weight of writing sample

[jacib]

I mean -- those are around the 80th percentile.

Thanks for the information and support. Economics minimum Q is about 164, and T20 will want to see 166+. Technically it's high-school math. One of the reasons they changed the test was that fields like economics, physics, and engineering did not present enough variation at the top: note that an old 800 only translates to (I think) a 164 or 166 now.

I don't think it's a great system, GRE, but economically speaking it makes sense as a costly signaling device. One "pays" to have one's application looked at by sacrificing inane hours getting good at solving tricky math and verbal problems quickly. When I took the GRE I was still equivocating about economics or sociology, and didn't study at all for the verbal because that month, I was going to be an economist. In retrospect I wish I had, but it is what it is now.

1) I totally forgot that the new GRE went up to 170. For some reason (probably the reason above) I thought it went up to 166. Those scores seem less deadly now. But I know some schools wanted 90% and 90% in poli sci and were open about it.

2) I actually absolutely agree with you about the GRE's utility as a costly signal.

[jacib]

The number of times that I have wanted to post one of my recommendation letters, hoping that people would say that it is not lacklustre. I was given the possibility but two of my LOR to check their letters. I just felt that after the process of writing the SOP - understanding what looks good in a LOR is beyond my energy levels..

Might not be a universally true thing about how letters are written, but if you are morbidly curious, here's one take on letter writing from the Professor Is In blog (her grant template and abstract templates are pretty useful). But honestly, if a letter writer let you read the letter, it's a positive letter.

It's funny I've heard people say opposite things about letters: I heard one professor say "I only take letters seriously from scholars that I know" and I've heard one professor say, "I only look at letters from people i don't know--if I know the scholar, I assume the letter is good" or something crazy along those lines.

LOL this is such nonsense. So basically, letters, statement of purpose, transcripts, writing sample and CV hold very little weight in the admissions process, at least according to a few people on here. That is complete nonsense, it has to be. Obviously there are items of an application that hold more sway or weight with admissions committees, I think what it really comes down to is that no one on this forum actually knows what they are.

Every part of the application, especially in a field like sociology where there aren't hard "Get higher than this score, take these prerequisites, have this research experience" cut-offs, is "the most/least important part" of the application. Admissions Committees are made up of capricious, idiosyncratic professors, who often act in completely different ways from other capricious, idiosyncratic professors. Like I've heard a professors arguing that you should ignore GPA (worked out in my favor, but I think that's absurd). Some will skim letters to make sure that they aren't thinly vieled warnings from colleagues, others will read them more carefully looking for praise. Some will only look at the names at the bottom of the letter, some will care exactly what the letter has to say. There's no one way that admissions committees read these things.

[heathenist]

LOL this is such nonsense. So basically, letters, statement of purpose, transcripts, writing sample and CV hold very little weight in the admissions process, at least according to a few people on here. That is complete nonsense, it has to be. Obviously there are items of an application that hold more sway or weight with admissions committees, I think what it really comes down to is that no one on this forum actually knows what they are.

I completely agree, I was just pointing out, that along with the devaluing of other parts of the application, I've even heard of letters being devalued. I definitely wasn't trying to argue that I think that's the case, because I don't. But this is straight from the horse's mouth.

Fabio Rojas (http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/how-i-pick-grad-students/):

Things that usually don’t impress me:

1. Statement of purpose: I usually find this useful only as a test of basic language skills. It also communicates that the applicant is a good fit with respect to research interests. But these considerations rarely come into play because I can usually tell what I need to know from your transcript and test scores.
   
2. Letters of recommendation: As I have argued many times on this blog, most research, with a few exceptions, shows that letters of reference are poor predictors of future performance. I quickly scan letters for red flags to weed applicants who are clearly not suited for graduate school. But aside from that, I pay very little attention to them.
   
3. The college you came from, unless it is known as an incredibly demanding/undemanding place.
   

So there's that...

What it really comes down to, is that like many things within sociology, there is no one right answer. Different people on different adcomms are going to see things, and prioritize things with a lot of variation.

[gilbertrollins]

I actually absolutely agree with you about the GRE's utility as a costly signal.

So lemme get a poll from everyone, then. This is the second time, to my amazement, someone on the forum has agreed with me on or argued vociferously from a rationalist model. Maybe that is not surprising in that functionalism agrees in many ways with other models of interests and incentives. To what degree are sociologists (controlling for sub-field variation -- just looking for quick-glance estimates here) do sociologists argue from incentives, costs, and benefits?

To extrapolate a bit on the costly-signaling argument: institutions seem to abound with these sorts of initiatory rituals. And at first glance, the social scientist might think since they have no immediate material value, they are just vapid rituals. Yet we understand there is no such thing as a vapid ritual -- we might suppose any myth-made conveys social freight. Since being a part of one network or another is so valuable, networks may "charge" a loading fee one must "pay" to join. A golfing group for corporate executives, and the country club dues and social dances they do to join would be an obvious and possibly infuriating example, but groups down to the level of the family, bowling league, and friend network confer enormous material and immaterial benefits in sharing and creating information, spreading risk, etc. So I see that these intiatory rituals are everywhere. Four years of college to obtain a certain stratum of employment, long courting periods and rituals to marry (including dowry), gang rapes and murders and beat-ins to join, and even early modern dueling has been shown to be a costly-signaling device to demonstrate loyalty and commitment to the aristocracy.

If anyone has thoughts or further reading that would be as the kids say, "hella."

[gilbertrollins]

With due respect to Professor Rojas, who is an extremely smart guy. There is more than a small caveat in leveraging 3rd-year UG statistics correlation coefficients reported in a management journal, done on private industry letters, to extrapolate that academic letters are worthless. I understand he is very tired of reading generic tripe about students. Most academics have gone out of their way, in fact, publishing scholarly comments on how to write letters - in order to stop that nonsense. And those who've given it a moments thought or two dramatically discount a letter like that anyway. That is why, for the two advisers I hadn't done independent research with; I gave them a file with my NSF proposal and statements, a recent summary/review I did for a class of a scholarly paper, my personal statement, and otherwise annoyed them to death with substance (dramatic polemics: do not annoy your advisers).

