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Sociology lives in an uncomfortable place at the intersection of "important" and "difficult". Forming a rigid experiment on human beings is vastly more difficult than a simple thing like an atom or a mineral, and so much worse with groups of human beings. STEM people like to dismiss it because it doesn't produce the same kind of rigid results and is therefore useless. But sociology is nonetheless important. Like it or not, we have to make decisions about how the world will run, and the fact that we don't have perfect information doesn't let us opt out of that. Combine that with all of the usual human failings -- pettiness, meanness, closed-mindedness, greed, etc -- it sounds impossible. But it does, slowly, gather data and formulate theories. This isn't made better by the fact that most STEM people imagine they can read primary source material and understand it -- a mistake they wouldn't make for a "hard science" in a different discipline. Like every field, the frontiers are based on huge amounts of background material, which is even more vast for a field that's more complicated than the nice, neat laws of physics or chemistry. None of that excuses those human failings of sociologists. They need to do better, and hold each other to account (and not just to foment their own failings in their place). But we do need to recognize that this work is important. The world is complex and difficult and we'll make better choices if we try to understand, rather than dismiss it as unknowable. |