A recent article in the WSJ titled “Hard Questions From ‘Soft’ Sciences” got me thinking, and when I’m spurred to think a bit, I might as well share the thought!

In much of the last century, the goal of science was to answer “big” questions in the ‘hard’ sciences: curing polio, getting to the moon, building a better car, quicker. In school as a kid, I was taught the validity of objectivity by way of the “scientific method” – observable, empirical, and measurable evidence as a methodology to reasoning. In high school, both my statistics and biology teacher explained that this approach led to the development and advancement of knowledge as we know it, and the main reason why we don’t all still lived in caves. “Thank God they came up with that!” I remember thinking at the time, for I kinda liked the way I had my bedroom set-up at the time.

Not any longer.  Nowadays, probably since the 70s, the public discource of inquiry has shifted to the study of the social sciences. Even more recently, say the past ten years, this focus on social scientific inquiry has taken a nose dive, and become notably obsessed with pop consumer behavior. People of all stripes, not just business leaders, are reading “The Tipping Point”, “The Blank Slate”, and “Freakanomics” to better understand, in a couple hundred pages, the application of sociology, psychology, evolution, and economics.  Grasping the dynamics of the social order in less than a week; understanding the big ‘why’s’ of the order of man in his environment.

Heck, only twenty years ago the business and social sciences sections of a bookstore was the vestige of dull bankers seeking interest rate formulas or neurotic mothers trying to figure out why their kids smoke pot. Now bin titles are pushed up to the best sellers table, featured as top choices on Amazon, or visiting visiting a Kindle or iPad near you.

Arguably, the social sciences today are under attack from those seeking a book deal and $25,000+ fees from keynote speaking at marketing conferences. It’s a good gig if you’re willing to spend a chunk of time pouring over the past two decades of arcane academic journals in a particular field of social science study; find themes of scholarly discourse that evolve and bubble up over time in the literature, and then condense the themes into palaple chapter-bites of info dumbed down to a Flesch Readability Index at the junior-high school level (i.e. cocktail party banter). Then find an agent to sell it to a publisher; then get a stylist.

What ever happened to the a good old-fashioned maturation in a social sciences graduate degree program for those of us who sought beyond the strict adherence to the scientific method explaining all (and detour a few more years from fulltime work)? I mean, what’s wrong with being mentored by scholars who, without motive of profit or fame, help align the stars a bit? 

In the end, I’ve never read Gladwell (yes, I’ve lied) or really any of the others who provide ‘cliff notes’ on social phenomena. Myself, I choose to go to the source, the academics, the originals. Like Gladwell? Read Granovetter and Rodgers. That’s what grad school taught me.  If you skip to shortcuts, your only shorting yourself…

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