Wired blog on mathematical sociology

Samuel Arbesman has a new blog over at Wired that might be of interest to math soc-oriented folks called Social Dimension.  Sam’s an interesting, entertaining scholar and writer; it’s nice to see mathematically-oriented approaches to the social world being shared with a mass audience.

John Levi Martin on Harold Garfinkel

For a more respectful tribute you could see Dan Hirschman.

But I had to share this footnote in the preface to JLM’s newish book, Explanation of Social Action.

I might reasonably also be asked why no use is made here of the work of Garfinkel (e.g., 2002), which had many of the same influences and made many of the same critiques of conventional sociological explanation. The answer is simple: Garfinkel chose to write in gobbledy-gook, and although I do not begrudge him the enjoyment he so obviously received from this activity, I also see no reason to wade through the results to extract arguments that were made previously and more clearly by others. Finally, rather than indicate to his sociological readers that there was a wide range of inspiring and dissenting traditions from which they could draw (the approach of the current work), Garfinkel instead attempted to put his own formalizations in between his students and the phenomenological tradition, acting more like a cult leader than a scholar. Even did I not find this somewhat disappointing on a human level, it would make little scientific sense to reward such behavior. At the same time, one can find many in this tradition making serious contributions. Most important, the critique of the “misplaced idealization” of sociological theory by Wieder (1974: 22, 24) is crucial — by not recognizing the social process by which actual practices are sublimated into ideal descriptions, sociologists hypostatize the ideals or rules into something that can be used to criticize behavior (which falls short of the rule) or to use behavior to criticize the rule (the triumph of agency), as opposed to understanding the rule or the ideal as one situated form of behavior. To the extent that ethnomethodology was a sustained and rigorous investigation of such productions, it was invaluable, but that extent was not, in my estimation, as great as it should have been. Only conversation analysis pushed forward with a positive research program; in some ways, this book is an attempt to derive arguments for the general applicability of aspects of this approach for all social science.

 

self promotion

Pardon me for a moment while i shamelessly plug a project that has consumed more of my time over the past three years than i thought was possible when it began. Our special issue of Social Networks on integrating social network and spatial analytic strategies is online (here‘s our intro). My understanding is it will be the first issue of 2012. I think it turned out really well; there’s work in there (12 articles in total) from some excellent researchers on a wide range of topics. And rather than a “culmination” i see this really as a beginning that serves also to point the way forward for future work trying to tackle this as a methodological question and/or for integrating these methods into a wider scope of substantive questions.

NB: With some of our funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we also were able to cover the cost of making the issue Open Access upon release (something Elsevier doesn’t do on it’s own), so for ~3 months anyway, share away. After that you’ll need institutional access to grab the full texts of the articles.

Is “Inverse Hyperbolic Sine” the new “Ln”?

If you don’t already have Chris Blattman in your reading feeds, might i suggest the add? So, can we replace ln(x) with log(y_i+(y_i²+1)^1/2)? Frances Woolley says so. i’m not an economist, so the “auto-reject” from AER isn’t an outcome i’m all that concerned about (see CB’s post here). That said, i do find the solution to computing a log-transformation on variables with high likelihood of zero-values an intriguing one. Perhaps, i should have borrowed CB’s preface of “If you know what ln(1+income) is, and why it’s a headache, you should read this post.”

Devaluing the Feminine + Econ 101

…talk therapy is often considered a “junk discipline” and is very badly-paid in part because it comes from the “feminine” domain of relationship management and emotional management.

I hear this sort of argument quite a lot and I think it has some truth to it, but also misses something.

Many sociologists have already digested a lot of economics, they might want to skip this post.  Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that the disproportionate number of talk therapists who are women, or the perceived femininity of the practice, causes talk therapy to be viewed as low-status.  Will this also cause it to be paid more poorly?  In a supply and demand framework, the reason for thinking a low-status occupation will earn less money is the demand side.  Fewer customers are willing to pay as much money for it as they would be willing to pay in a world where talk therapy was not perceived as feminine.  But don’t forget the supply-side.

It seems reasonable to assume that because talk therapy is considered feminine, fewer men are willing or able to go into the field.  This is a restriction on the supply, which means that talk therapists face less competition which means they can charge higher prices and still keep their customers.  So does the perceived femininity of talk therapy cause talk therapists wages to be lower?

This basic economic analysis is silent on whether the reduction in demand will affect wages more or less than the reduction in supply.  At this point, I’d put my theory aside for a while and start thinking about how to collect empirical evidence.  Theory is less ambiguous on something else though, if femininity depresses both supply and demand then we can be sure the overall size of the market, the amount of people getting talk therapy, will be smaller.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons labor markets aren’t perfectly competitive so the analysis above can be made more realistic by considering that it takes time for supply and demand to equilibrate, and that norms and especially governments, can stop supply and demand from adjusting.

Though I’m questioning whether the low-status of an occupation causes it to be low-paid, there is a much more straight-forward way in which women were historically forced to accept low wages.  Social norms meant that women were only allowed certain occupations… if they weren’t low-wage already, they became low-wage because there was a large supply of women who couldn’t work in other jobs and therefore had reduced bargaining power.