Letters are a poor predictor of performance in the settings where they have been studied. Here’s a clip from an article in the journal Public Personnel Management : “Even though references are commonly used to screen and select employees, they have not been successful in predicting future employee success (Muchinsky, 1979). In fact, the average validity coefficient for references is only .13 (Browning, 1968; Mosel & Goheen, 1959). This low validity is due mostly to four main problems found with references and letters of recommendation: Leniency, knowledge of the applicant, low reliability, and extraneous factors involved in the writing and reading of letters of recommendation.” There’s a number of studies in psychology and medicine about letters and future perfomance. The studies show letters aren’t very good. They’re glorified junk

_____________________

Rojas ends that comment with a reference to psychology and medicine letters - where UG RA's often - maybe nearly exclusively work on lab teams where they Pivot Table in Excel and point out spelling errors during research meetings if they're lucky. People used to working with lab teams of graduate students -- psychologists and medical researchers, say -- have no time for undergraduates, often have their graduate students vet and train UG research assistants. In these circumstances I've seen at least one academic have her UG RA write the letter for her, and in such circumstances a reference letter written by a graduate-student supervisor would be more substantive.

If you have made a substantive theoretical or empirical contribution to your adviser's project, potentially over many months or more, and they have advised your independent research as well, your letter counts for something.

Disclaimer: I am 100% defending my adviser right now whom has invested an unparalleled amount of time in me, and whose letter I hope will push my applications into the offer pile.

[Palito]

@econosocio, I don't think theories that recognize incentives, benefits, and costs are strictly rationalist model of behavior. One compelling counter to rational actor theory roots itself in American Pragmatism. You mentioned Mead in an earlier post, so I'm going to guess you're already somewhat familiar with this school of philosophy. Josh Whitford offers a strong argument for folding rationally derived action into the more flexible explanatory model offered by pragmatist theory. Check out Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: http://joshwhitford.org/articles/.

[gilbertrollins]

@econosocio, I don't think theories that recognize incentives, benefits, and costs are strictly rationalist model of behavior. One compelling counter to rational actor theory roots itself in American Pragmatism. You mentioned Mead in an earlier post, so I'm going to guess you're already somewhat familiar with this school of philosophy. Josh Whitford offers a strong argument for folding rationally derived action into the more flexible explanatory model offered by pragmatist theory. Check out Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: http://joshwhitford.org/articles/.

Thanks!

[gilbertrollins]

I guess we have to define what a "rationalist model of behavior" is. Coming from economics, then, my definition is one where agents beyond childhood have fixed and complete preferences (that is, you know what you want, and have a complete ordering in mind i.e. apples>oranges>bananas>etc), and that you thus maximize those relative to the costs and benefits you face, which do vary. The assumptions about preferences can be translated into axioms about the Real line (the real number line), which means that you can do calculus on them, and once you can do calculus on them, you can find maxima and minima of functions. If you vary preferences (i.e. I like apples>oranges today and oranges>apples tomorrow), or if there are holes in your preferences (i.e. I don't know if I like box fans or not, so apples>?>oranges>?>?), then the maximization problem falls apart. But if you assume those axioms, you're golden -- because you can study people's preferences based on their choices alone. Most economists are willing to consider some version of context and all kinds of sociological concepts like cooperation. But those necessarily get subsumed back into that mathematical model one way or another, because again you cannot do the calculus otherwise (game theory assumes the same axioms, though is slightly different from traditional optimization).

I think those are good assumptions most of the time. For most situations people encounter they do have a relatively complete set of preferences defined ex ante, and they do order them consistently. So you get demand curves popping up everywhere. But preferences do vary, sometimes in appreciable ways that economic theory cannot explain. Like the mass cessation of smoking after the Surgeon General's announcement it was bad for you decades ago. It wasn't just that people's estimates of the cost of smoking went up, affecting their "budget constraint" subject to the same preferences they'd had when they were smokers. A new social norm emerged where it was considered unaccetable to smoke any more -- and many people stopped preferring cigarettes.

Since the agency/structure debate is so old by now in the social sciences, I'd really like to see some unity of analysis emerge by compromising the two perspectives in some systematic way. But it's a dogged fight by now. Sad.

[jacib]

2) I actually absolutely agree with you about the GRE's utility as a costly signal.

This is the second time, to my amazement, someone on the forum has agreed with me on or argued vociferously from a rationalist model.

Oh, I didn't mean that I actually agree with you for the first time or something. I disagree with you on somethings, granted, but you've definitely had a positive effect on the board. I meant I have actually made that same argument to other people, with that language even (which I got from political science classes, not sociology ones).

Often, across disciplines boundaries, people talk about the same things but just use different vocabulary for it. I was in a graduate political science class on Nationalism where we read Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile which is without a doubt mainline anthropology. Very interpretive, far from rational choice. It's all about "cosmology". The professor took the book and was like, "It's obviously not in the book in these terms, but I think we could read this in terms of rational choices made by the different actors in the city and the refugee camp" (the refugees to the city people assimilated, the people in the refugee camp doubled down on their previous ethnic identity). He was, of course, right.

You do see rational choice in social movements literature--everyone cites that one Mancur Olson article (I just saw it again yesterday while reading a Sudipta Kaviraj's The Imaginary Institution of India). In Sociology of Religion, rational choice is a large percentage of the core recent literature (more from the 90's than the last decade)--but I get the sense that some people don't like them because there's a sense they, as it were, "don't always play well with others".

[gilbertrollins]

A lot of behavioral economics is essentially sociology. New institutional economics too. What you see happen with these programs though, is that someone comes along and points out with a series of empirical situations that cannot be ignored that context matters, preferences change, institutions matter to markets, etc. And immediately the micro theorists go to work trying to put it back into the theories of games and optimization - which often times don't offer up testable predictions as claimed. Then the questions stagnate.

As a result, the modern games literature on institutions (see Acemoglu, currently the top cited economist in the discipline and author of the popular and astoundingly poorly done and incorrect Why Nations Fail) and the modern behavioral literature are rather immature.

