you asked for it: why is sociology commonly an "easy" major?

A couple of commenters asked for my "take" on why sociology is reputed to be a relatively easy major at many colleges and universities. Okay, why not? I'm just to going to write it as a series of observations and conjectures, though:

1. The intrinsic substantive difficulty of a field, whatever that means, is not a good place to look for the explanation of why some majors are easier than others, as instructors have the capacity to vary greatly the difficulty of courses on the same topic. There was a minor scandal many years ago at the University of Iowa over all the athletes who were talking "Watercolor" because it was an easy course to get a good grade in. The craft of watercolor itself is (I hear) very difficult and a course on it presumably could be made extremely hard.

2. That said, so many people are so resolutely incorrigible and freaked out about math, it's probably safe to assert a tendency in which the more a substantive enterprise involves math, the more difficult a major in that enterprise will be perceived as being. Most sociology dissertations are not quantitative, so it's not surprising there tends to be minimal math in sociology classes.

3. With varying directness at different universities, majors are a source of revenue for departments, so one might expect the "equilibrium difficulty" of a major to be whatever maximizes the number of students. All else being equal, it might be simpler to explain why an easy major would attract more students than a hard one, so perhaps difficult majors are bigger explanatory puzzles than easy ones.

4. One reason a student might choose a hard major over an easy one is that the hard major is perceived as offering greater career rewards. Any major that has to put up bulletin boards for undergraduates about "What can you do with an X major?" is more likely to be an easy major.

5. I'll conjecture that departments less dependent on students for revenue because of grants and other revenue streams tend to offer harder majors. Sociology has only modest funding from grants. BTW, if true, an implication might be variation in difficulty of majors is higher at research universities with considerable grant revenue (spread wildly disproportionately around departments), than at liberal arts colleges.

6. "Sociology" is sufficiently mysterious to high school students that very few enter college with the idea of majoring in sociology. Sociology commonly picks up many majors who only decide to major in sociology relatively late, and after taking some course after intro. For this reason, sociology has a greater cost to trying to impose any kind of prerequisites on students. Multicourse sequences are more difficult than courses with no prerequisites, especially as the latter often have to offer redundant conceptual content with one another.

7. Professors differ in the psychic rewards they derive from being seen as tough, presiding over a tough course, telling classes on the first day that a third of them will either drop or fail, etc.. Sociologists tend to be less stoked to give large numbers of students bad grades than practitioners of some other disciplines I could name.

8. Sociologists are, professionally, better at generating non-individualistic explanations for individual failures. So they tend to be constitutionally more squeamish about making distinctions among students, which inflates grades and makes the major easier.

9. Consistent with a broader aversion to hierarchy, sociology draws disproportionately from the pool of those who would be fine abolishing grades altogether. I'll conjecture the prevalence of this attitude in a discipline is correlated with how easy it tends to be. Any discipline in which a leading textbook is titled "Down-To-Earth X," or something equally hippie-friendly, is more likely to be an easy major.

10. Even after all the foregoing, I would want more evidence before I conceded that sociology is typically an easier major than most majors in the humanities or fine arts. Sociology is identified as a "social science," though, so when people call it an easy major, the humanities are not the comparison group in mind.

when i say 'p.s. you rock my world', the 'p.s.' stands for public sociology

Fabio presses the question of the possibly declining public presence of sociology (links to previous posts by him and by me). I'm not sure if we are actually in disagreement about sociology's past. As for understanding what happened between then and now, one of his bullet points especially caught my attention:

Major sociological studies used to have a major impact on the way we thought about the world. For example, the Coleman report really rocked people. The Moynihan report was another shocker. When was the last time sociologists rocked anyone’s world? Sure, we may publish the occasional contrarian article, but it’s been decades since the work of sociologists has changed how the educated public views social life.

I agree these were important documents that captured considerable public attention that does not have any clear analogue to anything in my own time as a sociologist. But, question to ponder: how did the discipline of sociology respond when these people went out and rocked the world? In the case of the Coleman Report, sociologists were pleased with Coleman until his mid-70s research finding evidence of "white flight," and then there was a campaign by the then-ASA president to formally censure him. In the case of the Moynihan Report, sociologists have been at the front of denouncing what was taken to be its thesis (the "tangle of pathology" argument regarding black families and especially young black males), and, as far as I can tell, that there was something very ugly and possibly evil about the Moynihan Report remains a conviction of many of those in the pertinent areas of sociology.*

Why aren't sociologists today out there world-rocking? I don't know. It does seem fairly obvious to me like large swaths of sociology today are tied as a matter of identity and norms to seeing the world in terms of a fairly restricted and predictable set of ideological positions, and "predictable" and "world-rocking" do not go together well. Indeed, I think the ideological uniformity of sociology not only hinders our ability to be taken seriously as the kind of honest interpreter of human affairs that is part of Fabio's vision, but also makes us bad at making arguments to the public, as we spend a lot of time in seminars not really arguing with one another but arguing against (caricatures of) people not actually in the room (Republicans! economists! evolutionary psychologists!).

