On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.
On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.