I studied sociology in Spain. Here going to uni you can't choose much what you want to study so you have to go through every roadblock and eat that theory timesinks.
There's too much activism in the field. I know people in social sciences hate to talk about this because they see as an attack from outsiders that they don't understand the limitations of current methodology, but it's true. It's too much to deal with.
My university had some ideological diversity among professors, yet I was subject to veiled attacks from professors who feeled that I asked to many questions or that I wasn't aligned with them. Such as talking about me to other classes in a demeaning manner, saying I was too liberal, and trying to frame me.
I went to uni in my mid 20s and I am actually someone who was poor, who comes from an unstructured family, and who had to do all the route from basic education to uni by myself, while working and living in less than desirable places, so I'm one of those "oppressed folks", and I clearly saw that being from that background and confronting them didn't sit them too well. And I wasn't unpolite or anything, I just had questions and wasn't 18, nor shy.
This of course translates to other dynamics, like publications and grants. In Spanish there are some publications who I would classify as "serious" in the field (like REIS) yet some obvious ideological BS slips from time to time.
There was also plenty of network effects for getting money for research, and some other professors, which I personally considered more... professional, or serious, or whatever you want it, where affected by this dynamics because their personality didn't allow them to play office politics. It was a shame, and seeing that is one of the main things that prevented me to pursue an academic career.
One of my professors told me once something that IMO is very true. Fields like sociology are in desperate need for outsiders. Not everything is activism nor far-left propaganda (google functionalism, symbolic interactivism, systems theory to name theree schools of the top of my head) but if nobody who's willing to fight BS stays (like myself), it will just perpetuate, and there's an actual need for this field to develop further.
This seems to be a pretty thin rebuttal. There’s a perfectly sound case against calling Trump a Nazi—which is not what the article does. It’s not really very obvious what your objection to the actual content of the paragraph is. Then you seem to jump on sociology simply because it’s in the submission headline—but it’s far from clear that the article is a representative example of the practice of sociology, so it’s rather mysterious how you get from whatever was in the article to the claim that sociology should be named ‘far-left propaganda’. I’m afraid I don’t really see any substantive content here, and posting that is, I thought, the point of this website.
Yes. But physics has a layer of abstraction on top of the replication problem, if you will.
If you were to go through the physics literature, you would find studies that are hard to replicate. Maybe even my dissertation. ;-)
The "studies" that are hard to replicate in the social sciences are testing what I call isolated factoids, such as: If you give children a chance to eat a sweet snack, they will tend to become criminals as adults. There is no way to test this factoid except by carrying out more identical studies and hoping that statistics will converge in favor of an answer.
Instead, physics can attack a problem from multiple angles, especially by connecting different factoids with a web of relationships based on theory. If it works out, then you end up with a web whose structure remains reliable even if you knock out even a large number of studies. For instance I don't think we'd consider abandoning Maxwell's equations if we discovered that much of the early experimental work done in support of developing those equations was faulty.
This is why I actually think that replication is not actually the gold standard of science.
Perhaps I should have clarified. What I should have said is that replication is certainly important, but replication alone can't drive science forward or produce a reliable scientific knowledge base. At least, it hasn't done so yet.
And a science that's bolstered by the development of robust theory can tolerate a certain amount of replication failure.
It's fascinating to me that social psychology can have a replication crisis, and somehow gets turned into a replication crisis in all of the social sciences.
