Seems like some heavy editorializing for a research paper:
"Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
Possibly, but in physics the standard for stating something is "true" is 5 or 6 sigma while in sociology, maybe 2 sigma. In the first case, you can take the finding as a fact and it is very unlikely to change in your lifetime, in the second case, one needs to constantly keep in mind the conclusion might not be true. Not really that useful, actually.
Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.
Doing sociology is hard and physics is, in some ways, absurdly easy. As a physicist, you can generate an endless supply of particles. They are all identical, and so behave in the same way. They do whatever they do, regardless of the experimenters' expectations, social pressures, or the like. The results can be slotted into a formal mathematical framework, which also helps you design better experiments. The work of these experiments is often difficult (e.g., holding a detector just about 0K), but the concepts are often relatively clear.
None of this is true in 'softer' sciences. Every person (or animal) is different and you often can't even test the same subject twice because the very act of doing so changes them. People often don't know what they want or why they do something. When they do know, they sometimes lie about it, for myriad reasons. This makes designing, analyzing, and interpreting experiments conceptually hard, even if the actual work is pretty easy.
>>> Good sociology papers are just as scientific as physics or engineering papers,
> Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.
It seems like entirely the point. Also, the difficulties you describe are reasons sociology can't be as scientific as physics, not reasons to pretend sociology is just as scientific.
I think the problem is conflating being scientific with numerical. This paper is not very numerical, but is scientific. It lays out observations and a hypothesis that might explain those observations.
> It lays out observations and a hypothesis that might explain those observations.
The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested. A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does, regardless of how much effort is expended. A field being more scientific than another isn't a matter of researchers trying harder. The quality of their results, independent of the magnitude of their effort, is what really matters. If researchers dutifully follow the scientific method by the textbook and, due to the subject of their research, can only get slipshod results, their field is less scientific than one in which researchers easily get high quality results.
This definition seems very idiosyncratic to me, and wrong in more than a few ways.
Science is usually defined as a process of systematic exploration, rather than a set of results. One goal of that process is to make predictions, but it’s not the only one. Even if it were, I don’t see how you can aggregate the quality of predictions within and across fields.
Physics is a perfect example. It’s true that some phenomena have been measured with exquisite precision and can be used to make extremely accurate predictions (relativity, say). Other phenomena turn out to be immeasurable: chaotic systems are, by definition, virtually impossible to predict even though they are generated by simple rules. I find those rules more interesting than yet-another decimal place on the fine structure constant. Plus, it seems incoherent to argue that particle physics is more scientific than biology which is more scientific than atmospheric physics but…
Finally, even if science were defined by predictive accuracy and there were a sensible way of comparing them across fields…the alpha levels/confidence intervals from individual experiments certainly aren’t the right way to do it! They’re a mishmash of the intrinsic variability of the thing under study, then resources devoted to studying it, and the assumptions baked into your design. In 2011, OPERA reported a six-sigma detection of faster than light neutrinos. This was, of course, not really true: a loose cable that was not included in their model was responsible instead.
The scientific process is a means to an end. The only reason it has any value at all is because it gets better results than other processes. But this process is not equally effective in all fields of inquiry. Those fields in which the process is more effective are "more scientific". Fields in which this method are less effective are less scientific.
>The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested.
There is no rule that every science paper needs to do testing and cover the whole scientific method from start to finish. Some can just be building blocks; data, hypothesis, ect.
>A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does
I couldn't disagree more. That just means the field is more predictable
Super rare then, because I don't know of any quantitative sociological theory that holds under all (reasonable) conditions. Nor of a qualitative one, by the way.
I think it is clear they have a strong personal opinion about something that want people to recognize.
I think this is clear from the title of the paper: "Stop that! It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness"
I don't think that is inappropriate. Mass sociogenic illnesses are recognized and generally thought to be related to stress and psychological conditions. It makes sense that they would opine on what these stressors and conditions are, and back them up with a dozen references.
It doesn't make that clear at all, it's just an editorialisation.
The thrust of the paper, which is that behaviours seem to be on some level 'contagious' is an absolutely important issue.
If these can be contagious, imagine what other 'in the range of normative' types of behaviours are equally contagious?
Anyone who's around small children knows how immediately and intimately they observe and learn behaviour, it's definitely something we don't think of enough.
I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis in that attention-seeking is a fundamental driver for most, I think it is for a very large cohort and is a 'relevant factor' for further study. Though it's a tough one to decompose no doubt.
It's unusual to editorialize in the abstract like that. It's not uncommon to puff up the merit of the work in the last sentence or two, but making sweeping generalizations about "modern man" is usually beyond the pale.
"Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."