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Why is this on SSRN? This is not an academic paper...it's not doing science or analysis, there is no data or statistics. It's just an opinion, and a facile, mea

by darawk 6y ago

Why is this on SSRN? This is not an academic paper...it's not doing science or analysis, there is no data or statistics. It's just an opinion, and a facile, meaningless one at that.

renewiltord 6y ago
It's a social science paper. Many of them are not quantitative. A lot of them look like this.
- nostromo 6y ago
  If words matter, I'm not sure we should be calling this sort of academia "science" at all. Policy advocacy would be a better word.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Well, this particular word is sort of overloaded due to legacy reasons, right? For instance, strictly I would not consider most mathematical sciences 'science' - not empirical. Likewise, non-empirical social sciences aren't sciences in the science sense either. But the word 'science' means something different from its meaning in 'social science' just like 'Act of God' in your insurance paperwork does not mean a supernatural being acting (it just means natural catastrophes and the like - one kind of force majeure). Altogether, I've chosen to just accept that "social science" is not "science" in general.
coldtea 6y ago
>it's not doing science or analysis, there is no data or statistics Science is not necessarily about data or statistics. You're confusing it with "hard sciences". We've had soft sciences (and non quantitative scientific inquiry) for as long as we've had hard sciences...
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Some people are picky about this, but in many languages the main science-like word is way more uncontroversially broad. German Wissenschaft covers a whole range of scholarship from physics to humanities and there's no competition for who gets to call their field a Wissenschaft, because mostly anything pursied in academia is considered one. In the Anglo world "Science" seems to be a badge of honor, a title to earn and it leads to cargo culting and physics envy and mock quantitative analysis just for the show. It's better to make specific criticisms about particular methods in the particular contexts, rather than fight over semantics and definitions of words. "This isn't science" is a lazy and uninformative critique. Better is: this and this quantitative analysis or structured approach would better help us uncover the truths behind this topic.
sdoering 6y ago
I don't know how SSRN selects. But this seems to be a NPR journalist publishing under the cover of social science. Not that someone not affiliated with a university cannot write scientifically valid papers. On the contrary. But a journalist writing about journalists should in my mind at least warrant extra scrutiny.

by darawk 6y ago

Why is this on SSRN? This is not an academic paper...it's not doing science or analysis, there is no data or statistics. It's just an opinion, and a facile, meaningless one at that.

renewiltord 6y ago

It's a social science paper. Many of them are not quantitative. A lot of them look like this.

nostromo 6y ago
If words matter, I'm not sure we should be calling this sort of academia "science" at all. Policy advocacy would be a better word.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, this particular word is sort of overloaded due to legacy reasons, right? For instance, strictly I would not consider most mathematical sciences 'science' - not empirical. Likewise, non-empirical social sciences aren't sciences in the science sense either. But the word 'science' means something different from its meaning in 'social science' just like 'Act of God' in your insurance paperwork does not mean a supernatural being acting (it just means natural catastrophes and the like - one kind of force majeure). Altogether, I've chosen to just accept that "social science" is not "science" in general.

coldtea 6y ago

>it's not doing science or analysis, there is no data or statistics Science is not necessarily about data or statistics. You're confusing it with "hard sciences". We've had soft sciences (and non quantitative scientific inquiry) for as long as we've had hard sciences...

bonoboTP 6y ago
Some people are picky about this, but in many languages the main science-like word is way more uncontroversially broad. German Wissenschaft covers a whole range of scholarship from physics to humanities and there's no competition for who gets to call their field a Wissenschaft, because mostly anything pursied in academia is considered one. In the Anglo world "Science" seems to be a badge of honor, a title to earn and it leads to cargo culting and physics envy and mock quantitative analysis just for the show. It's better to make specific criticisms about particular methods in the particular contexts, rather than fight over semantics and definitions of words. "This isn't science" is a lazy and uninformative critique. Better is: this and this quantitative analysis or structured approach would better help us uncover the truths behind this topic.

sdoering 6y ago

I don't know how SSRN selects. But this seems to be a NPR journalist publishing under the cover of social science. Not that someone not affiliated with a university cannot write scientifically valid papers. On the contrary. But a journalist writing about journalists should in my mind at least warrant extra scrutiny.