Frankly, a lot of the fight between economics and the rest of social science is just political, re whether or not markets are great or a perverse travesty. But as both economics and sociology have shown respectively for the last four decades -- structural theories do not in any way imply markets are garbage -- and utility maximization in no way ensures markets are incredible.

Frankly, my fascination is with social coordination -- Pareto improving trades are merely one subset of mechanisms I think make that happen. Through a combination of norms, institutions, trades, technology, and so on nearly 7 billion people in the world on balance cooperate and benefit one another daily. That, if there is a reason to be ideologically motivated toward social science, is I think a good one. And economists and sociologists would seem to share the same fundamental fascination to some degree.

That is, except for cranky scholars who will find a way to argue the sky is falling no matter the facts they're presented with.

[Palito]

I think your definition of a rational behavior model is solid. The notion maximizing a durable set of preferences is exactly what Whitford calls into question. In essence, the argument is that this model reverses the causal flow of behavior: set ends do not cause people to look for ways to acheive those ends; instead, the process of deliberation ensues when circumstances lead individuals to identify a lack, need, problem, or deficiency. We often act of habit, and when we don't we only deliberate things according to the set of beliefs we hold as a result of past experience, and according to what we percieve are acheiveable means to realistic ends. Absolute preferences may not be an option, and form out of experience in any case. A model of rational action can account for many circumstances, but in a limited way. Whitford applies the insights of pargmatism to conclude that deploying a rationalist model of behavior may be the best option to explain behavior in certain instances, and given certain "end-in-view." But this necesarily limits our understanding of the temporal and relational aspects of behavior as analytically defined segements of life processes.

You might consider how this connects with some of the approaches to contemporary sociology that seek to make the structure vs. agency conflict obsolete. Field theory and theories of problem-solving networks do this well, in my view. Mustafa Emirbayer does some great work on reconstructing these approaches in pragmatist terms. I think Tilly was the first to promote it as a specific approach to sociological understanding, but you should definitely check out Emirbayer's "Manifesto for Relational Sociology": http://ssc.wisc.edu/~emirbaye/Mustafa_Emirbayer/ARTICLES.html There, he outlines a strong argument for the ontological basis of adopting a relational framework of understanding.

I think one of the key differences between this sort of approach is that it favors explanation over prediction. One of the strengths of economics as a discipline is that it is offers sophisticated tools for predicting behavior, as that is a general focus of the discipline. Sociology is a little more broad in the sense that some sects within the discipline are still actively engaged in constructing and reconstructing theories of behavior in particular contexts -- with time and relationality as key factors in understanding behavior. As you transition in to sociology (and I must advertise that I am doing so myself) I think it will benefit you to consider models of explanation that show preference to description. You seem to be really strong in economic theory, but that will only take you so far in sociology because the discipline has a larger tolerance for ambiguity and irony.

[gilbertrollins]

We often act of habit, and when we don't we only deliberate things according to the set of beliefs we hold as a result of past experience, and according to what we percieve are acheiveable means to realistic ends.

This is as I understand it (which is not very well) the now more widely used definition of rationality in economic theory -- Bayesian rationality. Agents update not their preferences, as this avoids the intransitivity issue that follows, but their beliefs about the world based on passed experience. You can model such a situation rather neatly mathematically using conditional probability. Anyway, it's an effort to keep everything which actually dictates behavior exogenous to the agent's motivations -- which again their choices ought to reveal as long as their preferences are consistent.

I don't find the argument particularly compelling, but it should be noted that it iw a way to salvage formal rationality and give it more texture. And it should be acknowledged as one of many, many successful attempts economists have made to incorporate greater and more realistic descriptive accuracy into their models. Outside my particular dissatisfaction with certain fields in economics which I would have otherwise pursued (economic history, behavioral economics, growth theory, experiments), I think economists do deserve a lot of the credit they've gotten, and think the vitriolic attacks on the discipline are completely unproductive. Of course there is plenty that comes from the other side of the fence -- but two wrongs don't make a right.

Importantly one should note that Marshal's derivation of supply and demand do not rely on preference axioms and utility maximization to derive demand and supply curves -- though that is the dominant treatment in economics at the graduate and undergraduate level now.

You might consider how this connects with some of the approaches to contemporary sociology that seek to make the structure vs. agency conflict obsolete.

Not a year and a half ago I thought I was a registered genius for discovering and defining the structure/agency dichotomy in some detail independently while going through economic literature for my research. So I'm embarrassingly new to the astounding maturity of its exposition in sociology, and appreciate the links.

As I've moved into the literature on social norms and economic sociology, I've found papers that anticipated and covered in much better exposition ideas that it took me months to derive on my own. Most recently I read Granovetter (1989) where he notes the automata that both hyper structuralism and hyper rationalism both imply. I noted to my adviser last year that both sociology and economics suffer from "given-ness," that is looking for data or givens in the actor's (agent's) environment which necessarily imply his behavior -- in economics you have the ecology of supply and demand (firms constrained by prices, and consumers too) -- and in sociology you have the cultural framework.

What I really enjoyed about economics at first was that it seemed to reify agency, and imply a dignity about humans that structural and false consciousness theories I was used to thinking in terms of strip of the individual. Turns out once you go deep enough into the details of economic rationality - agency altogether disappears again. So I'm not happy with either approach at all. Their is no human being.

I think one of the key differences between this sort of approach is that it favors explanation over prediction.

Rojas just posted something about this on his blog. Everyone should know that this is a very old problem in the methodological and philosophy of science literature in economics, dating back to at least Friedman (1952) (all the stuff about assumptions not mattering, only predictions -- as if modeling, etc) Herbert Gintis argued sometime in the last ten years that economics ought to give up on prediction and focus on explanation. Unfortunately "prediction" is a philosophical criterion imported from the hard sciences into economics which it is not likely to give up any time soon (even though the vast majority of theoretical papers in economics, which have incredible influence, turn on illustrative anecdotes to motivate whatever mathematical model will follow -- as much is an exercise in blackboard description, and just as ad hoc as sociological efforts have been accused of being).

