{"id":2471,"date":"2021-12-06T14:39:52","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T22:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=2471"},"modified":"2023-10-19T18:58:03","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T02:58:03","slug":"the-crises-of-a-quantitative-social-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/2471","title":{"rendered":"The crises of a quantitative social scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"<ol>\n<li>So I&#8217;ve always identified as an empirical-first person, and v. cagey about theory contributions in social thought.  I need the world to tell me how it is, I don&#8217;t want to tell it.<\/li>\n<li>But I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of theory this last two years with theory people.<\/li>\n<li>But I&#8217;ve had to get over being self-conscious about it, since theory is so made up.<\/li>\n<li>But I&#8217;m starting to appreciate that made up isn&#8217;t so bad, because the name of the game is figuring stuff out together, and that applies as much to useful distinctions and language as to facts and data. <\/li>\n<li>But I think that data is ultimately the thing that sciences of sociality are short on<\/li>\n<li>But my theory pieces are quickly eclipsing my data pieces in terms of &#8220;what the people want&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>But data is still a strategic advantage of mine, and something I enjoy a ton.<\/li>\n<li>But it takes a lot more work for a lot less out.<\/li>\n<li>And I&#8217;m starting to question more whether science is really the appropriate tool for learning about society: whether science as method is even ready for humans as subject.  If you think about it, from cell and mouse research through the Nobel prize for lobotomies even to Facebook&#8217;s &#8220;emotion manipulation&#8221; experiments, the only times that science is really &#8220;in its element&#8221; for building knowledge about living systems is when it&#8217;s murdery.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Therefore &#8230; I don&#8217;t know.  I should keep doing both I guess. So everything is exactly as it should be<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve always identified as an empirical-first person, and v. cagey about theory contributions in social thought. I need the world to tell me how it is, I don&#8217;t want to tell it. But I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of theory this last two years with theory people. But I&#8217;ve had to get over being &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/2471\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The crises of a quantitative social scientist<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":["default"],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2472,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions\/2472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}