In any case, history suggests that when a true world-rocking work of sociology appears in the world, you may know it by this sign: that the other sociologists are in confederacy against it.

P.S. Now I'm playing "P.S. You Rock My World" by Eels. I love that song. Pay the 99 cents from iTunes if you've never heard it.

* Criticism of the Moynihan report is the origin of the phrase "blaming the victim," which has indisputable cautionary utility for moral and social thought but has come to be understood by many sociologists as a logical fallacy, like "affirming the consequent." The enduring rhetorical power of the charge of "blaming the victim" in sociological debate can be seen in last year's debate between Eric Klinenberg and Mitch Duneier in ASR (in noting this I do not intend any broader assertion about that debate).

the protestant genome and the spirit of capitalism

I've started reading A Farewell to Alms, a book about the economic history and macrosociology of the last two thousand years. It received an enthusiastic write-up in the New York Times (here), and I think its publication date might have been accelerated as a result.

The moral and political implications of the book's argument, either if it is true or if it comes to be regarded as true, are so breathtaking as to be hard to understate, especially in a hastily written blog post by someone who is moving.

The argument, most briefly, is that part of what led to the Industrial Revolution was a more longstanding improvement of the species over the preceding several hundred years, and, although the book is coy about saying this improvement could be either "cultural" or "genetic," it's clear that author's inclination is "genetic." The seemingly obvious implication if that were true--although I am uncertain from the 30-odd pages I've read so far whether the author will actually connect the dots he draws right there on the page--is genetic variation among people with ancestry from different parts of the world on traits pertinent to socioeconomic attainment. Good to have ancestry from the regions of the world that were the leaders of the Industrial Revolution or otherwise socially close to it, and bad to be from regions that were not close. In this respect, the argument could be interpreted as providing the historical backstory for The Bell Curve. So, it's important, especially given that it is by an economist and all the recent hoopla for economics as the enterprise that has the apparatus to uncover hidden insights into social affairs and the independent-mindedness to speak unpopular "truths."

As I said, I haven't read enough of the book to be able to begin to evaluate its evidence, and moving isn't exactly allowing great focused cognitive space for reading. I'm approaching the book with a lot more skepticism than the author of the NYT article. I know I post perhaps surprisingly little about the substance of social science on this blog, but it doesn't get more substantive than the history of human organization and the causes of social inequalities, so I'm putting y'all on alert about this book if you haven't heard about it.

regarding the purported glory days of public sociology

For whatever reason, after a couple different exchanges with the proprietors in which we believed the problem to be fixed, I am still not able to comment at Orgtheory (boys, eventually I'll start to take this personally). Fabio has a post about a speech that Orlando Patterson gave on the occasion of Malcolm Gladwell receiving the ASA award for "Excellence in Reporting of Social Issues." Says Fabio:

Patterson noted that until the 1970s or so, you had quite a few sociologists who captured the public’s imagination such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills. After that time, prominent sociologists decreased in the public imagination.

Fabio raises several hypotheses for why you might believe Patterson or not. On the negative side, I would like to raise another, which is just that ideas of the existence of "quite a few sociologists who captured the public's imagination" then as opposed to now is wildly overblown. Evidence? If Fabio had just included blanks instead of the names of Riesman and Mills, experienced sociologists would have guessed exactly which two names to fill in. If there was such a public sociology efflorescence back then, why wouldn't there be a larger pool of salient examples? (Especially since The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950 and The Power Elite in 1956, and apparently Patterson was talking about a 20-30 year period.)

Not even to mention that Tuesdays with Morrie probably outsold The Power Elite and The Lonely Crowd combined. Why doesn't sociology do more with its Tuesdays with Morrie legacy. I say, Every Day With Morrie!*

BTW, Dan has written an enthusiastic post about Gladwell's acceptance of the award. Meanwhile, I seem to remember being on a panel at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings this spring in which another panelist, a sociologist of some prominence, alleged with considerable irritation that Gladwell interviewed the sociologist Duncan Watts for three days for the Tipping Point and then wildly undercredited his contribution in the book.