If I remember right, the economists whom have explored evolutionary theories have argued pretty strongly that description is what's important -- as evolutionary theory even in biology is strikingly not a predictive theory. The difference between explanation and prediction is that prediction is an ex ante criterion and description an ex post criterion. Prediction seems at first blush to have a little more power and magic in it I suppose because describing something that's already happened feels a lot like story telling.

Unfortunately for this debate -- story telling is about as good as anyone's going to get in any science. The task is to come up with stories about motivations and behavior that seem warranted within reasonable tolerances, and consistently play out. Supply and demand are one such story. Cascades are too. Etc.

[Palito]

Unfortunately for this debate -- story telling is about as good as anyone's going to get in any science. The task is to come up with stories about motivations and behavior that seem warranted within reasonable tolerances, and consistently play out. Supply and demand are one such story. Cascades are too. Etc.

I think these kinds of stories are important, and qualitatively different than those offered by powerful institutions before reason started disseminating through societies all over the globe. They are important because they help us to understand things, not because they are in fact those things we are seeking to understand. Mathematical models of behavior can be helpful, but we must also recognize that these models have gained a great deal of power over determining the ever unfolding events and circumstance of human life. Analysis can effect the thing under analysis, This is important to bear in mind. Add to this the admonition that the social scientist should look reflexively at the his or her own position as an observer, and how the object of analysis constructed by this indivdual is produced through the prism of a specific life process and must be weighed against the actual experience of those who have been abstracted in the analytical process, and we have ourselves a very complex game to navigate. You make a really great point about how concentrating to much on structure and concentrating to much on agency each do damage to the existentially obvious: we are human beings, not merely nodes plugged into a network, and not merely utility calculating machines. My own view is that you should let this tension inform you always. Don't try to resolve it, per se, just try to live with it as you explore all the patterns and discontinuities of social realities.

[gilbertrollins]

before reason started disseminating through societies all over the globe.

I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics, in the early modern period, or anywhere else since. Been working on precisely that problem for about a year now.

hey are important because they help us to understand things, not because they are in fact those things we are seeking to understand.

Yep. Models are just models. And you can make take that argument to a nice fancy meta level and show that all human cognition is a mere framework of metaphorical relations evolving dynamically, etc. But then we're into a level of abstraction I don't think is really useful. Not putting up a straw man -- that's just where the comment took me.

Mathematical models of behavior can be helpful, but we must also recognize that these models have gained a great deal of power over determining the ever unfolding events and circumstance of human life.

If you're alluding to economics-as-neoliberal ideology, I don't buy that. If only for the massive mis-reading of price theory in the street. Your garden variety conservative doesn't know what a demand curve or positive sum trade is, and thinks about trade in zero sum terms just like the left -- the only difference is they don't call zero sum transactions "exploitation," they call it "winning," and deservedly, in their minds, at that. If anything that, and a limp extrapolation of it to "as long as government lets the winners collect the spoils" is a good working definition of neoliberalism. And that framework, I'm sure you know, misses just about every first principle taught in a freshman year economics course. So mathematical models as rationality and instrumentality inducing normative tools of hegemony? No. (again not a straw man; I just love to vent -- reading people like Chris Hedges leaves me with very hurted feels taht I have to vent somewhere)

Analysis can effect the thing under analysis, This is important to bear in mind.

Outside of experiments, surveys, and ethnographies - endogeneity, priming, cueing, etc not really a problem.

Add to this the admonition that the social scientist should look reflexively at the his or her own position as an observer,

Meh. I'm 29. I've done enough "looking at my invisible backpack of priviledge and unexamined cultural frames dictating my priors, etc. Pretty square here. I think it's something useful to keep in mind, but not important enough to worry a ton about.

and how the object of analysis constructed by this indivdual is produced through the prism of a specific life process and must be weighed against the actual experience of those who have been abstracted in the analytical process, and we have ourselves a very complex game to navigate.

I'm going to regress quantitative language data, do some experiments, examine historical documents. Anyway, even if I do come off the arm's length observational analysis - I think these kinds of "inherently dynamic and recursive effects" concerns are the broken shin-bone of anthropology, and should stay there and die. Why? Because it becomes an excuse to do theory. Lots and lots and lots and lots of theory. And say nothing about society. We already have philosophers. And I'm all for it. But philosophy posturing as science does a disservice to both.

You make a really great point about how concentrating to much on structure and concentrating to much on agency each do damage to the existentially obvious: we are human beings, not merely nodes plugged into a network, and not merely utility calculating machines. My own view is that you should let this tension inform you always. Don't try to resolve it, per se, just try to live with it as you explore all the patterns and discontinuities of social realities.

Oh I'll resolve it alright. Take a dose of agency and bounded rationality, add a network, show the emergence of the network feeding back on the decision heuristics of agents on the network, tie it all back to the bits of definitions lying around like "social norms" "conventions" "choice" and so on -- and you've got a real shot at a generalizable micro-to-macro-to-micro social theory. Another thing I'm all for: generalizable models. Paying due to context does not imply ad hoc hypothesis testing. Consistent assumptions are a beautiful thing. Until they ossify. Then you switch departments as an undergrad and go start fights on sociology boards.

Edited December 6, 2012 by econosocio

[Palito]

I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics, in the early modern period, or anywhere else since. Been working on precisely that problem for about a year now.

Not really what I really intended to say. My point is more that the narratives people used to deliberate decision were in informed by a different set of beliefs. If you contend the concept that modern society is progressively more characterized by rational systems, accompanied by a greater acceptance of rational decision making processes and increased utility of technical expertise, I would love to hear a more detailed explanation as to why. And while you're at it, maybe you could tell me why Weber offers no useful insight in the sociological.

Yep. Models are just models. And you can make take that argument to a nice fancy meta level and show that all human cognition is a mere framework of metaphorical relations evolving dynamically, etc. But then we're into a level of abstraction I don't think is really useful. Not putting up a straw man -- that's just where the comment took me.

I disagree that it is not useful. If I understand correctly, you would like to improve behavioral models to the point were they transfer across scale, geography, context, etc. I am doing a great deal of work now on trying to learn how mathematically derived models might further my understanding and ability to produce sociological knowledge, but I am most interested in engaging with precisely that which you find useless -- symbols. Maybe you can come with an equation as to why? Or maybe there are better approaches to understand how I might be viewed as a product of society contributing to reproducing social fields.

