Top products from r/BadSocialScience

We found 11 product mentions on r/BadSocialScience. We ranked the 11 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top comments that mention products on r/BadSocialScience:

u/twittgenstein · 4 pointsr/BadSocialScience

Varieties is good but a bit outdated, and also heavily pushes Little's particular form of realism. It's a good read and one that I recommend to colleagues interested in boning up on the philosophy of social science, but am looking for a better alternative. Alexander Rosenberg's is even more dated. A scholar in my field, Patrick Jackson, has written a decent survey titled The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations that actually is more or less pertinent to any of the social sciences, and isn't all that specific to mine. The one downside is that it is somewhat unfair to realism, only really admitting into that category Bhaskarian Critical Realism. If I had to recommend anything, though, I'd say read that, read something like Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Powers of Social Structures, some of the causal mechanism stuff, and Joas and Knobl's superb Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. At this point you'd have a good basic grasp of the approaches out there and how they link up to particular social meta-theories.

u/chemical-welfare · 1 pointr/BadSocialScience

Have you managed to get a hold of Little's New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science? Haven't read it; from what I gather it's not so much an updated Varieties as an answer to the question of: provided we accept a handful of epistemic starting points (actor-centricity, macro-meso-micro levels to the social, etc.), what's available to us? The attention paid to assemblage theory and crit realism reflects what he's been concerned with on his blog. The Foreword.

Unrelatedly, I went through Abbott's Processual Sociology over the summer and am keen to get a committed pragmatist's thoughts on it. Or rather, your thoughts on Abbott's work more broadly, as I've never been able to take the pulse of someone who's philosophically literate on the matter. I enjoy Abbott. I'm not well read enough to have an opinion on him beyond that. I think his ontological stuff is entertaining if nothing else, and I fear that that's what most people take away from him.

Also, please don't leave us again :(. Diss be damned.

u/dmoni002 · 4 pointsr/BadSocialScience

I have you listed as a "friend" because generally I pay some heed to the ideas you express in your posts, that being said your comment reads like a shotgun blast of irrelevancies.

To start off I lived in SK for two years and never experienced any hatred of Americans... so I guess I'll take my anecdote over yours.

>Past a certain point does it even matter?

To the extent we're on a rock that will be consumed by the sun in X billion years, maybe not. To the extent it helps us understand alternative policies' consequences for the billions of humans in developing countries during the mean time - of course it bloody matters.

>The whole socialism vs capitalism or more or less efficient is a red herring.

Socialism and capitalism weren't even on the table; how is this anything other than your own red herring? Efficiency matters for reasons which I assume are obvious.

>different from each other drawing comparisons or trying to find similarities between them is probably a waste of time

I read this as "examining how economic growth occurs or does not occur is a waste of time," is this accurate? Why have social science at all? "There's too many variables, fuck it!" You need some Barro & Sala-i-Martin.

>Starting a business is never a rational decision at least by economic standards

I would love to see your model!

u/easily_swayed · 1 pointr/BadSocialScience

If some of these studies are to be believed (and my anecdotal evidence agrees with them; on average I see that girls are more likely to cooperate, take criticism better, give and seek help from others, etc.) then this book might give a clue as to why women do better.

u/eunicyclist · 13 pointsr/BadSocialScience

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Peoples-Modern/dp/0062231731

The whole thing is just one big piece of unapologetic nostalgia for the days of imperial Britain

u/PopularWarfare · 3 pointsr/BadSocialScience

> lol, these kinds of child-labor/child-prostitution apologetics are kinda funny in juxtaposition to how much hand-wringing is done over great leaps forward and collectivization/rapid industrialization done under state planning

Well, once capitalism vs socialism genocide Olympics begin the discussion is pretty much over, at least from a social science perspective. But yeah, it's pretty unlikely that an argument that could attack state-socialism/maoism/marxist-leninism/communism/whatever as immoral, defend the morality of capitalism and yet still somehow remain consistent. The only person to do it somewhat successfully was Hayek but usually, you end up with something more akin to Rothbard or Mises.