* OK, so I don't actually say that. However, I do have a friend who has talked about getting an EDWM tattoo.

Update: Thanks to Brayden, the commenting problem appears resolved.

the far eastern front in the war to shrink the pet-child gap

The sociologist who wrote the article on "Animal Selves" that I highlighted here a couple weeks ago has written a letter to ASA protesting their plan to offer a tour to China (I couldn't find the link, so I've pasted as jpg above). Me, I'll admit I don't understand how ASA's tour business works and so don't know what I think of the enterprise generally. I guess if ASA is going to be in the tour business, I wouldn't agree with them letting the political views of some members prevent other members who want to go on the tour.* (I presume the substantive importance of China to those interested in global society is without question, as is China's dismal human rights record.)

Anyway, the protest is made on both human and animal rights grounds. Comparisons are made to Nazi Germany and to ASA's decision to hold its meetings in Montreal. China is said to be "bankrolling genocide." Even so, "Although [China's] treatment of people is shameful, its treatment of animals is far, far worse." That said, by my tally, description of human rights abuses does edge out animal rights abuses, by a word count of 141-139.

BTW, according to a post on this site, eating dogs was banned in South Korea in 1988 just before the Olympics, but is presently legal in China (but not Taiwan or Hong Kong). I wonder if China will ban eating dogs before the 2008 Olympics open.

* I might feel differently if, say, ASA were talking about holding its annual meetings in China, although there would be nonhumanitarian grounds for complaining about that decision as well.

what's jeremy's beef with the animals & society section?

Regarding my recent post about a sociological article against "speciesism," someone asked why I seem to be regularly chiding those sociologists involved with the Animals & Society section. Reason #1 is that a certain friend who doesn't have a blog of her own keeps sending me these things, so things are brought to my attention more than they otherwise might. Reason #2, point blank, is that I have no enthusiasm for the fight against "speciesism" and reject approximately all of its attendant moral arguments*, and so I have a hard time seeing it listed alongside "racism" and "war" on the roster of social concern.

But, beyond that:

I think if I had to name what I regarded as the most genuinely interesting social trends in the US in the last 50 years, the shrinking pet-child gap would maybe make the Top 10 and would certainly make the Top 20. "Interesting"-ness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and I suspect the shrinking pet-child gap particularly intrigues me because I grew up on a farm, in a culture with a very different attitude toward animals than the world I stepped into when I entered graduate school. Indeed, when I was in graduate school, for awhile I was keeping this tally for the sociology graduate student listserv of the number of times anyone sent out a message related to advocacy for an animal welfare cause versus a message related to advocacy for a child welfare cause. My recollection is that the score ended up Pets 11, Kids 4.

This, to me, is interesting, but apparently not interesting enough where it has risen to being anything I actually do research about. Which is another reason that I find sociology's animal movement interesting, because it exemplifies for me a larger point about sociology. As I said, I believe the shrinking pet-child gap is an interesting phenomenon, and it could be subject to a extremely interesting analysis from somebody willing to take a broad and engaged-while-still-somewhat-removed view of it. But, of course, who is going to do that?

Instead, the people who are going to enter the field of "animals and society" are going to be the people who are most committed to fighting speciesism as a cause--in other words, the people who are playing a vanguard part in the very thing I regard as the phenomenon. So, instead of sociologists offering studies that help to understand the shrinking pet-child gap--which, whatever you think of it, is an empirical phenomenon with all sorts of social ramifications, we get sociologists exhibiting the phenomenon by arguing for the value of work in which the researcher studies playing with his dog and in which the researcher tries to use sociological theory to justify a polemic that elevates "speciesism" to being of a piece with racism.

* Even so, inexplicably, I must confess that I've been lately thinking about returning to pescatarianism (that is, eating no meat except for seafood).

chew on this

Qualitative Sociological Review has a special issue on "Animals and People." The lead article is "The question of animal selves: Implications for sociological knowledge and practice" from a sociologist at the University of Colorado. Concluding sentence of abstract:

[S]ociologists have an obligation to challenge speciesism as part of a larger system of oppression.

Some sentences from the conclusion of the paper:

Poverty, environmental degradation, homelessness, war, and the threat of terrorism are all high on the social agenda. Some would argue that they are more pressing than the well-being of animals. The flaw in this argument is that all problems are connected, and the segmenting of issues is both illogical and morally questionable. For example, the moral status of animals as property justifies institutionalized cruelty on the basis that we humans can use them as we see fit. The ideology of superiority, coupled with “might makes right,” also underpins sexism, racism, and homophobia.

While various other things might be said, I will admit to having reached a point of confusion regarding exactly what qualitative sociology is.