If you're alluding to economics-as-neoliberal ideology, I don't buy that. If only for the massive mis-reading of price theory in the street. Your garden variety conservative doesn't know what a demand curve or positive sum trade is, and thinks about trade in zero sum terms just like the left -- the only difference is they don't call zero sum transactions "exploitation," they call it "winning," and deservedly, in their minds, at that. If anything that, and a limp extrapolation of it to "as long as government lets the winners collect the spoils" is a good working definition of neoliberalism. And that framework, I'm sure you know, misses just about every first principle taught in a freshman year economics course. So mathematical models as rationality and instrumentality inducing normative tools of hegemony? No. (again not a straw man; I just love to vent -- reading people like Chris Hedges leaves me with very hurted feels taht I have to vent somewhere)

That's not what I was alluding to. To be forthright, I am less than than eager to use the term "ideology." I think the term has fatigued with overuse and am currently looking into competing theories. In any case, I was really reffering to the growth and increased power of technocracy, particularly as it is constiuted in economic expertise. Whether this technocracy calls for freer markets or whether it recommends greater state regulation of market forces and agents was not a consideration in my previous statement. I am merely refering to the increased acceptance of technical knowledge produced within the discipline of economics or by actors whose credentials are drawn from their training in that discipline. Whether a set of beliefs that advocates for unrestrained markets is dominant among technical experts might be debatable. I don't think the increased influence of economists over the actions of government and private agents is really a question.

Outside of experiments, surveys, and ethnographies - endogeneity, priming, cueing, etc not really a problem.

I've done enough "looking at my invisible backpack of priviledge and unexamined cultural frames dictating my priors, etc. Pretty square here. I think it's something useful to keep in mind, but not important enough to worry a ton about.

I find it interesting that you feel is a real option to put on the back burner, so to speak. I am also 29. I have also done a great deal of self-examination. I guess I see consideration of the subject-object relationship as one of central importance to the fullness of explanation achieved in social analysis. This leads me to see the value in setting the object created in analysis against an earnest representation of the experiences which constitute its lived counterpart.

We already have philosophers. And I'm all for it. But philosophy posturing as science does a disservice to both.

This is a bit dramatic. Sociology deals with human meaning because it looks a human relations. This makes it necessarily tied to philosophy. This is why it is often referred to as a pseudo-science. You don’t have to engage in this type of work, but I would encourage you to consider how it might compliment your own. Again, there are different types of models to be built and tested, and this occurs in different ways.

Oh I'll resolve it alright. Take a dose of agency and bounded rationality, add a network, show the emergence of the network feeding back on the decision heuristics of agents on the network, tie it all back to the bits of definitions lying around like "social norms" "conventions" "choice" and so on -- and you've got a real shot at a generalizable micro-to-macro-to-micro social theory. Another thing I'm all for: generalizable models. Paying due to context does not imply ad hoc hypothesis testing. Consistent assumptions are a beautiful thing. Until they ossify. Then you switch departments as an undergrad and go start fights on sociology boards.

I meant to readdress the issue of rational behavior models in my earlier post. The pragmatist school of thought contests the notion that agents make decisions using a durable set or portfolio of preferences. This is because desires are stem from circumstances, and circumstances provide for a limited number of means to achieve a feasible set of possibilities. Identifying the most preferred outcome, then, is not a function of absolute values, but one of the means available in a situation. Cause flows from means to ends, and not the opposite. Not only this, but what we might refer to as “ends” when we look at a particular segment of behavior are really only ends-in-view, as they become means to other ends, which then become means themselves. So there is real continuity and a cumulative aspect to the way people behave. Some have come to capture this with the phrase: “a world of flows.” You really should consult the Whitford piece, as it better outlines the argument. But the point remains that there is a sophisticated argument against the decision making process assumed by all rationalist models.

[Palito]

And for the record, I don't consider this a fight. I take the opportunity to debate with a sharp and well-read person as a real privledge. Hell, I consider the opportunity to engage with any earnest person as a privledge.

I had considered just staying away from this board, but I cannot help but feel like my ability to argue a point has diminished because of my current work in the applied research field -- my colleagues are weak in theory -- so I just had jump in.

[gilbertrollins]

"My point is more that the narratives people used to deliberate decision were in informed by a different set of beliefs."

That's how I read your first statement. After you translated/expounded on your first statement, the second^ seems to submit directly to the counter I made: "I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics" ideational framework change in the early modern --> decision criterion, preference sets, or whatever else you wannna call it at the agent level fundamentally changed --> people now more "rational"

"If you contend the concept that modern society is progressively more characterized by rational systems, accompanied by a greater acceptance of rational decision making processes and increased utility of technical expertise, I would love to hear a more detailed explanation as to why"

Before I do, can you give me a couple examples of "technical expertise," so we're working with the same definitions? Also "rational decision making processes."

I haven't read any Weber and need to. From what I understand of expositions of Weber, though -- I largely agree with the compromise he was trying to strike between oh I dunno what you'd call it - ideational structure, culture, symbolic ritual -- and material incentives. What you're probably citing him for though is his treatment of the early modern transition, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It's just incorrect history, though he gets a pass for being a genius with limited scholarly resources at the 1920s? 1930s? Chinese confucianism was pragmatic from the top to the bottom, inspiring meritocratic (rational? <-- such a huge umbrella) government, a proliferation of technology that outpaced the West around 1500, give or take a 100 years of variance, and so on. Haneatic merchants were extraordinary traders. Thrifty. Speculating. The Medici in Italy. It goes on. Polyanian histories, deriving from the tradition lain by Marx down through Weber and the rest of the critics of modernity are histories of thought, and paid very little attention to material fact and actually counting up with primary sources what happened in The Street back then. You can't do history by reading what historical philosophers had to say about their contemporary society -- though we both agree it's an important variable. Like I said - I understand though that this version of economic history is almost unanimously taken for granted in other disciplines. I'm not trying to patronize you by saying that. I'm saying: consider that it's not just a fact of life, considering a critical majority of economic historians think it's rubbish, because they went back and did the counting for those eras.

