) from winter to summer based on three birds recaught hundreds of miles and several years away from each other. Is that less complex than a sociology question? Maybe it is. But it's not less difficult to get the answer (which, btw, came from a new technology, stable isotope analysis, that at least gives you an idea of latitude from feather samples).
I think there probably are questions as basic as the salted slug example in sociology but we just don't know enough about the field. Or the really basic questions are included in some psychology field.
116 to 111, to a first approximation.
Hydrobatty is doing a much better job explaining what I'm trying to say. I don't see any comity-bringing.
The fairness/unfairness experiments weren't done by sociologists, incidentally.
I'm trying to think of an equivalent to the salt-slug example in the social sciences.
"Do people like it when you set them on fire?"
Hydro-
Does my 109 say anything that you think addresses what we're talking about? It does but it's simply wrong; you understand what I'm getting at but it's irrelevant because of X; it makes no sense to you and you can't figure out why I said it in this context; you see my point, and agree with it to some limited extent; any of those?
132. Point is, if you look hard enough you can probably find somebody who does. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there's an on line community. Whereas you'll never find a slug that doesn't shrivel from contact with sufficient NaCl, because it's chemically determined.
That's equivalent to what in sociology?
Putting people in a windowless room and seeing how they react to a completely artificial test only vaguely analogous* to any real world situation.
* that's right - sociology is banned
"Do people like it when you set them on fire?"
There are four major schools of thought ...
135: that's not sociology. That's psychology.
Thank you, 134.
I only wish that Sifu had used a swift kick in the balls as his example.
134: so is the idea that everything in biology OS chemically determined in a similarly clear-cut way, or that I can't come up with a human behavior that's purely chemically determined? Because neither seems terribly likely to me.
134: Sure, if induction is allowed to prove what is chemically determined.
Whereas you'll never find a slug that doesn't shrivel from contact with sufficient NaCl, because it's chemically determined.
But if a slug is offered a choice between being covered in NaCl or being set on fire, which will it choose?
"OS" in 139 should be "is".
I sort of can't get over what a stupid example the slug thing is.
Aren't there sea slugs that live just fine in salt water?
Looking at history, I could see some hostility to "sociology" depending on subdiscipline and age. For example, in history of technology the sociological turn was very contentious. It is far less of an issue now as people have retired, etc.
I did wonder if it could be anyone at HG Uni, but looking at the departmental page I tend to doubt it. Wow, that's a small department. Some cool research interests.
"Zero percent of humans recruited to drink three liters of sulfuric acid engaged in voluntary bowling activities three months after ingestion."
My ex recto idea is that it's a turf battle. Things that get to call themselves sciences get to be thought of as more respectable. Hard sciences don't like it when things they think of as squishy get that aura; humanities types don't like it when the questions they're asking and answering are ignored unless they can put it into a methodology that scientists like.
Also, IME, sociology and psychology get (unfair) reputations as where you go if you want to have a respectable scientish degree but you're not actually good at math or science.
One should take this turf battle about as seriously as philosophy - comparative literature wars, i.e., not at all.
(My department is housed within social sciences, which is pretty funny when trying to compete for grant money. Describe your methodology, o philosopher, or we won't fund your conference travel!)
hydrobatidae's wolf example is a good one, I think. This happens to be a big issue with major real-world implications in Alaska right now, and the NPS has done some recent studies in some parks to figure out exactly what the wolves eat, because no one really knew before. The questions ecologists deal with strike me as very similar to those that social scientists deal with, and not inherently any more or less complicated. As hydrobatidae also notes, a lot of the differences in practice tend to involve restrictions on the kind of research that can be done on people. Basically, compared to studying animals, we're more interested in the details of what people do, but also more squeamish about how to get that information.
With animals or plants, we can't rely on their self-reported reasons for doing anything. For example, if you're studying human divorce, you can't follow ~100 couples for 10 years and watch how many times they mate (with each other or others) and how many children they have. If you do that with animals, you can suggest that divorce occurs because of bad parenting or not enough pair bonding. With humans you don't get the individual data that would allow you to make those links so you have to rely on correlations at a population level. There isn't a difference in complexity, just what you're allowed to study.
In those 10 years, the laws of divorce could change, state incentives could be given or taken away to have more or fewer children, the concept of marriage could be redefined, people could get new jobs, the kids could be all right or wrong, family could move to the area and help with childcare, family could move out of the area but they didn't help anyway, friendships could be made or lost, there could be a recession but some families weather it better than others, a daycare could open up, maternity/paternity leave could be canceled, and so on and on. This is assuming you've got a sample of couples representative across differences in age/class/race/ethnicity/sexuality/religion/upbrining/jurisdiction/etc.
People obviously still study divorce and other social and cultural phenomena, but I don't think you can reduce the difference between this and field biology/ecology to a difference in "just what you're allowed to study".
Also, in my family we've generally thought of sociology as "anthropology for white people" (which is more or less what Ned said too). This isn't totally correct anymore, if it ever was, but I wouldn't say it's totally wrong either.
we're more interested in the details of what people do, but also more squeamish about how to get that information.
So no on the acid/bowling study?
Because I am stupid/rash/overzealous many comment number references are now off by two. Sorry!
So no on the acid/bowling study?
You'll have to check with the IRB first, then run it through a separate evaluation by Halford and urple.
146: There can be a whole lot of changes in a given ecosystem in 10 years that would also have potential effects on a question like that regarding animals.
When studying wolf behavior, is there a chance that wolves will redefine the social institution you're studying during the course of the study? This is a genuine question, though phrased in social science terms because I don't know the ecology terms.
When studying wolf behavior, is there a chance that wolves will redefine the social institution you're studying during the course of the study?
I'm obviously not an expert here, but my understanding is that yes, this sort of thing does happen among some animals, especially highly social predators like wolves.
And of course there are also external environmental changes that can affect the institution in question.
In the UK, people who hate sociology are invariably horrible rubicund Tories, and the argument is "Sociology? Humph." or "Sociology? Commies!"
152: Yes, I know. I'm not really arguing the more of less complexity question because I don't really think it's interesting (or tbh, care) but I do think there's a real difference in the kind of complexity.
I'm not really arguing the more of less complexity question because I don't really think it's interesting (or tbh, care) but I do think there's a real difference in the kind of complexity.
I'm not all that invested in the question either, actually, and I'm willing to accept that there might be some difference, but I think they're ultimately outweighed by the similarities in the underlying phenomena (as opposed to the means available for studying them).
I was curious recently to what extent history and historical sciences are growing closer together. Cheaper DNA analysis, development of techniques like pollen analysis, etc. makes it seem like you'd expect history as a discipline to incorporate more and more techniques taken from science in addition to more standard text-based techniques. To what extent is that happening, and to what extent has it already happened?
I don't know about history, but this has certainly been happening a lot recently in archaeology (which in the US I think is in the process of moving away from anthropology and becoming its own discipline more closely aligned with history, the way it's always been in Europe).
153. AFAIK Jane Goodall is quite clear that her work at Gombe modified the behaviour of her subjects. OTOH it was one of the first longitudinal ethology studies carried out on that scale, so I think people who study animals these days are aware of the issue going in and try to address it.
I don't know if there's anywhere to go with this, but I think I've found one of those interesting terribly different ways of looking at the world. Fake and teo are both right that more/less complex isn't a great way of stating it. But the divide between people who look at problems in sociology and problems in biology and think they're fundamentally the same sort of thing, and people like me who, for reasons like the ones fake gives in 146 and 153, think they're very very very different seems like the sort of thing there's no way to argue across. We're all looking at the same facts, but interpreting them very differently.
