[LegitShady]

Modern sociology in no way resembles a scientific study and is heavily politicized. A bunch of nonsense political "researchers" citing each other in drivel papers desperate for relevance.

It's now leaking into other fields. I remember when I first heard stem be changed to steam to include "arts" a laughed at how inclusive and utterly useless it is.

[pvarangot]

Postmodern sociology is revisionist towards trying to see society only through a lens that is also easily probable to be statistically sound, this is because of how more quantitative socioeconomic theories failed to predict very big crises or events in society. It can be argued that asking for scientific rigor in sociology to the same extent as in other human sciences raises the bar too much because to validate some theories the experiments are either impossible, prohibitively expensive, or so massive that they would bias the whole of society.

Also, I think it would marvel you knowing how much things you would call "scientific study" are also heavily politicized.

If this bothers you to a big extent I would recommend you try to find comfort in thinking about postmodern sociology as a religion different than yours. They won't be bothered by it and it will probably fit your mindset in a more soothing way than thinking about them as scientists. It's not that they are trying to publish their findings in ACM TOPLAS or something, they have their own community and books and kinda like it.

[LegitShady]

If it was treated as religion instead is science I would be open to that, but the papers churned out by "experts" today become policy tomorrow that effect everyone.

[pvarangot]

Religions dictate and have been dictating policy since forever we had governments and even before that. It's what people understand and mostly everyone seems to be ok with it.

[weberc2]

I do think of it as a religion—one that is state sponsored and masquerades as science.

[travisoneill1]

They even make up math. I had a sociology prof in college teach us that to mathematically determine that there is a difference between groups, the difference between the means had to be greater than the range in either group (not even any reference to sample size). I replied that by this test you couldn't even determine that there is a height difference between men and women, and the prof said that in fact you can't and that it was a good example of this test.

[bransonf]

That professor was wrong or your understanding is.

There are plenty of statistically viable ways to determine differences between groups. Even a simple T-test is usually sufficient.

The difference of means does not have to be more than the range in either group. Standard deviation is what’s important here. You use a test statistic to determine the relative value of the real mean within a confidence interval. It’s whether these intervals overlap that you can determine a significant difference between groups.

[travisoneill1]

I know that the professor was wrong. That was the point of the comment. That a professor in a so called science class could get the math so comically wrong.

[roflc0ptic]

Sociology is way more rigorous than you’re making it out to be. Studying people is hard, but it’s making good faith effort in that direction, reproducibility crisis notwithstanding.

Take the “Sokal 2.0” affair, where some profs sent obviously bogus research to various journals. Notably, while they were able to get “rape culture among dogs at the dog park” (or maybe it was racism, easy to look up) published in a gender studies journal, they couldn’t get published in sociology journals. Sociology has standards. The absurdities committed by gender studies as an institution don’t falsify racism/other forms of oppression. They might be wrong, but you’re certainly not right.

[LegitShady]

>Sociology has standards.

Mostly political and much of it unreproducible. Desperate political academics using non science to argue their opinions and right and citing each other into fake legitimacy.

Garbage studies garbage standards garbage journals from people who couldn't hack it elsewhere.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They are boring and repetitive and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[LegitShady]

It wasnt an unrelated tangent. It's directly related to the drivel in op.

[dang]

Tangents are always related at some point. The problem is not where they start, but what they lead to. If they start from drivel but lead to hotter drivel, like internet ideology wars, HN gets much worse. Please just avoid generic ideological battle here.

[LegitShady]

Fair enough, although I think it's unavoidable when you're talking about what I think to be essentially made up terms.

[weberc2]

It is odd that your comment was “ideological battle” but not the original article. I guess the original was sufficiently jargon-laden.