There is nothing to show that people became verifiably more individualistic, selfish, speculating, alienated, concerned with ends as against means, or any of that. Nothing that is, other than arm-chair theory done at the time. Marx was a smart guy, and an atrocious historian. Then again - he gets a free pass considering all of his contemporaries were terrible empiricists as well.

"I am most interested in engaging with precisely that which you find useless -- symbols."

Not at all. I'd like to map the Oxford English Thesaurus in network software and see what kind of structures emerge, testing evolutionary, cascade, and other hypotheses on the data. Empirical sociolinguistics work is almost entirely devoid of the study of meaning, and lacks any sort of systematic theory of behavior, either agent-, structural-, evolutionary-, or anything-other-based. It also doesn't seem to give a damn about meaning. Phonym changes disseminate from populations of teenage girls in modern America. Neat. What does that say about how culture emerges through purposive speech? Next to nothing.

"But philosophy posturing as science does a disservice to both.

This is a bit dramatic."

I had economic theorists in mind when I said that. Though all the social sciences are guilty of arm-chair temptation. Theory is cheap. Data are expensive. So supply and demand say that . . . .

C. Wright Mills was lobbing the same methodological complaints at sociology in the 1950s that modern economic methodologists have been lobbing at their discipline for the last four decades -- enough theory already. Theory without tests is philosophy.

"Sociology deals with human meaning because it looks a human relations. This makes it necessarily tied to philosophy. This is why it is often referred to as a pseudo-science."

I'm up to date on first-course definitions of sociological theory. I'm down on my knee trying to engage that woman.

"The pragmatist school of thought contests the notion that agents make decisions using a durable set or portfolio of preferences."

Read the paper. Great stuff. Thanks again for the link.

"Cause flows from means to ends, and not the opposite . . . Some have come to capture this with the phrase: “a world of flows."

Breh -- I was trying to get at a theory of meta-preferences which derive in social context, last year -- I'm on it

"But the point remains that there is a sophisticated argument against the decision making process assumed by all rationalist models."

I told you I left it behind. Bringing supply and demand with me, because (as I think I said earlier) supply and demand do not depend on utility maximization and Samuelsonian rationality, price theory, strict methodological individualism, Bayesian Rationality, or whatever particular version you wanna take from the set of the Stricter Theories.

Edited December 7, 2012 by econosocio

[gilbertrollins]

And for the record, I don't consider this a fight.

Wanna wrestle?

[gilbertrollins]

^ joke Not a fight at all. I like a nice sharp argument and a bear hug after.

[Palito]

That's how I read your first statement. After you translated/expounded on your first statement, the second^ seems to submit directly to the counter I made: "I understand this is a common position - and it is the way the history of thought reads, but it's not clear any sort of rationality, instrumentality, or logic disseminated in the material history of people's decision heuristics" ideational framework change in the early modern --> decision criterion, preference sets, or whatever else you wannna call it at the agent level fundamentally changed --> people now more "rational"

The systems that people have to negotiate in everyday living have changed dramatically, gaining an increasingly rational character. This is a notion explored by many (Weber and Elias spring to mind immediately, as does Veblen) Certainly you would agree that the proliferation of technology and its incorporation into the work and personal lives of most citizens of advanced countries has been extensive. More of life is standardized and systematic and, as people are both products and producers of their environments, mental toolkits have evolved in relation to the increasingly standardized material and organizational life of modernity.

Before I do, can you give me a couple examples of "technical expertise," so we're working with the same definitions? Also "rational decision making processes."

When I say “technical expertise” I am referring to knowledge produced by credentialed agents within an occupational field. It is “expertise” in the sense that it reflects the dominant principle of organization (capital) in the field. In the case of economists, technical expertise is granted through successfully training at an academic institution. That training grants agents legitimacy in producing certain kinds of knowledge – knowledge about economic issues.

Some examples of the connection of this expertise to the policies of governments and firms: Ben Bernanke and the Fed, need I say more? Also, and this is a case that I’m more familiar with, you could look at the role of economic advisors in the political economic history of Argentina. Raul Prebisch was instrumental in amping up a program of Import Substitution Industrialization (not only in Argentina). In the 90s, Domingo Cavallo constructed the “convertability” plan that tied the country’s currency to that of the U.S., which undermined Argentina’s export competitiveness and contributed to a massive financial meltdown. On the side of firms, economic analysis and forecast disseminated through media channels informs their business decisions. I would argue that economics as a field informs the training of businesspeople. MBAs are much more popular now.

What you're probably citing him for though is his treatment of the early modern transition, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

No, I was actually thinking of his writings on bureaucracy.

It's just incorrect history, though he gets a pass for being a genius with limited scholarly resources at the 1920s? 1930s?

I have heard critiques of the book based on inaccurate descriptions of the makeup and practices of certain countries that Weber mentions to establish the basis of his argument. I haven’t investigated those thoroughly, so cannot speak to the issue. However, having read the book, I do think that it is still of some import today. Weber’s core argument is that the dispositions and beliefs of Protestantism contributed to the formation of conditions favorable to capitalism as a social system of production and organization. I’m not sure his argument can be fully debunked with the revelation a couple new facts. Even if it can, he gave us a conceptual tool look at society.

Chinese confucianism was pragmatic from the top to the bottom, inspiring meritocratic (rational? <-- such a huge umbrella) government, a proliferation of technology that outpaced the West around 1500, give or take a 100 years of variance, and so on. Haneatic merchants were extraordinary traders. Thrifty. Speculating. The Medici in Italy. It goes on. Polyanian histories, deriving from the tradition lain by Marx down through Weber and the rest of the critics of modernity are histories of thought, and paid very little attention to material fact and actually counting up with primary sources what happened in The Street back then. You can't do history by reading what historical philosophers had to say about their contemporary society -- though we both agree it's an important variable. Like I said - I understand though that this version of economic history is almost unanimously taken for granted in other disciplines. I'm not trying to patronize you by saying that. I'm saying: consider that it's not just a fact of life, considering a critical majority of economic historians think it's rubbish, because they went back and did the counting for those eras.