It seems to me like even in societies with writing, there'd still be room for interesting "pre-historical" methods when studying largely illiterate parts of the population. Say you want to study peasants during the dark ages, it seems plausible that you'd be able to get interesting information using non-textual techniques. But maybe the way this plays out is in archaeology departments, not history departments. So if a historian wants access to that type of stuff, they collaborate with archaeologists.
Certainly if you start thinking about studying orcas, chimps, elephants, etc. the differences between biology and sociology starts breaking down.
Say you want to study peasants during the dark ages, it seems plausible that you'd be able to get interesting information using non-textual techniques. But maybe the way this plays out is in archaeology departments, not history departments. So if a historian wants access to that type of stuff, they collaborate with archaeologists.
Yeah, this is pretty much how it works, and it doesn't just apply to the illiterate portion of a society. Historical archaeology has become a pretty important subfield, and it tends to complement text-based historical research pretty well.
But the divide between people who look at problems in sociology and problems in biology and think they're fundamentally the same sort of thing, and people like me who, for reasons like the ones fake gives in 146 and 153, think they're very very very different seems like the sort of thing there's no way to argue across.
I suspect that the idea of a fundamental divide between human and non-human phenomena (which is of course the reason we have separate disciplines studying physical and social science in the first place) is behind this in many cases.
Starts breaking down, but doesn't go very far along that path. It's a big exciting find when you identify a cultural difference between two populations of dolphins or chimps, isn't it?
This also ties into the concept of "nature" and the problems with a dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" phenomena, as rob was discussing in another recent thread.
162: The Annales school in France sort of got into that, and you see collaboration between historians and archaeologists in ancient and medieval history. An archaeologist I knew back in grad school told me that there's an issue going in the other direction where some archaeologists consider studies of, say something in the 19th century U.S., to not be "real" archaeology (which I guess they consider to be pre-history).
An archaeologist I knew back in grad school told me that there's an issue going in the other direction where some archaeologists consider studies of, say something in the 19th century U.S., to not be "real" archaeology (which I guess they consider to be pre-history).
Yeah, this has been an issue, and it took a long time for historical archaeology to be taken seriously as a subfield. I think it's pretty much there now, though.
165: I don't know that that's it exactly. I wouldn't endorse saying that there's a fundamental distinction between humans and chimps, as opposed to the two species occupying points (or areas) on a continuum with regard to most interesting qualities. Despite that, though, the difference in the quantity of culture produced by humans and by chimps is so great, that the problems of studying human society and culture don't seem to me to be closely related to the problems of studying non-human animal behavior.
There's pretty large cultural differences in Orcas, that aren't difficult to find.
170: Yeah, that may not be what's going on with you personally. I think it is the case for a lot of people, though. In general I think you tend to find natural science types less inclined to see a fundamental difference and social science types more so, for pretty obvious reasons of disciplinary background and perspective, but I'm sure it's not absolute.
Yeah, Orcas are fascinating. They keep finding new stuff, like it turns out there are pods of orcas who specialize in shark hunting. This is apparently very bad on their teeth, because of the toughness of shark skin. The coolest trick that group has worked out, is that if you flip a shark upside down it goes catatonic and you can just hold it still until it drowns and then eat it. But Orcas are pretty extreme in terms of cultural variation. There's still a big gap between humans and orcas, and then another big gap between orcas and other animals.
But I don't mean to argue that the line between more and less tractable problems has to be at the human/non-human border. If orca society is complex enough, there are going to be problems in orca sociology more difficult than any in human sociology because they're going to be less intuitively comprehensible to humans studying them.
So there's gangs of particularly badass orcas with bad dentistry? That's great -- you kind of hope that they also live in bad undersea neighborhoods.
I do remember reading something written by a dolphin trainer that described orcas as much brighter than dolphins.
The famous quote in the literature on this point is "The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties." So, it's not really a strong argument to say "but Orcas" because there's the riposte that "Orcas count as humans for the purposes of this discussion."
177: But that brings up the question of whether it really is just orcas, or whether there might be other species that have similarly evolved cultural faculties but haven't yet been studied enough for anyone to realize. I don't know if there are any other plausible candidates, but there are certainly plenty of species that haven't really been studied all that much with these questions in mind.
So great white sharks like to hang out on the islands outside San Francisco eating sea lions. An Orca showed up and ate one (using the flipping upside down trick) while a whale-watching trip was there, so they knew exactly when the attack happened. Apparently within a day all the sharks had left the area. There was one tagged great white shark in the area at the time, so they could figure out what that one did. Apparently less than an hour after the Orca showed up and killed a shark, the tagged shark dove to 500 meters and swam straight to Hawaii.
179 is fascinating, but raises the question of whether all shark populations would have reacted the same way, or whether it was learned behaviour because that particular group of sharks had been done that way before.
178. Problem here is that most of the prime candidates have moved into the field of archaeology (Homo spp., Australopithecus spp.).
Sharks aren't naturally afraid of orca. A realtor used blockbusting techniques to get the rest to sell in a panic.
179: I'm impressed. Orcas are almost as terrifying as humans. (If I didn't have the option of remaining on land I might reassess that.)
Sociology: a subfield of ethology? Discuss.
Problem here is that most of the prime candidates have moved into the field of archaeology (Homo spp., Australopithecus spp.).
I wouldn't say it's a huge problem. It'll just need different techniques to get at it.
find natural science types less inclined to see a fundamental difference and social science types more so
I think this is right, but the fact that the disciplines haven't actually converged despite some real attempts to bring them together over the last century suggests that there's still a real* difference.** There are certainly points of convergence and collaboration (or potential points).
I do have the impression that historians are more likely now to see themselves as part of the humanities than they were before, say, the 1980s as the social science type history sliced off to the social sciences. There are historical subfields in economics, political science, and sociology that aren't entirely absent from history departments, but aren't common there either.
So arguably social scientists and natural scientists are in agreement about a lot of this, but humanities types are over on the other side of the room saying "can't specify the question properly for a proper study, huh? That's too bad. We're going to study it anyway" and the science types say "go ahead, but it's all a bunch of anecdote. At least your studies don't cost very much."
*I don't know if "real" is equivalent to "fundamental" but I'm not using "fundamental."
**Or that the people making the attempts were idiots and misguided. Some probably were.
185. Not a huge problem, but the archaeologist/sociologist cross-fertilisation isn't yet as established as archaeologist/historian. If I had my time again...
185: You don't think studying the culture of extinct hominids is a huge problem? What kind of different techniques were you thinking of? Once you exhaust looking at stone tools, I run out of alternatives at Ouija boards.
184: In the sense that chemistry is a subfield of physics, maybe?
"Ethology" was an archaic word, right? like "philology".
OT: How hard do you need to hit a cd drive to fix it?
You don't think studying the culture of extinct hominids is a huge problem? What kind of different techniques were you thinking of?
Raw material types for tools, distributional analysis of site locations, stable isotope stuff on bones/teeth, maybe wear patterns/residues on tools. I don't quite what the available data are like that far back, but all this stuff is well established in archaeology, and much of it has been routine for decades at least in some areas. The "New Archaeology" back in the sixties and seventies was all about trying to understand culture and social practices through careful analysis of physical remains.
Which is all basically to say that there may not be much more than looking at stone tools, but exhausting the potential of that actually can get you quite far.
Quite far in terms of finding out interesting things, sure. Quite far in terms of understanding their society, on the other hand, seems like a wild overstatement.
I'm going to assume 193 to 191 and blame teo if the computer breaks.
