[fsloth]

Yeah, as science I have serious doubts about sociology. As a way to form an ontology it's plausibly worse than vernacular tradition. Please prove me wrong and point me to high quality sociological studies. I want to believe we have practical tools to deal with the future of our species.

[groceryheist]

How about https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/521848

?

[fsloth]

Applied graph theory? I don't have access to full article so I can't tell if it's actual math or something more hand-wavy stuff.

[groceryheist]

Here's a non-paywalled version. https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Centola...

This is just an example of a well-known recent sociology paper that can appeal to science-minded people unfamiliar with sociology.

By the way, it's a danger to rely too much on mathematical formalism as a heuristic for deciding whether a research field is scientific or valid. String theory for example lacks empirical evidence (and maybe even the possibility of empirical validation altogether).

[sytelus]

In general I agree. However many studies in this field had been large scale enough with low variance that effect is not ignorable. Given similar results, it appears reproducibility is also high.