I’m not sure what argument the examples you offered support. I would certainly not claim that rational thinking and action, or pragmatic for that matter, is unique to our epoch. And I’m definitely willing to reconsider economic history. I would be interested in knowing how these histories have been shown to inaccurate in any way, but am skeptical that they have been shown as fully mythical.

Not at all. I'd like to map the Oxford English Thesaurus in network software and see what kind of structures emerge, testing evolutionary, cascade, and other hypotheses on the data. Empirical sociolinguistics work is almost entirely devoid of the study of meaning, and lacks any sort of systematic theory of behavior, either agent-, structural-, evolutionary-, or anything-other-based. It also doesn't seem to give a damn about meaning. Phonym changes disseminate from populations of teenage girls in modern America. Neat. What does that say about how culture emerges through purposive speech? Next to nothing.

That sounds like a lot of fun and, as I’ve recently become interested in learning how to do network modeling and analysis, I would really love to see how this turns out. However, what’s the relevance to sociology? This sounds more like a badass linguistics project.

C. Wright Mills was lobbing the same methodological complaints at sociology in the 1950s that modern economic methodologists have been lobbing at their discipline for the last four decades -- enough theory already. Theory without tests is philosophy.

True, he was a ruthless critic of Parson’s grand architecture. He was also a critic of those that studied methods. Looking beyond one’s milieu to find answers to questions of great significance for the day using whatever method(s) best fit the situation was his admonition.

Also, as you may already be aware, Mills is tied to the Historical Institutional School, and Veblen specifically. Veblen was a student of Peirce. Dewey was a student of Veblen. The pragmatist stance that I have been advocating for can be seen in Mills’ approach.

I told you I left it behind. Bringing supply and demand with me, because (as I think I said earlier) supply and demand do not depend on utility maximization and Samuelsonian rationality, price theory, strict methodological individualism, Bayesian Rationality, or whatever particular version you wanna take from the set of the Stricter Theories.

So, do you have a favored theory of practice? How do you explain supply and demand at the level of behavior?

[Palito]

Wanna wrestle?

Don't tempt me! I grew up in redneck country, in Northern California. We are supreme wrestlers.

[gilbertrollins]

The systems that people have to negotiate in everyday living have changed dramatically, gaining an increasingly rational character.

I don't know what a "rational character" is.

This is a notion explored by many (Weber and Elias spring to mind immediately, as does Veblen) Certainly you would agree that the proliferation of technology and its incorporation into the work and personal lives of most citizens of advanced countries has been extensive.

Absolutely. But technology is an extension of humanity -- machines are just embedded complexes of ideas. Ideas come from people. Thus technology stores algorithms and "thinks" for people, reducing the cognitive load. It's an efficiency. A massive one in fact, boosting mean national income in developed countries by between an estimated factor of between 10 and 30 in the last 200 years. I don't argue that hasn't changed the way society looks. I'm arguing that it has not fundamentally changed the way people make decisions, and that it certainly hasn't constrained people's choices and abilities -- in fact its effect is the opposite.

More of life is standardized and systematic and, as people are both products and producers of their environments, mental toolkits have evolved in relation to the increasingly standardized material and organizational life of modernity.

Now we're getting into some good stuff. Standardized? No. Let's define a standard: a practice or decision rule "do X when Y to achieve Z." So we have machine standards (Microsoft Word) and social standards (Don't let the door slam in someone's face behind you.). To say that we have become more standardized on my reading is to imply that along with the increase in mechanical technology, the increase in social technology means that there are an increasing abundance of rules that delimit behavior and constrain people. I argue in fact, that just like mechanical technologies that help you get up in the morning, or tell you when you're about to mow down a 5 year old by backing up your SUV, social technologies help us make decisions. These get, at some point in their emergence and origin, chosen -- and thus I think it is reasonable to assume they were (locally) welfare enhancing. That is very different from a conservative argument that "X social technology (norm) is the best we can do and we should not try to make it progressively better." I merely argue that to-date, many of these social and mechanical technologies, in the form of bureaucracies too, are the result of our best and quite-good efforts so far -- that the whole False Consciousness and social critique reading of them is often extraordinarily uncharitable, that they are mostly welfare reducing and only got implemented in the first place because the people who volunteered for them are powerless, ignorant, and exploited.

So yes, mental toolkits have changed as a result of the environment. That is -- every time I get hot I don't have to sit there and reason through how to cool myself down. I just walk over and turn a $4 fan on. There is a very compelling theory that specialization among people eases the information storage and processing burdens on any individual, allowing that person to become much more adept at her skill and knowledgable, in aggregate increasing the intelligence of our "collective brain," of which the ideas embedded in machines are a nice archaeological record of.

These developments therefore increase human scope, and bestow efficiencies such that people have more time for more profound existential relationships with themselves and one another.

Some examples of the connection of this expertise to the policies of governments and firms: Ben Bernanke and the Fed, need I say more? Also, and this is a case that I’m more familiar with, you could look at the role of economic advisors in the political economic history of Argentina. Raul Prebisch was instrumental in amping up a program of Import Substitution Industrialization (not only in Argentina). In the 90s, Domingo Cavallo constructed the “convertability” plan that tied the country’s currency to that of the U.S., which undermined Argentina’s export competitiveness and contributed to a massive financial meltdown. On the side of firms, economic analysis and forecast disseminated through media channels informs their business decisions. I would argue that economics as a field informs the training of businesspeople. MBAs are much more popular now.

Wasn't Argentina's currency spinning out of control? Inflations are terrible. Prices are essentially data bits of information that convey a host of information to me. By observing that chewing gum is $1.25 and a mid level sofa is $2,000, I am able to ascertain millions of people's relative valuations of goods -- their tastes and preferences -- without ever talking to them. When hyper inflations happen, I can no longer reliably get that information anymore, and I get scared, terrified in fact to transact for fear of losing on the deal. Businesses raise their prices in order to assure they're beating the rate of inflation, which just keeps going up, in a positive feedback loop that makes actual economic production of goods and services grind to a halt. Pegging currencies to a stable currency like the dollar solves the problem. As does getting the printing press out of the hands of Kings and Legislatures -- who will print money just to fund wars and social programs, causing inflations.

