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It's not clear to me why the value of sociology would need to be defended. A good deal of the social graph analysis that's so popular now is built directly on t

It's not clear to me why the value of sociology would need to be defended. A good deal of the social graph analysis that's so popular now is built directly on the methods and works of sociologists and social psychologists (Stanley Milgram's small world, Zachary's karate club, etc.) with the big difference between then and now being availability of computational power and data sets. It seems like a field that has a lot of relevance today, even if perhaps people practice it under different guises.

triplesec 14y ago
You are a thoughtful hacker, but most people don't look much outside their own arena, which they tend to think it better than the rest, for fairly obvious psychological reasons. HN probably contains a much more open minded sample than the average science/hacker community! I'm an applied sociologist, a human hacker with emphasis on method, inter alia. The number of brilliant bio / physics and maths-oriented friends I have who believe that statistics is the only meaningful measure of truth is not insignificant. Sad, but true, a narrow methodological ideology assuming the primacy of cardinal measurements and deduction over anything else. Good point, and I shall use social network analysis as another example for such people. There are numerous examples of this blindness in popular geek culture, such as xkcd positing an outdated reductionism to physics or maths, which as a numberloving teenager I also subscribed to, because it was neat and easy. Thank you for the pushback, but you are part of an enlightened segment. It's about time I constructed a survey to ascertain the actual values and beliefs in this space among the HN community. I wonder if they let you do surveys here.