(Granted, I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly "analytic sociology" is supposed to be, and I'm currently floundering while trying to write an essay for an edited volume on that.)

social forces: the top 3 journal that isn't even in the top 10 in sociology impact rankings

See post here at orgtheory, with the full sociology top 10 listed in the comments. Also, see earlier post and follow-up of mine in which I dispute the usefulness of the idea of "Top 3 journals" in sociology anymore, especially if taken seriously for the purposes of rankings of quality-productivity of either individual faculty or whole departments.

Of course, many people who read this blog don't care about sociology journals, and for you I have a beatboxing flutist doing the Beverly Hills Inspector Gadget theme song, which is at least worth watching for upwards of a minute if you've never seen it (HT to a certain diva whose secret blog I rip off again and again):



I have decided that at next month's ASA meetings, I will help restore some of the luster to Social Forces by staging a performance in which I do a beatboxing reading of one of its articles. Details to follow.

quiz feature!

Received wisdom among those who run survey centers is that some interviewers are better than others at convincing respondents to participate in surveys. This is easier to assert than actually show. As some readers know, I am an investigator on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a survey of thousands of 1957 Wisconsin high school graduates that fielded its last round of phone surveys ~3 years ago. After several hours of meticulous data analysis, I have adduced strong evidence indicating that, in fact, some WLS interviewers were better than others. Today is thus not a day that feels much like I am splitting the sociological atom, here.

WLS respondents were in their late sixties; WLS telephone interviewers were mostly undergraduates (or undergraduate-aged). Any guesses about whether there was a sex of interviewer effect in the WLS (that is, a tendency for male or female interviewers to be better at getting respondents to participate)?

sociology bloggers: are we having a get-together at asa?

Sorry if somebody has already posted about this and I've missed it. It has become an annual tradition, though.

UPDATE: The current plan is to meet at Saturday, 6pm, in the Hilton Lobby. Presumably we will go somewhere else, which means we need to have a plan for how to let people know where we've gone.

post-ptolemaic social science begins at home

From the 2006 GSS, probability of someone with my mother's basic demographic characteristics indicating that she doesn't know the Earth goes around the Sun: 50% (N=26). (previous post here)

"Hey, Mom, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?"
"Jeremy, the Earth goes around the Sun."

Not one freaking second of hestiation or inkling of uncertainty, either, I'll have you know.

Probability of someone with my father's basic demographic characteristics indicating that he doesn't know the Earth goes around the sun: 31% (N=19)

"Ask Dad when he gets home."
"You need to take care of that cold!"
"Pretend like you don't know. 'Eldon, I was sitting here and wondering to myself, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? Do you know?'"
"Jeremy, he's going to think I'm stupid."
"You can tell him afterward that I put you up to it."

E-mail later from my mother:

hey j, dad knew the correct answer...............mom

I am tempted to offer a reward to the first person who provides a full and honest account of asking a noninstitutionalized, nondemented adult this question and getting 'Sun goes around the Earth' as a sincere reply. Apparently such people are all around us--including, according to Omar, more than 1 in 8 women with graduate degrees--so an exemplar in one's midst shouldn't be hard to find.

who doesn't know the earth goes around the sun?

Follow up to Omar's post yesterday, using data from the just-released 2006 General Social Survey.

% of Americans who say either that the sun goes around the earth or that they don't know, when asked, "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?"

People who have at least some college:

White men: 11.0% (N=392)
White women: 22.7% (480)
Black men: 25.5% (51)
Black women: 34.4% (90)
Hispanic men: 6.9% (29)
Hispanic women: 32.3% (37)

People with a high school diploma or less:

White men: 26.7% (221)
White women: 39.7% (292)
Black men: 40.0% (50)
Black women: 51.8% (83)
Hispanic men: 33.3% (30)
Hispanic women: 50.0% (34)

Also:

White Democrat men: 16.5%
White Independent men: 21.4%
White Republican men: 15.8%

White Democrat women: 26.2%
White Independent women: 37.1%
White Republican women: 27.5%

("White" and "Black" exclude Hispanic respondents)

BTW, a quote of Dr. Watson talking about Holmes in the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

To my knowledge, Sherlock Holmes is not a respondent in the 2006 GSS.

overheard

"I think he's a good student. I had three graduate students this semester who were really into the idea of doing carnal sociology. Of them, he was the one who actually took the time to read the book."

Note: The carnal sociology website is down but promises to come back "Bigger. Better. Faster." but not, strangely, "Carnaler."

the big picture

I was sent an e-mail survey today that included the following question:

What are the most important things for sociology graduate students to do during their tenure in graduate school?