I won't get into the international trade arguments -- but a country is not a business, where exports = revenue and imports = costs, and where the goal is to maximize revenues over costs. Mercantilism doesn't work.

Weber’s core argument is that the dispositions and beliefs of Protestantism contributed to the formation of conditions favorable to capitalism as a social system of production and organization. I’m not sure his argument can be fully debunked with the revelation a couple new facts.

That is the reading of his thesis that I confronted. It's not a case of "a couple new facts." Hard work and thriftiness are ancient. And anyway, savings and investment and hard work don't create economic growth, which is what Weber was trying to explain. Competition levels profits. Trade alone does not create growth. Technological innovation does.

That sounds like a lot of fun and, as I’ve recently become interested in learning how to do network modeling and analysis, I would really love to see how this turns out. However, what’s the relevance to sociology? This sounds more like a badass linguistics project.

Studying the systematic emergence of guiding mores through language is precisely sociological. Corpus linguistics provides a nice clean method to do it by.

So, do you have a favored theory of practice?

No.

How do you explain supply and demand at the level of behavior?

Prices go up: people buy less. Downward sloping demand curves. Prices go up: firms produce more. Upward sloping supply curves. Markets clear when suppliers and demanders agree on a price. Suppliers and demanders adjust inventories and consumption relative to the prices they observe in the market until the quantity of goods supplied and demanded are in equilibrium.

[ohgoodness]

And technolognical innovation is a function of? I am not keen on this reading of Weber. Discuss status groups instead - much more fun..

Edited December 7, 2012 by cherub

[gilbertrollins]

And technolognical innovation is a function of?

Collective action.

[Palito]

I don't know what a "rational character" is.

You seem to operating on the assumption that all things work in a rational way. I contend that this, and argue that things are moving toward more uniform order, but that logical order is not an intrinsic quality of all reality. Thus, I believe it is apt to speak of things as more or less rational.

Absolutely. But technology is an extension of humanity -- machines are just embedded complexes of ideas.

Machines are also the product of actual people, who are themselves products of their environments. So, there is a material element to the machines, both in terms of the actual material they made up of, as well as in terms of the historical process of energy transfers. I will also suggest that there is an existential element to what machines are.

Ideas come from people.

And people tend to live in societies. They do not come up with their ideas and manifest them as machines in isolation, but as a function of the transactional flows in which they are embedded.

Thus technology stores algorithms and "thinks" for people, reducing the cognitive load.

It’s just not that simple. The effect is not a singular one. I think you are correct in saying that technology “thinks” for people, but that is not all it does. Technology is not merely an extension of humanity. Each technology is a new object in existence, too. Thus, it is a new temporal means to an ends-in-view, which means it changes the feasible set before a given individual in a given circumstance. It also means that it will change how and when urges arise in people and cause them to act. So again, we are back to how people make decisions and whether or not a durable set of preferences guide people through their lives – the presence of technology changes people’s values, or at least prompts them to reconsider them in problematic situations.

It's an efficiency. A massive one in fact, boosting mean national income in developed countries by between an estimated factor of between 10 and 30 in the last 200 years. I don't argue that hasn't changed the way society looks. I'm arguing that it has not fundamentally changed the way people make decisions, and that it certainly hasn't constrained people's choices and abilities -- in fact its effect is the opposite.

Your vision is too one dimensional on this front. Technology changes the very environment we exist in. It changes the terms of existence and places new demands on actors to learn those skills. It is a little too convenient that an intelligent person such as yourself can run with the assumption that technology only empowers people. We aren’t all equally equipped to make use of technologies, so technology may also create and recreate differences in society. It is an efficiency, yes, but you have to start looking at social reality through more lenses than that offered to you by economics.

I don’t mean to say that I see technology as an evil, but it certainly isn’t as benign as you claim. And its effects are certainly more complicated than simply empowering people. Increased productivity is not always a positive for workers, for example.

Now we're getting into some good stuff. Standardized? No. Let's define a standard: a practice or decision rule "do X when Y to achieve Z.

Our production systems produce in more standard ways, at more standard intervals, and demanding more standardized practices of workers. Following the definition that you’ve offered here, we can look at how food is produced, distributed, and consumed in modern life – if is produced in more standard ways (i.e. animals moved through an industrial production system), distributed in regular intervals and in standardized ways, and consumed by a population that is unfamiliar with the fact that the uniform slab of whatever is sitting before them used to be a particular organism n – a life process.

" So we have machine standards (Microsoft Word) and social standards (Don't let the door slam in someone's face behind you.). To say that we have become more standardized on my reading is to imply that along with the increase in mechanical technology, the increase in social technology means that there are an increasing abundance of rules that delimit behavior and constrain people.

No, it means that the material and social organization of society has become relatively more ordered according to the principle of rationality.

I argue in fact, that just like mechanical technologies that help you get up in the morning, or tell you when you're about to mow down a 5 year old by backing up your SUV, social technologies help us make decisions. These get, at some point in their emergence and origin, chosen -- and thus I think it is reasonable to assume they were (locally) welfare enhancing. That is very different from a conservative argument that "X social technology (norm) is the best we can do and we should not try to make it progressively better." I merely argue that to-date, many of these social and mechanical technologies, in the form of bureaucracies too, are the result of our best and quite-good efforts so far -- that the whole False Consciousness and social critique reading of them is often extraordinarily uncharitable, that they are mostly welfare reducing and only got implemented in the first place because the people who volunteered for them are powerless, ignorant, and exploited.

People create systems, but systems tend to take on their own character in a way that does not reflect the initial ideal of the system. Bureaucracy is a pretty good example. Institutional power is distributed in positions occupied by real people who perform their duties off of a standardized script. One of the theorized benefits of this is reduced corruption. And yet, that is not all they do. Many believe bureaucracy is inefficient, or that the power should not be shielded from the democratic process. In systems science, they have a saying: the chief cause of problems is solutions.

Edited December 8, 2012 by Palito