Quotes About Social science

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War.

I would not be the first to say that this optimization set back social science by reducing it from the intellectual and reflective discipline that it was becoming to an attempt at an "exact science." By "exact science," I mean a second-rate engineering problem for those who want to pretend that they are in the physics department—so-called physics envy. In other words, an intellectual fraud.

Of course, I do not believe that there is such a thing as a 'value-free' science, much less a value-free 'social science.' Hence, I do not urge anything so naive as a value-free observer or observation; on the contrary, what I urge is that the observer's aims and values be as clear and explicit as possible.

Few acted so rashly as to commit murder or other felonies; the consequences of your actions still fell on you in this branch, not any other. But there was a shift in behavior that, while falling short of a mass outbreak of criminality, was readily discernible by social scientists. Edgar Allan Poe had used the phrase "the imp of the perverse" to describe the temptation to do the wrong thing simply because you could, and for many people the imp had become more persuasive.

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.

The progressives gave us the professor of social science, the scholar-activist, the social worker, the muckraking journalist, and the economic expert advising or serving in government.

When revealed theology is reduced to an autonomous study of man, when biblical authority is replaced by an unstable human wisdom, when behavior is directed by the descriptions of social science instead of the prescriptions of God's Word, then we have returned to the situation prevailing at the time of the Book of Judges: every man will do what is right in his own eyes.

This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.

G. HODGSON How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science

Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins. No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History Social Science in the Courtroom

Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.

Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.

Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.

Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life

La science sociale di XIXe siecle nous a legue un terrible heritage, l'idee que els processus se divisent en trois champs separes: le politique, l'economique et le socioculturel.

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity."4 This is one of the most robust findings in social science—and also one of the most ignored

It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.

Though it is closely linked to computer science, data journalism is generally considered a social science.

The first data-driven investigative story appeared in 1967, when Philip Meyer used social science methods and a mainframe computer to analyze data on race riots in Detroit for the Detroit Free Press. "One theory, popular with editorial writers, was that the rioters