The Potential of Adversarial Collaboration

Sometimes researchers break into opposing camps.  They may each find well respected journals to publish their work in, but neither’s work appears capable of changing the minds of the others.  Adversarial collaboration is an approach for getting beyond this.  The idea is that intellectual opponents co-design new studies.  As much as possible, they should agree ahead of time about how the data will be analyzed, and include other neutral collaborators.  Then they write down their predictions, their uncertainties, and how different results will change their opinion.  When the study is done, hopefully they end up agreeing about how to interpret it.  But even if they didn’t, I think examining such a study, including the collaborators’ predictions beforehand, would really help other people decide what to believe.

Philip Tetlock and Gregory Mitchell are the only people I’ve heard promote it.  They call for it here, and describe it in more detail towards the end of an article titled “Unconscious Prejudice and Accountability Systems: What Must Organizations do to Prevent Discrimination.”

Here is part of their conclusion:

Of course, what makes adversarial collaboration scientifically attractive—the prospect of breaking epistemic impasses—may also render it politically unattractive. Nothing will happen if either side decides that it is better off when there is less scientific clarity. For this reason, failures to broker adversarial collaborations are profoundly informative: they signal to the policy world that the American racism debate and the sub-debate on unconscious prejudice may be politicized beyond scientific redemption. Tetlock (2006) has offered rough sociology-of-science diagnostics for judging the odds of failures of this sort. Adversarial collaboration is most feasible when least needed: when the clashing camps have advanced testable theories, subscribe to common canons for testing those theories, and disagreements are robust but respectful. And adversarial collaboration is least feasible when most needed: when the scientific community lacks clear criteria for falsifying points of view, disagrees on key methodological issues, relies on second- or third-best substitute methods for testing causality, and is fractured into opposing camps that engage in ad hominem posturing and that have intimate ties to political actors who see any concession as weakness. Tetlock (2006) calls the former community as “epistemic Heaven.” the latter “epistemic hell,” and maintains—in the spirit of Figure 4—that if adversarial collaboration is indeed unnecessary in heaven and impossible in hell, we should expect the greatest expected returns in the “murky middle” in which theory-testing conditions are less than ideal but not yet hopeless.

If you can think of a topic in between which could benefit from adversarial collaboration please suggest it in the comments.

More Links :)

I’m really busy right now, but I still have time to share some stellar links.  Check out it out:

Gabriel has a great post on cultural markets!

Philip Cohen makes good use of Google Correlate here and here.

Rense Corten on visualizing couchsurfing networks.

Josh Marshall on blog comments and anonymity.

Physicist, Tom Murphy writes and thinks clearly on energy.

Assorted Links

Overcoming our Aversion to Acknowledging our Ignorance. See the reaction essays as well as the original piece by Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock.

How to find a topic for an economics research essay by Frances Wooley.

Why Sociologists Should Study the Internet by Dan Hirschman

Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving A’s already?? by Andrew Gelman. See my old post on grade inflation here.

“Circles” – just foci renamed/repurposed?

(NOTE: This started out as a comment, but was to a relatively minor point in the linked blog post. Since it became much lengthier than initially intended, i didn’t want to hijack any subsequent thread before it got started, so went with posting it here instead.)

Steven Kahl has an interesting post up at OrgTheory about the way Circles play a key role in the (current and potential future) differences between Facebook and Google+. I was with him, right up until he invoked Watts and small worlds. This (along with scale-free degree distributions) is one of the most over- (and mis-) used concepts from the network literature.* While i think i see what he’s getting at, Circles seem, in small worlds parlance anyway, to be much more closely aligned with the concept of clustering. Now, clustering does play an important role in the small world effect, clusters are just part of  the small world story. And frequently they are interesting in their own right, not simply because of how they are linked to the small world pattern. Perhaps that’s what SK is pointing out – that they are similar to clusters, but i think there’s something better already out there, and since clusters can arise for reasons that would seem consistent with Circles and with ones that aren’t, i think the pointer is potentially slightly off.

More importantly though, like i said, i think there’s something better. Circles much more closely reflect a much older (and, oddly, much less frequently used) concept from social network literature – that of foci as addressed by Scott Feld in 1981 (AJS 86:1015-1035). This point was made on Twitter a few days ago (HT: Brian Keegan, via Barry Wellman). While that paper (along with a few others of Feld’s) are frequently thought of as classics within the networks community, i am surprised at how little-known they appear to be outside it. Fundamentally, Circles seems to be an attempt at leveraging one of the key constructs of network development, which Feld highlighted 3 decades ago.

Think he can claim royalties?

_______________
*This isn’t to say there aren’t great ideas in those two concepts. There are. It’s just that there’s a lot more to the network literature than them, and attempting to shoe-horn every observed network pattern into one of these two frameworks has become so common that i think we’re often losing some of the important things about observed empirical networks.

Picking on our disciplinary rivals

Jeremy Freese notes:

In a case in which the other shoe took a very long time to drop, Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychology professor renowned for his work on moral judgment, apparently has resigned after a protracted dispute regarding “scientific misconduct” that included retraction or post-publication-revision of three papers because of data problems.

Q: Is any schadenfreude sweeter for the mainstream sociologist than evolutionary psychology schadenfreude? (A: Economist schadenfreude. But just barely.)

Well Jeremy, check out Andrew Gelman’s hard questions for pop-economics:

I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile.

Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

I understand why Gelman finds these types of arguments somewhat contradictory, but its possible they can each be true in different cases. After noting the tension between the two, what needs to be done is to identify a representative sample of such cases and see in what share of the cases the analysis is correct. Admittedly this isn’t an easy task, but it doesn’t seem to me much of substance has been shown based on Gelman’s observations (interesting though they may be).