Difference between revisions of "Sociology"

Latest revision as of 11:01, 30 May 2016

Sociology is a soft science with a conflict of interest built in at the foundation.

Sociologists tend to bristle when you say their science is a soft one. It's true, they do use hard analytical techniques such as advanced statistics. The softness of sociology lies not in its methods, but in its models. At some point, the researcher has to decide what to measure and how to relate findings to one another. These decisions are arbitrary.

Richard Feynman pointed out that scientists tend to fool themselves. They get data that doesn't align with their pet theory, so they invent a fudge factor instead of dropping the theory and trying to find out what's really going on. And that's in physics! In sociology, findings and theory are isomorphic to each other, with the relations in the isomorphism decided arbitrarily by the researcher. The sociologist doesn't put in a fudge factor; instead he leaves factors out, in accordance with his own biases. A left-out factor isn't rejected as being irrelevant. It's never thought of in the first place. No important finding can happen in sociology unless the researcher thought it was going to be important, at the outset. The premise affords the conclusion.

Added to this, is that science always wants to become technology. In the case of sociology, science wants to become policy. And policy is power. So your sociologist not only has no objective checks against his biases, he also faces the most corrupting of temptations. The result is that sociologists pretty much always find what they're looking for. This is why educated people should always take sociological findings with a truckload of salt, especially when those findings get played up in mass media.