I just read this as I was doing some research for a paper:
"Ethnographic research on the structure and culture of urban communities and some subcultural theories of crime suggest that the nature of violence is shaped, at least in part, by community characteristics. Yet, beyond these suggestive accounts, this issue has not been examined systematically in empirical research." - Baumer et al., Criminology 41(1), 2003
In other words, no observation may enter into the realm of social scientific knowledge until it has been examined statistically. Some day, I would love to put together a compelling reason to disagree.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Back from Australia
More than likely the best vacation I have ever been on. Australia is a fabulous country, the way of life is much, much slower than in America, which may have just been because I was staying in a farming community, but it was welcome nonetheless. The trip in general was just awesome. Bex and I traveled between Kiama and Sydney several times and hit up some locations a bit further inland to visit relatives. Sydney is just enormous, probably more than twice the size of greater Boston, but surprisingly the entire country has a population of around 22 million people, and 95% of them live on the East coast. I would love to go back at some point to check out the more arid areas of the outback.
Bex and I talked a lot about the prospect of moving out there for work once we are finished with our PhDs, and while at first I was reluctant, now I am totally on board, given that there will be opportunities, that is.
I got a metric fuck-ton of reading done while I was there. I brought Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a Marx reader, mainly to read Capital, but ended up buying several more books along the way, including A.C. Grayling's What is Good?, E.H. Carr's What is History?, and Sartre's The Age of Reason.
Just a few thoughts on those.
I loved Zarathustra, it was a great follow up to The Genealogy of Morals because while the latter was written to deconstruct "traditional" morals, Zarathustra attempted to fill the void with Nietzsche's Dionysian/individualistic morality. The lessons that I enjoyed the most were regarding self mastery. Nietzsche's conception of self mastery is mostly on an intellectual level and I feel like that is somewhat doable for me, as opposed to a physical self mastery, which I usually lack to discipline to keep up with. I also really enjoyed Nietzsche's courage to critique any idea, no matter how widely held or regarded. In the late 1800s (and today for that matter), arguing against utilitarianism must have appeared very daunting. Today, while I can appreciate the veracity of Nietzsche's conviction on utilitaranism, I imagine it would be very difficult, in a practical sense, to avoid using the philosophy of maximizing the pleasure of most while minimizing pain.
Relatedly, I enjoyed Grayling's What is Good?, mainly for approaching the issue as a question to be explored, rather than a definative, unalterable list of "thou shalts". In the end, the book felt a little shallow, mostly for the obvious vehemence that Grayling feels towards morality and ethics based on otherworldly beings, but I suppose I should have known what I was going to get from a good friend of Dawkins.
Reading Capital was pretty difficult, and I'm sure many of the harder parts were left out of the reader. What I enjoyed most about the book was Marx's method, what he considered to be social science. Concerning a subject, in this case capitalism, Marx starts at the beginning. Not chronologically, but with the simplest fundamental pieces of capital. He begins with a general statement on a definition of capitalism and then moves from concept to concept and their interrelations until he is discussing capital in it's entirety (he begins with 'what is a commodity?' and moves to 'what is value?').
Marx's analysis today, if it were produced to be part of the modern social science industry, would probably be considered "a conceptual piece", and thus "not real science" meaning that it would not be considered to present "scientific knowledge" until Marx's methodology was scrutinized and his assertions became subject to large-scale statistical analysis using a presumably representive dataset. Not being an economist, I am unfamiliar with the extent to which this has been done in modern econometrics, so maybe I am speaking out of ignorance and pessimism.
An important lesson I pulled from Capital (and The Genealogy of Morals, once I recognized the lesson) was the sheer importance of a historical outlook in social science. Marx rightly criticized capitalistic economists for analyzing capitalism ahistorically. This meant that they considered modern features of capitalism to either be eternal, in that they actually have been in place for all of human history, or eternal in the sense that capitalism was seen as a very real "thing", an idea which was destined to be put into power, people just needed to "discover" it (what Mills would call a 'Concept' with a capital 'C').
Thinking about this (and lack of other books) led me to get What is History? and I enjoyed it as much as I did The Sociological Imagination. The two books really mirror each other, but do not cite one another as they were both written around the same time. The important ideas I pulled from Carr's book regarded relativism and objectivity in the social sciences. I'll write a bit on those later, it's breakfast time.
Bex and I talked a lot about the prospect of moving out there for work once we are finished with our PhDs, and while at first I was reluctant, now I am totally on board, given that there will be opportunities, that is.
I got a metric fuck-ton of reading done while I was there. I brought Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a Marx reader, mainly to read Capital, but ended up buying several more books along the way, including A.C. Grayling's What is Good?, E.H. Carr's What is History?, and Sartre's The Age of Reason.
Just a few thoughts on those.
I loved Zarathustra, it was a great follow up to The Genealogy of Morals because while the latter was written to deconstruct "traditional" morals, Zarathustra attempted to fill the void with Nietzsche's Dionysian/individualistic morality. The lessons that I enjoyed the most were regarding self mastery. Nietzsche's conception of self mastery is mostly on an intellectual level and I feel like that is somewhat doable for me, as opposed to a physical self mastery, which I usually lack to discipline to keep up with. I also really enjoyed Nietzsche's courage to critique any idea, no matter how widely held or regarded. In the late 1800s (and today for that matter), arguing against utilitarianism must have appeared very daunting. Today, while I can appreciate the veracity of Nietzsche's conviction on utilitaranism, I imagine it would be very difficult, in a practical sense, to avoid using the philosophy of maximizing the pleasure of most while minimizing pain.
Relatedly, I enjoyed Grayling's What is Good?, mainly for approaching the issue as a question to be explored, rather than a definative, unalterable list of "thou shalts". In the end, the book felt a little shallow, mostly for the obvious vehemence that Grayling feels towards morality and ethics based on otherworldly beings, but I suppose I should have known what I was going to get from a good friend of Dawkins.
Reading Capital was pretty difficult, and I'm sure many of the harder parts were left out of the reader. What I enjoyed most about the book was Marx's method, what he considered to be social science. Concerning a subject, in this case capitalism, Marx starts at the beginning. Not chronologically, but with the simplest fundamental pieces of capital. He begins with a general statement on a definition of capitalism and then moves from concept to concept and their interrelations until he is discussing capital in it's entirety (he begins with 'what is a commodity?' and moves to 'what is value?').
Marx's analysis today, if it were produced to be part of the modern social science industry, would probably be considered "a conceptual piece", and thus "not real science" meaning that it would not be considered to present "scientific knowledge" until Marx's methodology was scrutinized and his assertions became subject to large-scale statistical analysis using a presumably representive dataset. Not being an economist, I am unfamiliar with the extent to which this has been done in modern econometrics, so maybe I am speaking out of ignorance and pessimism.
An important lesson I pulled from Capital (and The Genealogy of Morals, once I recognized the lesson) was the sheer importance of a historical outlook in social science. Marx rightly criticized capitalistic economists for analyzing capitalism ahistorically. This meant that they considered modern features of capitalism to either be eternal, in that they actually have been in place for all of human history, or eternal in the sense that capitalism was seen as a very real "thing", an idea which was destined to be put into power, people just needed to "discover" it (what Mills would call a 'Concept' with a capital 'C').
Thinking about this (and lack of other books) led me to get What is History? and I enjoyed it as much as I did The Sociological Imagination. The two books really mirror each other, but do not cite one another as they were both written around the same time. The important ideas I pulled from Carr's book regarded relativism and objectivity in the social sciences. I'll write a bit on those later, it's breakfast time.
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