> Not to say that the respective sets of problems are commensurable

The solution is to compare them anyway, obviously.

> and moral thinking split that happens with them: we know of no better way of doing capitalism without child-labor (or child-prostitution),

We know how "to do" capitalism without child labor but unfortunately, I do not think we can say the same about the industrialization which where we see the most flagrant abuses of child labor historically and contemporarily.

Regardless, I'm not really sure what you point is. It's not like capitalism has a monopoly on the use of child labor.

> yet the consequences of state-enforced industrialization and agricultural reform are unconditionally the final nail in the communist coffin.

The nail in the coffin for forced industrialization and collective agriculture reform is that it is that it is not competitive in the long term. Not that they don't have their place, many of the east asian tigers started with state lead reform and then transitioned to market economies.

> You see, that's the Mao's biggest mistake, he should have taken a different Great Leap in a pair of Nike® Air Jordans!

Nah Mao definitely should have gon with the Yeezys

u/vrosej10 · 1 pointr/BadSocialScience

Is this the book? My Genes Made Me Do It!: Homosexuality and the Scientific Evidence https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LPSNTPO/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_XSZOCbSK78KFJ

u/cordis_melum · 15 pointsr/BadSocialScience

Can confirm, when I was taking the class about women in the Chinese revolution, we just studied posts on Tumblr.

Also when going over gender during my Chican@ history class, we never used academic publications. This book? Totally a Tumblr post.

u/doomparrot42 · 5 pointsr/BadSocialScience

So you say:

> If I think that I'm a competent and nice person, and I have a roommate or coworker that treats me like a fool and a jerk, that's going to create some cognitive dissonance, for sure. But I don't have the right to control what he mirrors back to me.

But then you say:

> The problem is that others feel cowed by them and afraid to discuss things.

How is it the fault of "PC types" how others respond to them? They don't have the right to control what people mirror back to them, after all.

> But at the same time we have to also recognize that being part of a society necessarily involves repressing some aspects of ourselves in order to interact with others. Animals don't do this - they do not empathize, they do not conceive that other animals have rights, so they rape and assault and steal.

Acting as though humans, because we are animals, are all prone to the same impulses and desires as animals is rather fallacious. And as it happens, many animals can and do empathize. Bonobos do not rape or assault, for example; they're a pacifistic species that uses sexuality to form bonds, reconcile differences, and keep the peace. Animal psychology isn't my specialty, but you're talking veneer theory here, which is not really a current part of the field. Check out Frans de Waal's primatology research - it's not as simple as "animals are brutal and society represses that in humans." Learning to exist in an interdependent society, and so learning to practice altruism and to set aside violent tendencies, is not remotely the same thing as attempting to pretend to be something that you are not in order to protect yourself from bigots.

You're still talking about identity in a broad sense strictly from your perspective on/understanding of the term. That doesn't mean that it's everyone's experience. You're not Schroedinger's human, both extant and not until observed. Identity may be refined through interaction but it is potentially defined in many different ways. In the case of pronoun choice, that's not about asking people to mirror back your identity to you, that's about asking people to not forcibly impose their own reality onto you. There is a distinction. Your framing makes it sound more like "speshul snowflakes need everyone to validate them" - that's not the point, at all.

And you mentioned that you were thinking of reading Heidegger this summer? If you have time to reddit you have time to read. Pick up an actual book, it'll do you good. You don't seem to have much of a sense of humor, maybe try this.

u/Khjuu · 9 pointsr/BadSocialScience

I really like Little's Varieties of Social Explanation as a good primer on the (justified / justifiable) methodology of social science. Which is good: I like this point, but it mostly points out the problems with trying to prove social science doesn't work, rather than build an explanation of how it does work.

Also, crackpot theory time (kind of ironic in context, but anyway): I blame neoliberalism for a lot of the anti-intellectualism aimed at the social sciences. I think the background cultural assumption that planned economies fail because of their inability to gather together and mobilise sufficient knowledge (thanks, Hayek!) morphs into a "but how can you even ever prove that 'institutional oppression' exists?!?!" when reactionaries get their hands on it.