Well, that's the intent, anyway. And it may not be possible to find out very much for the really early species (plus there you run into the problem of whether they were behaviorally similar enough to modern humans to make valid inferences). But my understanding is that rather a lot of research on, e.g., Neanderthals along these lines has been done recently.
I take full responsibility for anything that results from Moby hitting his computer with rocks.
This was an annoying thread, but all worth it for the orca/shark story.
I know -- I love the terrified shark. It's like something out of The Usual Suspects: "They ate him, they ate his family, they ate the school of tuna he'd been feeding on..."
This would be a sad, sad followup to Lion v. Orca.
Judging by its current trajectory, if this thread reaches 500 comments we will be talking about Historian Sea Lion vs. Sociologist Orca.
Without having read the comments, I rely on my friendships with sociologists and historians to assert that sociologists tend to incorporate theory far, far more than do historians. Also, this.
Whenever my students ask me what the future of our own discipline holds, I tell them that whatever is currently cutting-edge in sociology will be the cutting-edge for us in about 25 years. Of course, the vast majority of scholarship (in the US and perhaps China) will resemble the IV/DV crap mentioned in 16.
202:I just read the shit for fun, but agree with this. Almost all the "history" I read is mixed with economics, social theory, pomo, feminism. I can't imagine a sociology that isn't historicized. Etc. Blah.
That I can't imagine otherwise shows which side I'm on. "History" is the stuff that pretends to science, unbiased, objective, etc. That's ok fine, the bias is usually obvious to anyone who knows a little theory.
Lemieux on Robert Caro ...earlier post discusses Caro's prejudices
LB's point also seems totally obvious to me, so obvious as hardly to need saying. People are self-aware, forward-looking, status-driven cultural animals. That makes human socieites incredibly hard to model in a way that allows for real scientific prediction a la physics and biology. It's great to gather data but the fundamental relationships are very likely to be unstable because they depend on the cultural norms at the time.
103 There's some very real senses in which social sciences are more difficult than say physics. ... Second, you're constrained by ethical considerations.
Unless you're a psychologist working on babies, in which case you're totally free to sever their brains from their bodies.
if you flip a shark upside down it goes catatonic and you can just hold it still
Doubt if I'll try that on a shark any time soon. But that trick works with other types of fish - if you catch a trout and it's flipping around, it will stop if you can turn it belly up.
Apparently they flip sharks over not by actually hitting them, but by pushing water at them quickly. It's similar to the crazy technique that southern Orcas (totally different culture) uses to knock sea lions off of ice floats with waves (which frozen planet has some amazing footage of).
I always liked Jon Elster's notion of mechanisms as intermediate between scientific laws and purely anecdotal descriptions. There are repeating causal patterns in social behavior but it's a mistake to search for scientific laws.
Take something pretty straightforward, like say bank runs. Bank runs are a frequently repeated phenomenon over history and we know a lot about how they are triggered. It makes sense to call all those phenomena by the common name of a bank run. But I don't think you'll ever find a true predictive law of bank runs. A run happens when people lose faith in a promise about the future that they were previously disposed to trust. That loss of trust is going to be extremely specific to the particular shared belief system in the society at the time. Any generalized law would have to introduce so many provisos for the specific instance that it wouldn't be much of a law at all.
Sorry, ran off for lunch.
LB, I'm really not sure about your 109. I've been thinking about it and I only have some beginning stuff that I haven't really thought through.
I think that bringing back the questions to their fundamental level might be helpful. In ecology, you're looking for evolutionary reasons for something. So, in my divorce example, you're looking to find out what causes pairs to split and what the evolutionary benefit would be. If you're studying divorce in humans you can look at divorce in terms of evolution (evolutionary psych for example, but also other fields), or you could look at it in 'purely' (I'm not super attached to this word) descriptive or predictive terms. By getting all that detailed information about what someone was wearing, what sports they play, how often they go to church, you're really just coming up with a really good (or better than random) predictive model or description of divorce as a event in humans. (I might be making some giant assumptions here because I'm not that familiar with sociology).
Is that important? I guess to a biologist/ecologist, I kind of don't see the interest. Or that it's interesting but not illustrative of any larger patterns? But if you can come up with evolutionary theories of divorce, you can actually tie together a lot of disparate groups and behaviour. Sociology might be trying to tie behavioural patterns together from across different cultures, but biology/ecology is trying to tie them together across all living things. That's pretty awesome.
So to answer your question, I think I understand what you're getting at and admit that wolves don't show that level of complexity in that task, but I think it's irrelevant to some extent.
Also ethology is still around as a field in Europe I think. It's the same as Animal Behaviour/Behavior departments in North America. Ironically (don't tell me if I'm using this wrong), the only Nobel prize I can think of won by biologist who were not in medicine, was won by ethologists (the bee dance guy, the imprinting guy, and? One of them was a Nazi too.).
Unfoggetarian respects orcas so much that they are the only animal whose name he capitalizes.
"Watch the bee! As it waggles, it points the other bees towards racial purity!"
If you want blogging like that, Erik Lund is your man. I keep telling you.
I think the issue here is between thinking that divorce can be reduced to a case of pairs splitting and thinking that it's a social institution that exists in particular contexts that are a long way removed from biological evolution, and which has been susceptible to quite a lot of historical and geographical variation.
Studying pair splitting, where divorce is one of the ways that pairs split in some contexts, among humans seems ok, though. But people also want to know about divorce in particular, and I seriously doubt evolutionary approaches are going to get at everything that can be gotten at about divorce, for some values of what people consider worth getting at.
That makes human socieites incredibly hard to model in a way that allows for real scientific prediction a la physics and biology.
As opposed to wolves? Orcas? Do they behave sufficiently deterministically to make straightforward predictions?
As opposed to wolves? Orcas? Do they behave sufficiently deterministically to make straightforward predictions?
I think evolutionary ecology is more complicated than it is made out to be in the pop press, since evolution includes a lot of things (like multilevel/group selection) that make modeling hard too. But yes, the human leap to self-conscious culture makes us much harder to model and predict. If you could find a group of wolves that started to herd cattle or practice contraception based on an ecologists prediction that they would run out of wild prey over the next couple of years, then I would change my mind.
Now I'm not even sure what we're arguing about anymore.
I know very little about orcas, but for most animals, while they're not predictable in the way that inanimate objects are, they're more predictable than people, in that they have a smaller repertoire of possible behaviors that are more closely tied to immediate environmental stimuli. And while I'll agree that it's all on a continuum, we're simply a different kind of animal, and all of that, there's a huge gap on that continuum between humans and most other animals (with most there as a courtesy to everything I don't know about orcas and various primates and the like).
like multilevel/group selection
I see what you did there.
Orcas' orchestras: product of evolution or some Sea World trainer's insane project?
I don't really disagree with anything in 217. I'm increasingly thinking that part of the issue here is trying to compare different scales of analysis.
216: I think you're arguing against the proposition that people are different in kind from all other animals. I think you're absolutely right to disagree with that, but I nonetheless also think that studying aggregate human behavior is wildly more complex than studying animal behavior because of the wildly more varied and complex nature of human behavior. It's a difference in degree, rather than in kind, but it's a very large difference in degree.
I'm increasingly thinking that part of the issue here is trying to compare different scales of analysis.
Or misunderstanding what levels of analysis mean in a scientific context, or something. You know what the problem is? Fractals.
221: I think that's right, and what makes me call sociology more complex than the study of animal behavior is that the problems we're actually interested in, in sociology, are very very specific problems, like how people feel about class differences in the US in the early 20th century, or different regimes for organ donation. And sociologists can't really back away to a broader scope of analysis, because once you back away from the specifics you lose everything that makes sociology interesting and useful.
