1) The social scientists tend to make heavier use of Econometrics, which tends to hold less water the mathematics used by Physicists. [0] [1] [2] This doesn't mean that Econometrics should never be used, just that the tools are tougher.
2) In social sciences, people react to the existence of studies. (Example: Once a paper shows a market inefficiency - frequently it goes away. This could be because it wasn't a real anomoly, or it could be that people trade away the efficiencies)
3) Physics isn't beyond reproach either. To quote Max Planck, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (I've also heard this as "Physics advances one funeral at a time.")
If a physicist wants to prove that a perpetual motion machine can work, they'll be shot down. If a sociologist tries to do the equivalent, as long as their idea is attractive it's hard for detractors to prove they are wrong.
What's an equivalent? That a culture can be unchanged for 500K years? A sociologist who proposes that will be dismissed as being un-biological and a-historical.
> After a half century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, there appears no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when student acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge
So .. the big "theory" in education is that "students learn better by teaching themselves". That's probably not untrue, for a bored upper-middle-class student who's ahead of the class (who do you think does a PhD in education?), but for most students it turns out to be a bad idea.
But it feels good to say "Teach the students how to learn, not what to learn!". And if you can write hundreds of thousands of words on the topic, and give a feel-good summary to peers, what's stopping the idea from gaining traction?
> Hormone replacement therapy — medications containing female hormones to replace the ones the body no longer makes after menopause — used to be a standard treatment for women with hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Hormone therapy (as it's now called) was also thought to have the long-term benefits of preventing heart disease and possibly dementia.
> Use of hormone therapy changed abruptly when a large clinical trial found that the treatment actually posed more health risks than benefits for one type of hormone therapy, particularly when given to older postmenopausal women. As the concern about health hazards attributed to hormone therapy grew, doctors became less likely to prescribe it.
Another example might be ulcers, which a few decades ago were believed to be caused by diet and lifestyle, rather than H. pylori. A third might be the relatively recent work of Ioannidis titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".
You write "For every sociologist, there's an equal and opposite sociologist."
On the topic of education, my understanding is that a large majority of sociologists believe that "socioeconomic status [is] a strong predictor of children’s educational and social outcomes" (quote from http://cepa.stanford.edu/iies2012 ). This view derives originally from the Coleman Report in the 1960s and hasn't appreciably changed over the decades.
If your statement is correct, then there should be a large number of sociologists in education who believe that socioeconomic status is at best a weak predictor. Where are these sociologists?
> If your statement is correct, then there should be a large number of sociologists in education who believe that socioeconomic status is at best a weak predictor. Where are these sociologists?
You're talking about an observation, not a model or even a qualitative explanation.
People have always known that the Sun "moves around" the Earth. That's an observation, and was never in dispute. The model has changed, though.
Doctors have always known that ulcers exist. Their model of the cause changed in the light of new evidence.
Did the Coleman Report do much to change the views of sociologists? I'm guessing they always knew that "rich kids do better at school". Do they think that's due to genetics, teacher behavior, better schools, parents reading to kids? Do they suggest the same interventions, to fix the inequality?
> You're talking about an observation, not a model or even a qualitative explanation.
It's certainly a model, based on correlating many observations. The report is at http://www.scribd.com/doc/89990298/Coleman-Report-Equality-o... and the technical explanation at p571 looks very much like the model building I'm familiar with in drug design.
> Using data from over 600,000 students and teachers across the country, the researchers found that academic achievement was less related to the quality of a student's school, and more related to the social composition of the school, the student's sense of control of his environment and future, the verbal skills of teachers, and the student's family background.
> First, it showed that variations in school quality (as indexed by the usual measures such as per pupil expenditure, size of school library, and so on) showed little association with levels of educational attainment, when students of comparable social backgrounds were compared across schools. (Differences in students' family backgrounds, by comparison, showed a substantial association with achievement.) Second, a student's educational attainment was not only related to his or her own family background, but also (less strongly) to the backgrounds of the other students in the school. These findings had clear implications for social engineering: opportunities could best be equalized via strategies of desegregation of schools (for example by busing). They challenged a major plank of Lyndon Johnson's vision for the Great Society; namely, that increased spending on education could rectify social deficits.
