Inductivist

It is a common belief in sociology that the source of our greed is the market. Our economic system turns us into unprincipled money chasers.

If that were the case, then the people most integrated into the market would be the most unprincipled. Compared to whites, blacks are more often at the margins of the system, so they should be more likely to retain the natural, biological desire to earn an honest dollar.

General Social Survey respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: "To make money, there are no right and wrong ways any more, only easy and hard ways."

Here are the percentages listed by race of those who agreed (sample size = 4,376):

Percent agreeing there is no wrong way to make money

Whites  22.8
Blacks  39.9
Other race  33.3

Blacks are 1.75 times more likely than whites to feel there is no wrong way to make money. This helps explain their greater involvement in illegal money-making.

The hypothesis that is consistent with this data is that integration into the market makes one more honest about how to make money, and the data here contradict the Rousseauian view that innocent human nature is corrupted by social institutions.

Following Jeffrey Epstein's death, we have learned where he found his justification for raping teenage girls. He explained to an interviewer that, "criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration, and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable.” “He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.”

Various social science disciplines, especially cultural anthropology and sociology, enlighten every freshman with the brilliant insight that the world's 7.7 billion people don't agree on every point of right and wrong, and today's norms can vary from those of past societies.  This truth is banal and harmless enough, but then these "scientists" pull a fast only and imply that since values have varied, there is NO objective morality. The values and rules we live by are just arbitrary and were simply invented willy-nilly by someone in the past.  They are mere conventions, so when your mom tells you sex with underage girls is wrong, you can say that many cultures have not had a problem with it, and rules against it are merely prejudice and superstition.  This technique makes it very easy to follow your desires, whatever they may be.

Of course, these social scientists are either fools or liars.  The question of objective morality--whether there is right and wrong independent of what people think--is not answered by the fact that cultures have varied on what is moral. Objective morality might exist, and like a bullseye, has been missed by various degrees by various cultures.  But since the one cardinal rule for social thinkers is that "all cultures are equal," then it becomes impossible for some groups to be better shots than others.

These are questions for philosophers, not dumbass sociologists.  Social scientists pose as if they are value-neutral, or at least they used to, but they constantly smuggle in their "anything goes" value systems, although "systems" give their thinking too much credit. And they are too obtuse to see how their bad philosophy helps the Epsteins of the world commit their crimes.

Sociologists are such dumbasses. For almost a century, they have been predicting high crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods. Such a prediction comes from their view that strong institutions -- families, schools, churches, community organizations, etc. -- effectively control young people. If the institutions are weak, people are "free" to follow the shortcuts of crime.  Since immigrants are new to the country, they haven't had the time and stability to build high-functioning institutions.

But over the past couple of decades, anti-immigration sentiment motivated sociologists to find that immigration actually lowers crime, or at least doesn't affect crime levels.

But instead of admitting their views were wrong and accepting the idea that immigration (notice how they don't differentiate legal from illegal) often selects for types of individuals not especially prone to crime, and that institutions are not that important for behavior, we see studies like this new one that propose that immigrants -- people still wet from the Rio Grande -- are now instantly supposed to have stronger institutions than citizens who have been building up their American institutions for centuries.

They will do back flips on top of back flips to avoid biological or any kind of internal explanation of crime.

One of the themes I'd like to stress is that sociology is untrustworthy among the social sciences. Not only do sociologists dismiss biological sources of behavior, many of them do not even believe in the scientific method and see research as simply a way to advance their politics. Robert Trivers is right: the more social the discipline, the more corrupt.

Let's take a glaring example. A standard race study goes something like this: "We will use opposition to affirmative action as our measure of racism among whites. This variable is correlated in our data with voting Republican, so we therefore conclude that racism is widespread among Republicans."  Or they use the same reasoning with being in favor of the death penalty: "If whites favor it, it is because they hate blacks." Research like this appears in the prestigious journals all the time.

Let's do a simple validity check to see if there is something to what they are doing. They are claiming that underneath conservative political attitudes lies hatred for blacks.  You can't simply ask whites if they hate blacks because nobody ever admits to it. So you use a proxy which just happens to be an attitude held by your political enemies. If these attitudes are proxies, then they should correlate highly with a more direct measure of  racism.

I would argue the best question available on surveys that taps not liking blacks goes like this: "In general, how warm or cool do you feel towards African Americans?" If political attitudes are good substitute measures, they should correlate strongly with answers to this question. Keep in mind that the correlation should be .8 or higher to be a good proxy. 

I did correlations with General Social Survey data--a sample of 694 whites. What is the size of the affirmative action/coolness association? A whopping .10. And for coolness and the death penalty? An enormous .13. Trivial correlations, both of them. Almost unrelated. These conservative political attitudes are worthless as proxies of racism. 

So here's your situation, conservatives: Your taxpayer dollars support these charlatans who abuse science to vilify and undermine you. And you pay an obscene amount of money to have your kids learn at the feet of these propagandists. 

As a sociologist, I take no pleasure in agreeing with Razib's recent Tweet about sociology: "End it, don't mend it." 