I think you're arguing against the proposition that people are different in kind from all other animals. I think you're absolutely right to disagree with that, but I nonetheless also think that studying aggregate human behavior is wildly more complex than studying animal behavior because of the wildly more varied and complex nature of human behavior. It's a difference in degree, rather than in kind, but it's a very large difference in degree.
I think I'm also arguing that part of the difference as it is manifested in different scholarly disciplines is not so much that human behavior is different from that of other animals (granting arguendo that it is) as that we care about different aspects of it. Like, you could in theory study humans the way people study wolves or orcas, but we don't, in part because we have heightened ethical concerns about research on humans (don't put radio collars or microchips on people without their consent, etc.) and in part because we can actually talk to people directly and get their perspective on whatever we're studying, which we can't do with other animals we can't communicate with.
So that's part of the difference, and it doesn't have anything to do with the actual differences in behavior between humans and other animals. But what I'm also arguing, perhaps more controversially, is that it might be possible to study certain other animals in more of the way we study humans. Not methodologically, of course, because the issues in the previous paragraph still matter, but in terms of what sorts of behavior we study. To go back to an example you used earlier, you characterized the way wolves get food as hunting prey and the way humans get food as working in a wide variety of specific occupations, but it would also be possible to frame that in a more comparable way such that humans get food by working for pay which they exchange for food and comparing that to the many specific ways that wolves might hunt in terms of prey choice, stalking strategies, etc. It might theoretically be possible to study wolves in that sort of detail (by following them in a helicopter for weeks or whatever), but we don't do it because we don't care about that level of detail. Just knowing what they eat is enough, and hard enough to find out that we leave it at that.
When it comes to humans, though, we do care, and in addition it's easier to find out the information, so we study that sort of stuff. But again, none of this has to do with any underlying differences between wolf and human behavior.
And after writing all of that out it's more or less pwned by 224.
I kind of feel that this discussion is setting a new low bar for stupid Unfogged discussions, and I was the one pushing the line that research psychologists are out there to fuck up your kids. Hey, sociology seems dumb, even though I know nothing about it and can't explain why! Humans are more complex than animals and therefore sociology is more complicated than biology, even though I know nothing about either, so let's talk about things we barely understand at an incomprehensible metalevel! I don't even understand why pouring salt on slugs is relevant, even though that's the kind of science I'd like to get involved in.
(don't put radio collars or microchips on people without their consent, etc.)
Man I just can not win.
Per 225 there is a lot of very interesting work on comparative primate cognition, which raises a lot of questions about whether animals who solve the same cognitive problems as humans are recruiting the same processes, or if they're just responding in emergent ways to their environment. Which of course raises the question of whether humans are actually recruiting the processes we think we are, and how much of our actual decision-making is emergent and environmental, supplanted by after-the-fact narrative rationalization. But none of that has to do with the increasingly-bizarre-seeming comparison of sociology and biology.
Man I just can not win.
Have you considered switching to sociology? Those fuckers can do whatever they want.
225: I disagree with this. Humans are incredibly different from animals. You could equally well track human and wolf migration, and maybe some of the numerical magnitudes or patterns might (by accident) look similar. But you would be studying a totally different phenomenon. If you analogized human migration in pursuit of a job to wolf migration in pursuit of prey you would be obfuscating more than you revealed.
I do wonder if this discussion would have been different pre-industrial revolution. Malthus does look like he is applying crude animal ecology to human populations, and human population sizes were more predictable over the couple of thousand years prior to the industrial revolution than they have been since. Part of the difference is just that we didn't know as much about what human society was capable of. But part could also be that when human societies were poorer the pure physical calorie constraint was more likely to be binding -- that is one behavioral driver we share with animals.
I don't think anyone's arguing that there aren't natural science approaches to studying human behavior. But you're not generally going to find those in the social sciences and they're probably not going to be on topics like divorce* (as opposed to mating behaviors). This seems like it should be obvious.
*I actually like the divorce comparison because it gets at an area where there's both human as animal like other animals behavior and human as social creature that creates social and cultural structures that have not always existed and once in existence have changed a lot over time, but that are still ultimately concerned with some basic aspects of human behavior.
Humans are incredibly different from animals.
Birds are incredibly different from dinosaurs.
comparison of sociology and biology.
We could bring them together in some way. Maybe come up with a new name for the field that combines elements of each discipline's names.
Halford and I agree in a thread at least kind of about science, which must be a first.
Really? We've had lots of stupid threads full of displays of ignorance.
Well, I don't think I agree about setting a new low bar, but it does seem like a lot of totally unenlightening argument happening at a hopelessly abstract level and not really saying anything.
Yeah I can definitely think of other science threads were people were at least this ignorant.
Well I thought LB and I had just reached a sort of comity that clarified some of the more confusing parts of the thread, but then everyone started talking about how dumb the whole thing was.
Too bad, teo. You've just agreed on stuff that's dumb.
(Actually, I don't think the thread was all that bad. But it wasn't really about history or sociology. BTW NO RIFT.)
205: HOW ELSE WOULD ONE JOIN A BRAIN TO A BRAIN TO CREATE A SUPERINTELLIGENT CHILD, OR A BODY TO A BODY TO CREATE AN EXTRAORDINARY ATHLETE?
Classicists: we're supposed to do it all! At least at Brun Mawr they treated the archaeologists with just as much respect as the philologists.
I don't really disagree that most of the thread was pretty dumb, actually.
I endorse 225. That's pretty much what I was trying to say.
This thread was not dumb. Or no dumber than a music thread (sorry music people).
Determing if this thread was dumb is far more complicated and analytically intractable than determining if other threads were dumb.
Way dumber than a bike thread, though.
Less dumb than a law thread, but that's a given.
Please list all theoretically possible types of thread in decreasing order of dumbness. You have 15 hours.
Very dumb
Dumb
Sort of dumb
Not really dumb
Not dumb
Not dumb at all
When considering threads dumb, there's a special place in my hate for some threads back in 2006.
I think it's harder to determine whether a dumb thread from 2008 resembles a dumb thread from 2006 than to make a similar comparison between 2012 and 2010.
I like the phrase "a special place in my hate".
I'll exempt teo's comments and anything related to Orcas from accusations of stupidity. Wait, why am I capitalizing "orcas"?
256: Because they asked nicely and have big teeth?
Because they had such a great prospectus?
252: oh hey, speaking of, I found out today I passed the second of those exams without rewrites. So my fifteen-hour-exam-days are over.
The dumb thread sulked on the sofa down by the railroad tracks.
If you're going to exempt my comments you should really exempt hydrobatidae's too, since she was saying basically the same things but actually knows what she's talking about.
The dumbest thread of all is one where a bunch of people talk about how dumb it is.
I exempt my own comments from being called dumb, because I was being smart.
Personally, I'm too busy with my male modeling career to worry about being smart.
What I mean is, I have sexy cool crinkle cloth for those hot nights to come.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to click the link in 267 while I'm at work, enticing though it may sound.
I think it'll be fine, teo. If anybody asks, you tell 'em it's a snowsuit.
Eh, it's not like it'll kill me to wait 15 minutes.
|| This thread has gone long enough that I can go OT with a request for advice from Socalians, regardless of how they stand on the value of sociology: suppose a traveler was to find himself in Los Angeles, having come up by car from San Diego, at 8/9 pm next Friday, and suppose further that the traveler had no firm plans between that time and, say 10 am Saturday morning (when he must present himself at the airport). What would recommend said traveler do about food, drink, entertainment? Suggestions? |>
This place is a collective, despite attempts at exemptions, we all bear the mark of dumbthredness.
