[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Useless? Certainly not. I think the manner in which they are taught and promoted have made them borderline useless…
You won’t get anything much out of Sociology or anything that ends in “Studies”. Waste of time and money. You won’t come out any more educated than when you went into it.
…Too often, the Social Sciences classes now require zero rigor or application of critical thinking, just having an opinion./quote]
That about sums it up. Your whole post made perfect sense and I agree wholeheartedly. I just edited down to what I currently think. If I’d bothered to read the whole thread and find this post I wouldn’t have had to rant like I did. But, at least I feel better now.
Not completely useless as they provide income to lonely professors who are genuinely interested in that sort of info.
I don’t like the word science used in conjuction with sociology because it implies that it is based on observation and testing of hypotheses. Most of it is just statistical.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
I don’t like the word science used in conjuction with sociology because it implies that it is based on observation and testing of hypotheses. Most of it is just statistical.[/quote]
I always thought that observation, testing hypotheses and statistics went hand in hand.
[quote]buckeye girl wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
I don’t like the word science used in conjuction with sociology because it implies that it is based on observation and testing of hypotheses. Most of it is just statistical.
I always thought that observation, testing hypotheses and statistics went hand in hand.[/quote]
Statistical analysis can be about observation and testing hypotheses. Part of the problem with social “science,” is, as Headhunter pointed out, it claims to be value free or neutral. Physics is this way - no one cares which way a particle spins. But there is no such thing as, say, political science. We of course attach value to political things, and what we study about politics is also indicative of what is currently valued (see all the studies on voting behavior). And so-called social scientists do have political values and ideologies which inform their studies and inform their research and conclusions.
If you are going to school to get a job and are not planing doing anything past your BA or BS then yes social science degrees are a complete waste of money and time.
Speaking as a (future) engineer, I think that humanities are on a gradient of uselessness. The actual sciency social sciences are useful when they are taught with proper scientific rigor. Otherwise they just devolve into the arbitrary line drawing and labeling of the humanities. My main gripe is with philosophers and literature types who spend their time arbitrarily making up classifications, labels, and distinctions that have no connection to reality.
Based on my experience, what one has to realize is that everything is a matter of trade-offs and compromises, and that the more you study something, the more complex it becomes. For example: wheels. Most people think they know how they work. I did until I started working with a racing team. Only then did I realize that we had mechanics whose only job is to maintain and optimize wheel function.
To brutally simplify the above: Humanities departments arn’t very good at english. They think “Study” is a synonym for “make shit up”.
[quote]Leppi wrote:
Speaking as a (future) engineer, I think that humanities are on a gradient of uselessness. The actual sciency social sciences are useful when they are taught with proper scientific rigor. Otherwise they just devolve into the arbitrary line drawing and labeling of the humanities. My main gripe is with philosophers and literature types who spend their time arbitrarily making up classifications, labels, and distinctions that have no connection to reality.
Based on my experience, what one has to realize is that everything is a matter of trade-offs and compromises, and that the more you study something, the more complex it becomes. For example: wheels. Most people think they know how they work. I did until I started working with a racing team. Only then did I realize that we had mechanics whose only job is to maintain and optimize wheel function.
To brutally simplify the above: Humanities departments arn’t very good at english. They think “Study” is a synonym for “make shit up”.[/quote]
I’ve also found that engineering departments aren’t very good at spelling.
This has led me to believe that much like despotism or monarchy, the soft sciences are only worthwhile if there are subtle, honest, and intelligent people running the show (eg-Plato’s philosopher-king ideal). If there is a majority made up of idiots, the field sucks balls. [/quote]
One could make the same argument for the hard sciences as well (or any discipline, for that matter). There have been plenty of scientific studies where the data was falsified or the controls weren’t upheld as rigorously as they were documented in order to prove/disprove a hypothesis. Granted, it is far more difficult to pull this off in most cases in the hard sciences, but it is still done.
Hard sciences develop theory that actually let you make predictions about the real world.
Social sciences seem to either a) try and make up theory based on assumptions about very complex phenomena or b) use statistics to try and establish links between variables.
So, I don’t really see what social sciences achieve, if the predictions they make are based on statistics anyway. I think social academics are barking up the wrong tree when they try and make theory. They would be much better placed trying to find mathematical descriptions of processes based on massive statistical analysis. In this second case, there is no such thing as a social scientist, merely a statistician who analyses social phenomena.
Well I tend to lean to the side that putnere everything taught in school is useless besides history and math. I think I would have been better off taking one year of tuition and buying the same dollars worth in books and just reading them for four years or until complete.
The worthless piece of paper is viewed as important by employers though.
It’s not that the social sciences are useless, it’s the dominant “psycho-social model” which is entirely useless, because they assume biology is not a factor in human behaviour.
Sociologist believe stupid things, like all gender differences are a result of socialization, despite studies showing that given the choice, male baboons like boys’ toys and female baboons like girls’ toys, or that female newborns’ pupils dilate when looking at a human face while male newborns’ pupils do not.
Ignoring this reality is what makes current dominant sociological discourse entirely useless.
(Oh God! I just used soc terms! Now I feel dirty.)
Every other field of study thought up by humankind has switched to the modern “bio-psycho-social model”, which actually includes BIOLOGY as a major factor.
The social sciences ignore biology completely, which is the single major factor which makes all of their observations and conclusions completely useless.
[quote]buckeye girl wrote:
I always thought that observation, testing hypotheses and statistics went hand in hand.[/quote]
Yes, but how does one, for example, measure human action? Positivism only works with value neutral measurements. Human action can not be measured via observation because it is not value neutral.
[quote]ElbowStrike wrote:
It’s not that the social sciences are useless, it’s the dominant “psycho-social model” which is entirely useless, because they assume biology is not a factor in human behaviour.
[/quote]
WTF? By the same token you could argue that hard sciences completely ignore the “nurture” factor of human behavior and therefore are completely useless.
I really hope all the “social science is useless” people are kidding. You’re all delusional. Your shit does, in fact, stink, people.
You want a total and complete waste of time class? Take Marketing. GOD I hated that stupid class. I hated everything about it. I hated it so much. I hated it with the intensity of the sun. I couldn’t even stand to hear the professor’s voice because I knew just how full of shit she was.
“Can you define the market for toilet paper?”
“How do we avoid marketing myopia?”
AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!! One assignment we had was to select a brand name product, and conduct a survey of ten people who had used that product, and get their reactions. I just made everything up, and surveyed ten imaginary people. I wound up with a B in the class, but I didn’t study for it at all. I hated that class so much… I know marketing majors make good money, but it really is an area for douchebags, and assholes.
Management was a class I didn’t like either, but I had a really hot professor so it was tolerable…
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
buckeye girl wrote:
I always thought that observation, testing hypotheses and statistics went hand in hand.
Yes, but how does one, for example, measure human action? Positivism only works with value neutral measurements. Human action can not be measured via observation because it is not value neutral.[/quote]
Do you have any experience with Social Science and the experiments done? There are any number of ways to measure human action. It just depends on what you are measuring.
I would go so far as to say that economics is a social science. I don’t know/care what it is technically classified. It’s still a field that studies behavior.
Well then I wonder why Sociology and Psychology PhD’s get paid so much in business schools. Maybe you should start calling up schools and tell them that we don’t need to study strategy, organizational behavior, or human resource management because they’re useless