To answer your question "Did the Coleman Report do much to change the views of sociologists" - yes.
Your earlier statements suggested that you knew something about sociology and it's historical mistakes and developments. Your questions now, which are easily answered and are seemingly a standard part of sociology (Coleman's work is on the Wikipedia page for Sociology), suggest otherwise.
Going back to my question, what is the equivalent in sociology to proposing that a perpetual motion machine can work?
I gave an example - that a human culture can remain unchanged over 500,000 years.
Are there sociologists who believe this to be true? Could I, though force of argument, convince a large number of sociologists that this is true? I believe that is the basis of your opposition.
I do not believe so. There is neither biological nor archeological evidence to suggest this is the case.
If you do not like that one, what is your equivalent?
If the Coleman report was so influential, why aren't protestors demanding busing? I'd hazard a guess that most protestors are either sociology students, or in close contact with sociology students (or graduates).
Another big study was the one that found Direct Instruction (a slightly faddish, but still fairly conservative / traditional model - "tell 'em, show 'em, make 'em do it themselves") was the best fad evaluated, by a significant margin. But for some reason, education seems to favor a model in which teachers try to mimic the heroic Robin Williams in the Dead Poet's Society.
Education reforms are dominated by a few main threads, most of which are rubbish (if you look at the evidence) - the managerial Econ101 (www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html) type model (reward teachers for good test scores - politicians generally like this one), technology (the obvious driver being the people who want to sell the solutions), and an eclectic collection of "teach students how to think" hogwash (yeah, nice idea, but it's all just mother-love statements) pushed by academia.
I guess I should back off a little from my assertion. Yes, sociologists do ditch bad theories, eventually. But there's a lot of random noise, and the time it takes them to adjust their theories means that the slight signal from good studies tends to be downed out by noise.
Yes, I really think you could convince people that culture is unchanged for 500,000 years. But you'd need a good sales pitch. Here's the skeleton:
* Culture has remained unchanged for 500,000 years.
* If this is true, then it's a moral imperative that people believe this.
Finding a decent excuse for the first part is easy enough. Wave your hands a bit, redefine culture, and find a few examples of things that haven't changed too much.
The second bit is harder, because your proposal is a little boring. A good lie is like a perpetual motion machine - it can keep itself going. I suppose you could argue that exceptionalism - the myth that our culture is fundamentally different, is the cause of a great many travesties.
So, all cultures are fundamentally the same, bar some insignificant surface differences. One of the few big differences (and it's been this way for 500,000 years) between them has been whether they considered themselves special or not (and the cultures which considered themselves special all did horrible things).
The next step is trying to tar-pit people with some kind of paradox - is it OK to consider your culture special, on the basis that it's one of the cultures that doesn't consider itself to be special? But just be a little sneaky with this bit - you don't want people to catch on.
> If the Coleman report was so influential, why aren't protestors demanding busing?
Quoting from the jh.edu link I gave:
> As a work of sociology, the Coleman Report was full of subtleties and caveats, but the mass media and makers of policy focused on one prediction--that black children who attended integrated schools would have higher test scores if a majority of their classmates were white.
> That last point is key because in 1975 Coleman concluded in a new study that busing had failed, largely because it had prompted "white flight." As white families fled to suburban schools, the report concluded, the opportunity for achieving racial balance evaporated.
> Political support for busing quickly waned. Many civil rights leaders, educators, policy-makers, and sociologists who had embraced Coleman's earlier findings now were outraged.They blasted him for abandoning his earlier commitment to desegregation. Some members of the American Sociological Association even moved to have him expelled, albeit unsuccessfully. (Coleman was elected president in 1991.)
> His supporters called him a true scientist who changed his opinion when empirical evidence required him to do so.
You also wrote "..for some reason, education seems to favor a model..."
It seems you have switched from sociology to education policy. Eduction policy in modern US is driven by politics much more than it is driven by science.
You refer to Econ101, so I'll counter with Parkinson's law of triviality, a.k.a. 'dog shedding'. Everyone who makes education policy went to school, and many think that gives them insight into how education work.