273: it is impossible to make any empirical claims about that. The collective nature of unfogged could shift at any time, just from the sheer complexity of things.
Empiricism is bunk. What is mere data in the face of groundless assertion?
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I don't know if people are still interested in recipes but this carnitas recipe
is simple and amazing. But takes hours.
|>
Huh, it appears SMBC has discovered linguistics.
Surprisingly, to me anyway, the opening to Exit, Voice, Loyalty - which I'm finally reading for other reasons - has a bit of an extended discussion of animal/human behavior models. I'm not going to tell you about it as that would be dumb.
I have no idea why anything thinks this thread is dumb. People didn't have much to say about the original subject, so they moved to a subject that they do have stuff to say about: human versus animal behavior. Biology has been a more successful science than all of the social sciences combined. The two possibilities are that either social sciences are incompetent, or biology is easier.
If we're still talking about orcas, Peter Watts, famously depressing Canadian author, used to study them and (AFAICT) grew to loathe them and wrote this story as a result:
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/WattsChanner_Bulk_Food.pdf
"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts". Damn right.
|| Further to 272, options that include interaction with imaginary friends score higher than those that do not.|>
Peter Watts' short story" The Things" is fantastic.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
"Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or assholes."
Love that line.
I actually like the divorce comparison because it gets at an area where there's both human as animal like other animals behavior and human as social creature that creates social and cultural structures that have not always existed and once in existence have changed a lot over time, but that are still ultimately concerned with some basic aspects of human behavior.
Me too, because it shows how even seemingly straightforward human behaviors we seem to share with animals are plugged into the entire human social system. You can't think about divorce without thinking about resource division and the economy generally -- the entry of women into the workforce is central to the story of divorce over the past couple of decades. Same with migration, where the current issue is how short sales and the housing crisis are affecting the ability and desire to move for jobs. (Which is also affected by the unemployment insurance extensions, two income families, etc.). Economics tries to abstract away from all this by reducing it all to cash payoffs, which can be useful at times but you always have to remain very aware of all that is lost in that modeling choice, not because of any desire not to be 'rigorous' but because you lose so much important and salient information.
284: his best book (alas, the one I read first) is "Blindsight". Terrific. Worth a look.
It's a big exciting find when you identify a cultural difference between two populations of dolphins or chimps, isn't it?
Not so much these days, other than that a new finding is always exciting. It used to be big and exciting because the very idea of animal culture was controversial, and there were relatively few examples in the literature. That's not the case any more, at least with dolphins and chimps. See The Ape and the Sushi Master for more on culture in chimpanzee populations, although even that is a decade out of date.
As for orcas, apologies if this is old hat, but the American unfoggeders may not have seen this footage from Frozen Planet. Amazingly cool hunting behaviour.
I'm friends with a sociologist. Her latest thing got a fair amount of media coverage because it was about feeding babies on demand increasing their IQ as they grew up.
But the divide between people who look at problems in sociology and problems in biology and think they're fundamentally the same sort of thing, and people like me who, for reasons like the ones fake gives in 146 and 153, think they're very very very different seems like the sort of thing there's no way to argue across
-I suspect that the idea of a fundamental divide between human and non-human phenomena (which is of course the reason we have separate disciplines studying physical and social science in the first place) is behind this in many cases.
--Well I thought LB and I had just reached a sort of comity that clarified some of the more confusing parts of the thread, but then everyone started talking about how dumb the whole thing was.
There's nothing dumb about this issue - it's usually described (using the terminology of Wilhelm Dilthey) as the question of whether and how the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) are a fundamentally different sort of enterprise to the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences). Dilthey's line was that the methodology of human sciences requires verstehen (interpretative/hermeneutic understanding of meanings) as opposed to mere Erklären (straightforward causal explanation). Part of the idea is that in the human sciences the actions of the people you're studying are affected by their own theories (and/or practically-expressed interpretations) as to why they are acting and the meaning of their acts. Whereas wolf behaviour isn't supposed to be affected by wolves' theories about their own behaviour and whether it is right, honourable, appropriately expressive of one's identity as a wolf, etc. (Charles Taylor has some good stuff on this.) So, as people have noted upthread, the issue maybe isn't really about complexity.
The general question of whether there is a difference between the human and natural sciences, and what that difference is = not dumb.
Proceeding to answer this question with "I know nothing about the human or natural sciences in question* but let me proceed to tell you how they work and what the difference is based on the theory of my butt" = dumb.
Me = dumb but cute, so what do I know.
289: Thanks, that sounds very much like what I was ignorantly and confusedly groping toward.
the * was to exempt hydrobatidae.
Dilthey's line was that the methodology of human sciences requires verstehen (interpretative/hermeneutic understanding of meanings) as opposed to mere Erklären (straightforward causal explanation)
I say horsepuckey, Dilthey. Horsepuckey.
Ah, so it's back, thought it had petered pout. A big yes to 289 and 291.
Proceeding to answer this question with "I know nothing about the human or natural sciences in question* but let me proceed to tell you how they work and what the difference is based on the theory of my butt" = dumb.
Funny, while this is exactly what I was doing, I still don't think the bits of the conversation I was engaged in were dumb. That is, what I specifically said was probably mostly dumb, and was certainly pulled out of my ass, but I had something I was interested in but didn't quite know enough to phrase properly myself, and eventually after I'd said enough dumb stuff, other people said better informed things that clarified my thinking. I like that process, and come out of it better informed.
eventually after I'd said enough dumb stuff, other people said better informed things that clarified my thinking. I like that process, and come out of it better informed.
That's fine, but it's still dumb. I could ask the blog to teach me calculus, which would make me better informed but would still be dumb.
296: Then the conversation isn't dumb, just like it wouldn't be if were devoted to teaching you calculus. Individuals in the conversation may be dumb (in this one, I'm not seeing a stronger candidate than me), but their dumbness is the cause of some interesting stuff getting said. If my rampant idiocy annoys you and Sifu, I apologize for having stapled your eyelids open so you couldn't keep from reading it.
If my rampant idiocy annoys you and Sifu
What, me? Nahh. I actually didn't think the thread was that dumb. I just went along with that so people would like me.
I do still think the slug thing was a dumb example, and I do actually think Dilthey's distinction is horsepuckey (at least as stated), but I'm mellow, yo.
Well, it would be dumb if I demanded that everyone explain to me in blog format why they weren't wrong about calculus, instead of just reading one of the ten billion instructional manuals out there on calculus and maybe asking questions from there It's just the reasoning from first principles of the butt, and simultaneous demand that all knowledge be reduced to blog-digestible format, on something people have thought a lot about (and about which there's a lot of available knowledge in the world) that bothers me, in this context as in others on the internet. I'm guilty of it myself often, as well.
It's still cool to complain that economics is bunk, though, right?
291: Glad to be of service.
296: Actually, I think working stuff out for yourself that recreates the lineaments of a major intellectual debate, on the fly over the course of a blog-thread, is if anything smarter than coming in with something you've read in a book. What it might not be is cleaner.
Halford is wrong on all counts. I pronounce him outlaw. Caput lupinum.
289: Some version of Dilthey's issue comes up constantly in all kinds of very practical contexts in applied social science. For example, it is related to the Lucas critique in macroeconomics. Also to the question of the relationship between productivity and wages which is core to lots of macro and micro questions.
There are lots of things I don't want to read a whole book about and where I wouldn't know the right place to look it up on wikipedia. I thought this thread was interesting and that I learned things.
Orcas! Also, I was aware of the complexity stuff in ecology on a general level, but hadn't known much about work on non-human animal culture.
And the Peter Watts story was excellently creepy. I kind of liked Blindsight, but not in a 'go off and find everything else he's ever written' way.
