An interaction about Sociology and Physics on Twitter
Jason and Jesse and whether sociology sucks!
This felt revealing of the ongoing desire of many for more order and form in society and of a misunderstanding about the diversity of roles for the scientific method as a legitimate way of knowing about both the natural and social world. The perspective offered by Jason is a pattern latent in many engineering types, so I thought I’d put a frame around it.
Jason
What are three major breakthroughs in the history of sociology? Something analogous to Newton’s Laws, the Bohr model of the atom, then Einstein or Heisenberg.
Jesse
I love the energy of comparing every field of inquiry to physics, lol.
Jason
You could use any real science as a reference point. What discoveries in sociology have meaningfully advanced the field in an enduring manner, the way that the discovery of pH advanced chemistry?
Jesse
I can't tell what you're critiquing. Are you pushing back against the idea that human society is studyable by the scientific method, that human behavior does not exhibit stable patterns (like molecules do), or that sociologists themselves (like me) are not scientifically rigorous?
Jason
I appreciate your willingness to engage more deeply on this. Broadly, my claim is that sociology hasn’t generated scientific findings that were subsequently translated into real-world applications with sustained beneficial results. In other sciences, we do see this; e.g., the discovery of acids and bases made the synthesis of industrial chemicals possible, and the discovery of atoms made nuclear fission possible.
Sociology doesn’t have similar results. Moreover, hard sciences progress. Although science is often messy and previous results sometimes get retracted, it is possible to determine 'laws' that, once determined, are incorporated into the body of knowledge and can be taken as assumptions in future research. Sociology hasn’t progressed much, if at all, in about two centuries. There’s a lot of 'just so' stories, often with biases that either conform to or cause the dominant political ideology of the day.
Since WWII, Western sociology has been defined by blank-slate liberalism. Blank slate liberalism as an assumption has metamorphosed into a new theory, call it CRT or wokeness, but I don’t care about the label, in which empirical differences between people are backwardly explained by external social forces and biases creating those differences. I think this is a just-so story and is usually not true. In some cases, it may indeed be true, but even then, it’s still a just-so story because sociology hasn’t found a mechanism to turn these biases on and off, so there’s no control, no real empiricism, just an explanation.
Sociology has also never made any major predictions that were both non-obvious and true. Sociologists didn’t foresee the collapse of dating life and rise of anxiety among youth, or Trumpism, or the strange flip on obesity where right-wing and left-wing switched positions! Now, I didn’t foresee any of those things, either. But I don’t claim to be a sociologist, nor do I even claim that sociology exists. I claim that sociology neither discovers laws with applications nor predicts major, non-obvious social changes, and so is useless at best.
Jesse
I think it's worth thinking of sociology differently than you currently are. Fields of inquiry have a diversity of relationships to society and purposes within society. The field of sociology is much more dynamic than physics, but to say it hasn't generated findings that have led to real-world beneficial results is extremely misleading.
Sociology is responsible for revealing the effects of human laws (not natural laws) on human sub-populations, for charting the effect of corporate donation on the likelihood of think tank climate denial, of corporate policy on hiring outcomes, of income on health outcomes, of state incarceration policy on criminality, etc. I mean, the list is actually more infinite than physics.
My sense is that you don’t read sociological literature. I see in your bio that you’re an engineer. What do you think of the social engineering that Silicon Valley is running on the young population? Why are Google and Meta hiring all my sociology PhD friends?
To reiterate, I think getting out of the rut of comparing all stable patterns to physical laws would be helpful for understanding the diversity of roles that the scientific method plays in society.