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An idea for getting approximately calibrated 50% subjective probability ranges

The person who created this website (“Hey Students, Considering Majoring in Sociology? Don’t Do It!”) points me to this interview with philosophy professor Stephen Turner, who writes:

1986 was the nadir of the granting of US Sociology bachelor’s degrees, and also represented a change in direction. That was the last year I taught Sociology in my own institution. . . . I had never been part of the graduate program and had taught graduate sociological theory as a visiting professor at Notre Dame and BU but not at my own institution. Department politics were pretty brutal.

The experiences I had the few times I returned to the department didn’t make me miss sociology. I was called back to teach a course on Comparative and Historical Sociology which I had originally designed, and took over the reading list the professor, who sadly was dying, had already created for it. One of the books on it was Hobsbawn’s Primitive Rebels. Hobsbawn, a Marxist, said that the (Italian) rebels in question lacked the appropriate class consciousness: that is what made them “primitive” rebels. The female student–and by this time the program was almost all female–who was assigned to discuss it objected to it because she thought it said Italian people were stupid, and she was Italian. The other students had their own complaints about life that they could associate with their identities.

That’s kind of funny! A battle of the grievances.

Turner continues:

I had been writing on philosophy of social science my whole career, including a comment on a ludicrous paper on “logic” that was published in the ASR in 1971 during a brief fashion for theory construction. I had thought that knowing some philosophy of science would both give me some intellectual leverage in sociology and point to ways of improving sociology. . . .

I did a paper for an Australian journal called “De-intellectualizing Sociology,” and that is probably a good label for what happened. Sociology was at some point in the past was a lively place with interests in big picture questions and big ideas, and a desire to bring facts to bear on contentious matters of policy. I trace it to the Labor Statistics movement of the 19th century. The bulletins of the Bureaus of Labor Statistics of the era make great reading. They managed to engage in questions like the relation of the fall of the Roman Empire and inequality. But they were resolutely factual and even-handed. For many reasons, some of which had to do with ideological conflicts, that kind of factual discourse became unacceptable, especially in the seventies. The protests against James Coleman and Edward Banfield represented a refusal to deal with anything that went against or even complicated the narrative of oppression that became increasingly dominant. What had attracted me to the field in the first place was no longer there, and the new way of doing sociology had no need for ideas or theory–they had the answers they wanted and didn’t care to debate them.

Interesting. As an outsider to sociology, I focus on the good stuff, for example this paper from 2020 and various work of Duncan Watts. I’ve also collaborated with sociologists and published other papers that I like in sociology journals.

I like sociology for the same reason I like political science: it’s an open field with all sorts of different approaches. There’s been some highly publicized bad work done in sociology, as there has been in economics, political science, psychology, and other areas of social science,

The notorious beauty-and-sex-ratio guy was trained as a sociologist and then promoted by an economist who also promoted some junk psychology.

The big problem that I see is a passive corruption whereby people just accept bad work and unsubstantiated claims, whether these be bogus evolutionary psychology published in scientific journals, discredited and fake anti-vax research promoted by the Department of Health and Human Services, unsupported NPR and Ted-bait, etc.

But . . . I don’t see sociology as standing out here. Turner’s stories are interesting, and I think they speak to his experience. It’s gotta be different at other places. The culture of academic departments can be terrible–I know, as my first academic job was in a snakepit full of liars, lazy faculty, and sex pests–but I don’t think all sociology departments would be like that! I guess the challenge is to throw out the baby without losing all that valuable bathwater.