I think an underappreciated difference between the social sciences and natural sciences is that people care about the outcomes in the social sciences in a way they don't in the natural sciences. Very few people are committed enough to the idea of an Oort cloud to falsify the evidence, while there's a whole cottage industry devoted to denying the basic empirical facts of macroeconomics.
Yes, you all are geniuses. The stuff about orcas was interesting.
I'm glad you admitted that. Now, you said you needed some calculus tutoring?
A few years ago, I came across a huge fight about how to handle Pacific Ocean fur seals that took place in the early 20th century. It seems to have been mostly a dispute within the US, but with international aspects since Canada/UK, Japan, and Russia were also operating in the same waters. I never quite got what exactly was going on - the fight seems to have been mostly about whether to ban hunting or allow selective hunting - but there's lots of documents out there if someone wanted to research it.
how to handle Pacific Ocean fur seals
I'd think really long-handled tongs. They've got big teeth.
If you aren't supposed to hunt them, why are they called "fur seals"?
Contemporary scholarship on the issue.
It was actually an orthographic corruption of the original German: "für seals".
This is a seal story that doesn't seem very well known.
309: I'm not sure I buy that. Particularly if you include medicine as a natural science, there are vast industries, far bigger than the social science ones, dedicated to fabricating data, burying experimental results, and spinning research to mean the opposite of what it suggests. Climate science alone is huge on this front, but there's also homeopathy, anti-vaxxers, smoking and lung cancer back in the day, and so on. And there are plenty of individual cases of data fabrication, like Marc Hauser, Hwang Woo-suk, the or the cold fusion people
For those who didn't click through to read any of A Century of Servitude, here are the opening paragraphs of the Preface:
By accident really, I discovered a scandalous federal government abuse that began in the nineteenth century and continued until very recently. We purchased Alaska shortly after the Civil War, fought partly on the issue of slavery. Yet, within three years of the purchase, the federal government established a slave-like relationship with the Aleuts on Alaska's remote Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. The government promoted and sponsored a system of hidden, internal colonialism that flourished decade after decade despite dramatic and progressive reforms in the rest of the country. How did such a condition arise? What forces sustained it, and what signalled its end? These questions prompted this book.
The Pribilof Islands have been inhabited by a small group of Aleuts - 200 at the beginning of this story in 1867 and about 650 at the time of telling it in 1978. The human tragedy these Aleuts experienced was stark and pervasive. But why, the reader may ask, is it important to read about a tragedy that affected so few people when contemporary problems affect millions? The story is significant not because of the number of people involved but because it shows the extremes to which even an enlightened democratic government can and did go, the totalitarian condition it established and continued until recently. Moreover, as an extreme case, the Pribilof story highlights some of the processes of deprivation and oppression that operate less visibly in other parts of the United States - in urban ghettos l and rural backwashes where people are held in fixed economic and social traps.
The reader may also wonder why we need yet another story of government mistreatment of American Indians; after all, that is an old, familiar, and oft-told tale. In broad strokes, the government's historical relations with Pribilof Aleuts did resemble those it had with other American Indians. But there was a critical difference. The government did not want the Aleuts' land as it did with other Indian groups; it wanted and coerced their labor. And to this end, the government came to control virtually every aspect of the Aleuts' lives - social, political, economic - even to the choice of marriage mates and freedom of movement.
The Pribilof story is significant, then, because it is an extreme case in United States' Indian history, it focuses general processes of oppression, and it shows the mechanisms of a democratic government at its worst.
The government needed the Aleuts' labor to harvest fur seals. About four-fifths of Pacific fur seals make an annual migration to the Pribilofs to breed. The Russians had developed a profitable seal industry on the islands. Eager to protect this profitable industry and to prevent the unregulated slaughter of the seals, the United States in 1869 declared the Pribilof Islands a federal reservation. In essence, the Pribilofs were the country's first national wildlife refuge. The United States sent Treasury Department agents to the islands to manage both the seals and the Aleut people on whose labor the seal industry depended.
It was a very different kind of thing and something that I'd never heard of before.
318: I would say that for that reason medicine is less successful than biology. At this point, they don't know even whether statins, the most hyped class of drugs over the last twenty years, is better than a placebo.
I'd argue erectile dysfunction drugs werre more hyped, but point taken. Even so, statins are demonstrably better than placebo at treating cardiovascular disease. The uncertainty is over their preventive benefits.
but point taken.
Otherwise, why bother taking the medicine.
I was required to take a sociology class as a prerequisite for a midwifery program. I bought the textbook and read the first chapter, and returned it.
It claimed that suicide is more common in people who are "less socially connected" or something like that. There was a handwaving explanation of why Catholics are more socially connected than Protestants, for instance, and then their lower suicide rate was given as evidence to prove the point--without any mention that the prohibition against burial in a Catholic cemetery after a suicide would likely affect the classification of deaths. And there was NO mention of bipolar disorder whatsoever.
The class was no better than the book.
I admit that I once told a professor in an economics class that "in other sciences, when the data doesn't fit the hypothesis, they change the hypothesis." However, the economics professor enjoyed responding to that. The sociology professor told me to stop asking questions during the second class.
324.2: That sounds like the argument of Durkheim's classic Suicide.
Right, presented with no discussion whatsoever about the obvious fact that it was wrong.
326: Not to imply that since it is a "classic", that you aren't correct in finding huge flaws in the argument.
empirical studies (or models) can give you an estimate of the amount of salt that will be required to shrivel up a slug of a given size by a given amount. This estimate will have some degree of error. If you do your study right, somebody will be able to replicate your results within the margin of error that you have established. It's exactly the same thing with studies of human behavioral response to unfairness.
just saw this. Sifu, your faith in the scientific method makes Skinner look like a moony humanities major.
The fairness/unfairness studies (ultimatum games) got celebrated basically for demonstrating that people, unlike homo economicus, really do care about and value fairness. Beyond that demonstration of common sense little of any use is 'scientifically' known. The response of slugs to salt is quite a different matter.
328:
I think most sciences present their history as a series of wrong ideas, followed by discoveries and new hypotheses. People thought Earth was the center of the universe, and then data was gathered, and a new model was found to have a better fit.
This textbook did not follow that model. It was presenting that early work as if it still recognized as valid, not as an early attempt that was built on by later efforts. I promise, I could not make that sort of thing up.
I remember a few anecdotes about the craziness of the class. We were shown a cartoon, narrated by a rat, about feudalism, colonialism, and the eventual revolt of the oppressed. They started showing names of countries and the year of their revolutions, which seemed to be in chronological order. At some point it dawned on me that they skipped India.
Since I was paying tuition, I shouted out, "Wait, they skipped India." The professor stopped the video and said that India wasn't relevant to the issue being presented, and restarted it. Subsequent names and number flashing across the screen led me to realize that they were only listing Communist revolutions. Why didn't the professor just say that?
On the other hand, I remember taking a class from the "social sciences" department at Caltech--my humanities class for the term, to make sure we were well-rounded little scientists and engineers. It was about maximizing the social welfare function U, complete with proofs on the board and QED at the end. He of course acknowledged the impossibility of actually plugging real numbers into any of the terms. (We didn't really solve many of the physics problems, either.)
I have a date to discover what's up with Sociology next Tuesday. Stay tuned!
My mild and non-sociologist defense of sociology: I have been lucky enough never to be much exposed to the varieties of Generic Sociology described by Shamhat (though I have certainly heard very similar reports from many others). Sociolinguistics and sociology of language both produce plenty of research I think seems perfectly interesting and well constructed, though. I think social network analysis can be done well, and can produce interesting insights. And who doesn't enjoy reading Erving Goffman?
