More information about the genesis of this panel here. Paper abstracts here. Hope to see you February 18 in the Grand Salon 3 at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans at 4:00!
More information about the genesis of this panel here. Paper abstracts here. Hope to see you February 18 in the Grand Salon 3 at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans at 4:00!
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis' New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators...
One point that I'd like to see made a little bit more clearly is that political scientists should try to reframe this. I doubt that we have much sympathy among members of other disciplines; that...
Yeah, I don’t really know either. I always hear the expression ‘SSCI’ thrown around as the gold standard for social science work. Administrators seem to love it, but where it comes from and how it...
This genre is growing on the Duck, so here are are a few more thoughts before you take the PhD plunge. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss… Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like bloviating at length. The sun is my enemy, and exercise bores me. I would really like to be a good writer/researcher. Including grad school, I’ve been doing this now for 15 years, so clearly I could have switched. I am committed. But there are at least 7 things I didn’t see back in my 20s when I...
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('000902d5-7b3b-4c9c-b77d-2a0f6080ed33'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-xHchAHKaTKA/T6nywRxtfXI/AAAAAAAAALg/2rX2oBbeHk4/video6cf4c2596412%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />Greatest Movie Line Ever on Academia: “How the Social Scientists Brought Our World to the Brink of Chaos” Hah!If academia’s taught me anything taught me, it’s that the real world is flawed, not theory, and that facts should change for me, not the other way around. As...
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC,...
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere - but if you...
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and admirably broad diversity reigns, despite the best efforts of partisans to tie up all of the pieces of the philosophy of science into a single and univocal...
In today's 'horrors of bad social science', we have a piece by Jennifer S. Bryson, director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project, (which seems to be a conservative think-tank) who has written a piece for the Institute's blog on the threat of pornography for national security. (No really.)Bryson asks the question that no serious scholar has ever, ever addressed and comes up with an argument to be considered. In fact, she is getting right on top of this hard and pressing issue.She reaches around the boundaries of conventional thinking about terrorism and slowly but...
Or, how do we compare the not so nearly like? There is an obvious temptation to compare Libya to Syria and ponder why the US has not jumped into the fray now that Syria has started killing lots of people (to be fair, the piece does show how different the cases are). Now, I am not a Middle East expert (and I avoid playing one on TV), but this is a handy opportunity to think about how we do comparisons and then maybe we can figure out what is relevant here.In the first week of my big intro to International Relations class, I spend a bit of time explaining that there are few perfect...
Congressional hand-wringing over America’s inability to forecast the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts is unsurprising given the foreign policy hubris that dominates in Washington today. How can it be, the cry goes out, that America, was blindsided by these earthshaking events? Doesn’t “exceptional” America see further and act more wisely than other nations? Sadly, that arrogant and delusional mindset is unlikely to be changed even by this latest “intelligence” failure. Rather than questioning whether anyone could have predicted this kind of event—let alone whether we should be trying to...