In the latest issue of American Sociological Review--the flagship journal of U.S. sociology--Andres Villareal finds that even after a number of factors are taken into account (i.e., gender, age, indigeneity, educational level, region, and rurality) darker skinned Mexicans--in Mexico--are poorer than their paler counterparts. The poverty gap is roughly as large as the American black-white difference. Even though the main ethnic division in Mexico is between indigenous people and mestizos, and skin tone variation among mestizos is not socially emphasized, Villareal concludes that the results are strong evidence for intense discrimination based on color. 

Keep in mind that this research has appeared in the best quantitative sociology journal in the United States; perhaps in the world. The author is interested in discrimination, but treats skin tone variation as his measure of discrimination. Why not measure discrimination directly? At least ask respondents concerning perceived instances of mistreatment. Is that too difficult to ask about? Why doesn't he save himself a lot of work, skip the data collection and analysis, and simply write a speculative paper asserting discrimination?

The relationship between skin tone and poverty could be explained in many different ways. If I claimed that the link is explained by genes associated both with economic success and skin color, my assertion would be just as plausible as his. But it goes without saying that he wouldn't admit (and doesn't mention in the paper) that a genetic explanation is possible since it is morally out of bounds. This trick of not measuring what you are studying and ruling out other explanations as unacceptable has been used in a thousand similar studies. Instead of relying on data, a whole discipline is based on moralistic faith. If we're going to defund NPR, let's do the same to sociology.     

Suckiologists II: This is how idiotic sociologists are. I was just reading in an undergraduate-level sociology textbook the reason why gay men are more promiscuous. (I was surprised that they conceded the fact). You see, men in general have a sex drive because society teaches them that men are sexual. Presumably, society instructs straight guys to have sex with a lot of women, while it teaches gay men to screw as many guys as possible. In an earlier section, the author also wrote that the sociobiological view that gender differences in sex drive are mostly biological in origin is simply propaganda intended to support a patriarchal society; in other words, to justify male privilege and to keep women in their place.

Do you pay to have your children subjected to this crap? Send them here; they can get crap for free. You've got to innoculate your kids against this nonsense before they get it in school. Nowadays, homeschooling of a certain sort is absolutely mandatory.


UPDATE: It just gets better and better. Now I read that homosexuality is caused by an abundance of physical affection from mom, and lesbianism from a lack of it. I guess a distant mom produces a masculine child regardless of sex. Why am I not surprised that no data is presented?

Durkheim: Reader TGGP suggests I say a word about Emile Durkheim. While many sociologists nowadays loathe Durkheim because of the conservative element in his theory, I like him for the same reason.

To Durkheim, communities are like organisms that naturally gravitate toward order and harmony. Institutions make up the organs, each playing a specalized role that contributes to the smooth functioning of the whole.

Isolated individuals have potentially unlimited appetites, and to maximize their psychological and physical health, they need to be well integrated into various institutions. Being tied into a web of social relationships and the norms that accompany those ties are good for people: they limit, regulate, and guide behaviors and feelings, and they give one meaning and a worldview.

At this point, Durkheim would insert a word of moderation. If insitutions are too controlling, they can lead to destructive behaviors. A good example of this would be cults. On the other hand, if institutions are failing to adequately guide people, dysfunctional behavior will occur.

The problem is that communities exist within ever-changing environments, so communities will inevitably change as well. But any kind of rapid or sudden change--demographic disasters, revolutions, conquests, for example--disrupts this web of relationships and moral structure. Individuals become dislocated, and you consequently see an increase in dysfunctional behavior.

According to Durkheim, optimal health is found in a community that evolves slowly and organically. He doesn't seem to stress this, but his theory implies that a national goverment inposing new policies on local communities tears social fabric and creates anomic conditions. Any powerful, aggressive social movement or institution--say, the federal judiciary--that coerces local communities to change before they have evolved to that point generates chaos. Moral guidelines are delegitimated; people have nothing to turn to but their own cognitive resources; and anomie and dysfunction are a result.

Here's one quick example. The post-war gender and sexual revolution produced a high rate of divorce, cohabitation, and remarriage. All of a sudden, we had new arrangements, like the stepfamily. Well, that arrangement was not institutionalized, so stepfamilies have consequently been conflict-ridden and unstable. Same kind of thing for mother-only families. Durkheim, I imagine, would have predicted the decline and fall of the black community as it was taken over by the sexual revolution, and perhaps by the sudden, devastating loss of manufacturing jobs.

Slow, natural, organic evolution--good. Sudden, externally imposed change--bad.

Can you see why lefties hate him, even though he never whispered the dreaded word "genes"?

(You can see why freedom fetishists wouldn't like him either).

My faith in the people's wisdom is restored: GSS respondents were asked how scientific is the discipline of sociology. I display the answers below, along with attitudes toward biology for the sake of comparison.


Percent saying sociology is scientific

Very scientific 8.6
Pretty scientific 43.8
Not too scientific 30.3
Not scientific 9.1
Haven't heard of it 8.2


Percent saying biology is scientific

Very scientific 71.7
Pretty scientific 24.6
Not too scientific 2.1
Not scientific 0.8
Haven't heard of it 0.8

I am so pleased to learn that only 9% of people think a discipline that believes that behavior is 100% environmentally produced is "very scientific." Yes, you might find an odd sociologist who accepts that genes and biology matter, but sociology did not convince of him of that.

And I am also tickled to learn that 8 percent of people haven't even heard of sociology! Were it 80%!