Beyond that demonstration of common sense little of any use is 'scientifically' known.
Is that right.
332: Be sure to let us know how dumb it is!
(Those are supposed to be three basically separate items in sociology's ledger of OK-ness. Goffman certainly talks about language plenty, though, so maybe it's more like 2.5 items.)
333: I'm not sure I'd characterize much of sociolinguistics as really being very similar to sociology, but I'm not familiar with any sociology of language research so maybe there's more overlap than I realize.
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Having finished my stats exam, I am now dooone with first year (and the bulk of my coursework). Now I... can actually spend time on research for a month and a half or so!
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I'm not sure I'd characterize much of sociolinguistics as really being very similar to sociology
I'm thinking of the William Labov line, like the kind of stuff surveyed in here. Not sociology-ish to you?
339: I don't generally think of it that way, but I can see how you could make a case for it, especially if sociology is as fragmented a discipline as has been suggested in this thread.
I can see how some of Labov's work would fit into the social constructionist approach described in the link in 1, for instance, so yeah, maybe I just don't know enough about sociology to really judge.
I do still have the impression that there's been little interaction between sociolinguistics like Labov and sociology as a discipline, but maybe there has been and I just don't know about.
I think most sciences present their history as a series of wrong ideas, followed by discoveries and new hypotheses. People thought Earth was the center of the universe, and then data was gathered, and a new model was found to have a better fit.
Most of the classic sociology I read was as part of intellectual history classes, and I'm pretty sure we never really discussed whether any of it was right or wrong, but rather how it reflected and affected how people thought of their world and how it built on and/or reacted against earlier writings. The only time accuracy came into play was when the text was serving as a secondary source on some topic.
Shamhat, I didn't read your text book or take your class, but it sure sounds like you were confusing the explanation of an early foundational work* with a statement of current understandings. Because while I don't know much about contemporary sociology, I do knwo that the sociology of suicide has developed considerably from Durkheim's findings.
As to you video shouting, what was it that you were thinking of as India's "revolution", becuase, while I may be forgetting something terribly obvious, I'm pretty sure that it hasn't had one?
*Durkheim's late 19th century study was significant because it approached an issue like suicide, that would previously have been treated in terms of moral/personal failing or national/racial "characater", by looking instead at differences in suicide rates by nations and postulating as to the differences in social structure and culture that could account for those differences.
346: I'm assuming we're talking about independence from the UK, which, when we got it here in the US, was characterized as a "revolution" (bourgeois, of course). Alternately, the Sepoy Mutiny/Indian Rebellion of 1857, perhaps? I think that would more properly be called an insurrection, but I guess you could argue that that's just another way of saying "failed revolution".
319: Seems a little off to me. I can see the argument for the oppression of the Aleuts being different (and, in some senses, worse) than that of other indigenous groups, but all the stuff about how great and progressive the US was during that period rings false. Yeah, there were reforms, but there was also a lot of killing and burning shit down to get to the point where the ruling class was willing to make the reforms. Just seems a little lax to fail to mention the intense economic, political and social upheaval of that century in mainland affairs.
332: Ooh, I hope no one lets Jammies know you're stepping out with an anti-sociologist! How thrilling!
I can see the argument for the oppression of the Aleuts being different (and, in some senses, worse) than that of other indigenous groups, but all the stuff about how great and progressive the US was during that period rings false.
I agree, and the main thing that struck me about 319 was that it sounds like the American treatment of the Aleuts basically continued what the Russians had been doing, which a quick skim of the first chapter in 317 seems to support. Certainly the Aleut case was different, and I can see an argument for it being especially ironic in light of the recently concluded Civil War and Emancipation, but it's not like the late nineteenth century was a period of general harmony in Indian-White relations in the US overall.
348: Is Jammies known to be pro-sociology or something?
Whether or not the Aleut history is exceptionally exceptional, it certainly isn't particularly well known.
350: oh yes. He could give a shit about salting slugs.
347.1: Right, those are the two likely candidates for what Shamhat was thinking of, but, just as you say, neither of those things, the independence movement or the 1857 Mutiny, are what we call revolutions. The American War of Independence, on the other hand, qualifies through the whole armed struggle to change the system of government thing.
Maybe it's just the end of semester talking, but while Shamhat's prof could probably have done a better job of explaining why not all anti-colonial movements are revolutions, I think I can understand why they might not have wanted to spend much energy doing so. They may have been understandably annoyed by a student who returns the text book rather than reading it and then shouts at the screen during a film with a question that is neither pressing nor, as it turns out, accurate. The student chose to do this screen shouting in the middle, thus requiring the Prof either to ignore the question, shout back or pause the film to respond, rather than waiting until the film had ended, as a less self-entitled student might have.
What I've found shocking about the Pribilofs, compared with Native communities elsewhere, is how long the thing persisted. When Jones says century of servitude, she's starting in 1867. People now alive can tell you about the absolute power exercised by the administrators over them in the 1940s and 50s. A 20th century history of Native affairs in Minnesota -- while I agree it's nothing to get all triumphal about -- is markedly different than the Pribilofs (which were also very different than the Chain.)
What I've found shocking about the Pribilofs, compared with Native communities elsewhere, is how long the thing persisted. When Jones says century of servitude, she's starting in 1867.
Yeah, that is admittedly striking, and I had not known it before. Noteworthy also is that this is in addition to the preceding century or so of similar servitude under the Russians.
As I understand it, the Pribs were not inhabited year round before the Russians made the Aleuts stay there are work. Check out Jones' discussion of the time they made the people from St. George hunt seals with spears. In the 1970s. That was fucked up.
Peter Watts, famously depressing Canadian author, used to study them and (AFAICT) grew to loathe them
I love this idea. Getting up in the morning. Fucking whales again. Breaking your balls in traffic. A day of fucking whales ahead. The first fin sticking up over the aquarium wall as you park up. Oh God, here we go. Let's hope we don't have any fucking singing today.
From an anthropomorphic point of view, there's good whales, bad whales, concerned citizen whales, who knows what else. I suspect it's quite hard to love orcas: they're stone killers by any measure.
I suspect it's quite hard to love orcas: they're stone killers by any measure.
Yeah, but they're so imaginative about it. They're not like your boring, chase a straggler down till they get too tired to run killers of the Serengeti. They've got flair.
358: well, he wasn't so much bored with them as just gradually more and more convinced that they were a bunch of complete bastards. And it's perfectly possible to have an enjoyable and rewarding career studying and writing about bunches of complete bastards. I should know.
It was actually an orthographic corruption of the original German: "für seals".
"Not at all, Officer. It's German. It means "the, for seals, the".
Right, those are the two likely candidates for what Shamhat was thinking of, but, just as you say, neither of those things, the independence movement or the 1857 Mutiny, are what we call revolutions. The American War of Independence, on the other hand, qualifies through the whole armed struggle to change the system of government thing.
Google doesn't turn up a whole lot of answers for "Indian Revolution" and most of them seem to be discussing why India hasn't had one, whether it should, and what it ought to achieve, which rather backs up your point. 1857 was an armed attempt to change the system of government from Company direct and indirect rule back to the pre-British situation of absolute monarchies, but it didn't work and thus wasn't a revolution. (Instead they got a change from Company to Empire.)
That's kind of an odd reaction, come to think. People usually don't have any trouble at all getting affectionate about predators. Cats, dogs, the commonest reaction to nature shows is to get attached to the beautiful furry killer and overlook the antelope getting savaged as cannon fodder... I wonder if orcas are enough smarter that when you learn about them they seem like human bastards rather than your standard predator, or if the demonstrable fact that Watts is not a cheerful guy comes through in his attitude to orcas as well.
Since this thread is sort of on academia, maybe somebody could tell me what "ResearchGate" is? Is it LinkedIn for people in research or actively evil spam?
People usually don't have any trouble at all getting affectionate about predators.
The existence of Seaworld and the success of Free Willy suggests people in general don't have any trouble getting affectionate about orcas. Even when they kill their trainers.
364: as far as I can tell, it was largely a reaction to the sort of person who visits aquaria and talks about the wonderful mystical connection she feels with the wise, peaceful leviathans of the ocean.
Ah, I should have mentioned hippies in 358.
In my experience, any illusions that cetaceans possess mystical wisdom, inner peace, transcendent connectedness etc. does not survive the first time one of them attempts to have forcible sex with your dive partner.
Same thing for those who dive near coral reefs, if it were possible to notice.
370. People who advocate swimming with dolphins as all purpose therapy never seem to emphasise this aspect of the experience.
I shouldn't actually have made a joke about it. It was an unpleasant experience and she was pretty shaken up by it. Basically it did its best cut her off from her dive buddy (ie me) and tried to grab her with its jaws.
It must have been terrifying. Those are big bastards, and they're in their element, which you aren't. How did you get out of it?
372: Except for whoever it was that used to run dolphinsex.com. Which no longer exists, apparently.
364: as far as I can tell, it was largely a reaction to the sort of person who visits aquaria and talks about the wonderful mystical connection she feels with the wise, peaceful leviathans of the ocean.
Spock is very irritating, it's true.
374: basically she hit it a few times on the head and it swam off. The whole thing was over pretty fast - the dolphin had been following us down on our descent and I'd assumed it was just playing around (as it had on previous dives). I thought it was just hassling her and headed over but she'd dealt with it by the time I got there - visibility was good and I was about 15 m away.
That wasn't a bad movie. At least, it's the only one I ever saw in the theater.
375. But there's this. IF YOU'RE NOT INTO ZOOPHILIA DON'T GO THERE.
Gaahhh!
That wasn't a bad movie. At least, it's the only one I ever saw in the theater
That wasn't a bad movie. At least, it's the only one I ever saw in the theater
Meh. Call me when they get transparent aluminum.
I've heard stories like that about dolphins before. You've got to wonder (or maybe it's just me) if they're the same with any mammals, or if they've got some particular interest in human. That is, have biologists ever seen a dolphin trying to molest a seal?
After the joke about the penguin who blew a seal, I doubt it. Somebody should drop some cows in dolphin-infested waters just to see what happens.
Similarly, do dogs hump other mammals' legs, or just humans?
I remember my buddy expressed surprise at the fact that the dolphin had been able to tell, through her drysuit, that she was female, but not that she was not a dolphin.
The dolphin probably knew perfectly well she wasn't a dolphin. He just didn't care.
I agree, and the main thing that struck me about 319 was that it sounds like the American treatment of the Aleuts basically continued what the Russians had been doing, which a quick skim of the first chapter in 317 seems to support.
I read most of this yesterday, and actually it seems that American rule quickly became much worse than Russian rule. The Russians had been relatively hands-off, converting them to Christianity but also letting the chiefs organize work, whereas the Americans eradicated the chiefs by the early 20th century and instituted what was very close to being a totalitarian dictatorship: interfering in marriages, making rules about home life, banning emigration, banning use of Aleut and Russian, and ratcheting down material conditions to a miserable level to save money. (See the quote at the top of chapter 5 for the material conditions.)
And it was especially horrible because they were so isolated and few in number that they had virtually no idea of the political movements or standards of living in the outside world until they were temporarily evacuated during World War II.
I remember my buddy expressed surprise at the fact that the dolphin had been able to tell, through her drysuit, that she was female,
I'm pretty sure I've seen research that suggests this may not have been the case, but there's no way in hell I'm googling for it at work.
388: that was my thought at the time, though I didn't voice it because I am a caring sensitive dive partner.
That is, have biologists ever seen a dolphin trying to molest a seal?
NOT to google this, but I've seen it authoritatively stated that they'll molest a herring. A seal OTOH might fight back.
There's probably a flounder-fetish community among the dolphins.
I've seen it authoritatively stated that they'll molest a herring.
I don't believe this, purely on grounds of scale. What's a dolphin going to do to a herring other than swimming next to it? (Or eating it, of course.) How would you know that the intent was sexual?
(I mean, given that you remember seeing this, there's probably some explanation, but it sounds really surprising.)
394: Perhaps "molest a herring" was not meant literally?
I googled "dolphin herring molest"* and the first link says "There is even one record of a Bottlenose Dolphin masturbating with a herring."
*Just to see if anybody really is watching my internet use.
Squeeek qeetk keeeq t'k kk'kkkk klik klk tkt sktk klq squeek eee'eek!
Translation: There goes Marvin again with that coelacanth he's been schtupping. Pervert!
Knowledge is power. It's great to learn.
That said, I'm afraid to learn more on this particular topic so I didn't actually open the link.
398: Knowledge is sorrow. It is best to forget.
My skepticism was misplaced -- I was thinking of the herring as more of an involuntary sex partner, which seemed impractical, than a, um, tool.
One man's knowledge is dolphin-like, anothers is herring.
Skepticism about stuff like that is all that keeps people from paving the Amazon.
I'm still baffled by how a dolphin could even use a sex toy. Tool use is much more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought.
I suppose the fish is in the mouth and they bend well.
"You know, acrobatic swimming is great and all, but I'm beginning to think we got the short end of the metacarpal in this hand/flipper deal."
404: It's not like this is the first time this has been the underwater sex blog.
397: Could you repeat that? I'm hard of herring.
I think "hard for herring" would have been more topical.
Oh, the Van Halen song about his hot herring?
I think "hard for herring" would have been more topical.
Well, that was supposed to be the gag, but I figured iti was forced enough as it was.
Well, that was supposed to be the gag,
Is that what they do with the herrings?
Do herring have fewer teeth than dolphin or something?
408: really? That makes me feel slightly less horrified.
Also the quote in 396 can only be heard in the voice of one of the Knights Who Say Ni.
416: Be reassured.
(I thought the googleyahoohole was a thing of the past, but google adamantly denies that this is the underwater sex blog. I had to go to yahoo to find it.)
I'm pretty sure it is just fronting Bing.
I continue to maintain that this is not the underwater sex blog.
I read most of this yesterday, and actually it seems that American rule quickly became much worse than Russian rule.
Huh, that's interesting. It was certainly true for many of the other Native groups in Alaska, but I had thought the Aleuts (who bore the brunt of Russian activity) might be an exception. Maybe I should actually read the book.
That seems like overcompensation in service of trying to convince yourself that this isn't the underwater sex blog.
Squeak, squeak, herring, squeak.
Also "crossing state lines for immoral porpoises".
Couldn't come up with a joke for either of them, but needed to purge them from my consciousness.
No one seems to have said "blowhole" yet.
380 As if any more proof was needed that there are people into anything you can imagine and a whole lot more, and all of them have an online fetish community to cater to their tastes.
"Crossing staid lions with mynahs for immortal porpoises" is the punchline.
The one I know is "Transporting young gulls over staid lions for immortal porpoises."
Standpipe keeps the underwater sex blog. That's why we keep all of our most valuable archives there. This blog no one would miss, but that blog...
429, 430: Immortal porpoises would live forever, immoral porpoises masturbate with herring. Gee, do I need to draw a picture?
Why did the herring cross the state line?
It was stapled to the immoral porpoise.