My answer:

1. Figure out what kind of career they want.

2. Develop the substantive expertise and other skills that will allow them to be effective and prosperous in that career.

3. Develop the credentials that will allow them to get a post-Ph.D. job consistent with career they want.

(The idealist in me insists on putting #2 over #3 even though the pragmatist notes that one only gets to implement #2 in an actual career if #3.)

Thoughts?

Update: Somebody e-mailed to ask, "Why would you end a post with 'Thoughts?' and then turn off comments?" I'm not sure why comments were disabled but now they are enabled. So, um, somebody comment.

by comparison, last year 700 americans were killed by poisonous gases

Via Kristina via Eszter. I wanted to look at the comparable graphs for economics and anthropology, but couldn't figure out how to get the NSF web software to produce it.

Update: Tom B sent me a link to the numbers for economics. (Thanks also to Nan and Kim for sending these numbers to me as well.)

views of sociology from beyond this world

So, the recent Pacific Sociological Association meetings hosted a panel entitled "Pirate Professors, Deviant Departments, and Disappeared Programs." Via Jeff, here are the titles listed in the program for four of the five papers:

"Views of Education from Beyond this World" - Emails and Conversations with my Dearly Departed Mentor 'Boz'

Educating Astrosociologists: The Need to Bring Outer Space Into Social Science Classrooms

The Denial of Educational & Employment Opportunity Due to the Discovery of Evidence Contradictory to the Axiomatic Assumption of Harmlessness of High Demand Religious Movements: A Case Study of the Normative Negation of Conflict of Interest from Australia.

[!!] The Fascist Trend in American Academe: "Disappearing" Sociology at Niagara University, New York

Jeff apparently found these titles not exactly inspiring. Imagine that! Comments on his post include Jeff reposting a couple of e-mails received from participants on the panel, one of whom thought it appropriate to cc: various faculty in Jeff's department and close with:

Well, in a few years, when this angst-driven 30-something comes to us for some sort of connection, we'll be sure to remember. In addition, the realities of the sociological job market ought to throw him off that high horse he is riding when he isn't riding a barstool in Berkeley coffeeshops. Right now, I'd just love to get put on his thesis committee to help straighten him out.

I think the foregoing probably speaks for itself with no need for additional commentary from me. So instead I'll just pine for the idea of changing International Talk Like A Pirate Day to International Talk Like A Pirate Professor Day. "Today I will lecture ye on astrosociology! Argh! How do I advance me Powerpoint slides with just a hook for me hand!"

in surf city it was two girls for every boy; in soc city it's three retirees for every new ph.d.

The big annual meeting of demographers is going on in New York City, and even though I'm not able to attend, I thought I could at least write a demographically-minded post. The new issue of Footnotes, the newsletter of the American Sociological Association, has an article titled "Too Few Ph.D.'s" that makes the following observation:

"Since 1993, the 'replacement rate'--the ratio of the annual number of new PhDs awarded to the number of PhDs retiring--has steadily declined in all social science disciplines. Figure 1 shows the replacement rate between 1993 and 2003 for these disciplines. ... By 2003 (the last year for which data were available), there were two-thirds of a new psychology PhD for every PhD psychology retiree. In contrast, there was less than one third (.29) of a new PhD for every one PhD retiree in sociology."

Among other things, this observation would seem to explain:

1. My sense that, in certain institutional respects, the experience of my broad cohort in sociology has resembled that of a game of musical chairs, only except instead removing chairs, removing people.

2. The increasing difficulties editors report in finding people to peer review articles.

nothing up my sleeve (p < .05)

My ability to figure out magic tricks increased greatly the day I realized that magic tricks are optimal in an important sense. A trick is basically as impressive as it can be without giving away its secret. When the magician saws the woman in half, the parts you can see are all you can see. If the trick would be even more impressive if the woman wiggled her toes but she doesn't wiggle her toes, there's a reason there's no toe-wiggling.

It's distressing the extent to which I have been able to export this epiphany to the evaluation of quantitative social science.

I was recently talking to a colleague who does not do quantitative research about a paper we had both, in very different contexts, read. The paper addressed its substantive question using Approach A. It could have used Approach B instead. Approach A is good enough for the standards of where the paper was published, but Approach B would be the approach preferred by more quantitatively-discerning types. The paper acknowledged the existence of Approach B but made substantive and statistical arguments for why Approach A was superior. In talking to my colleague, I explained that these arguments were really not very good arguments, and that, indeed, people who understand the technical issues are not going to very persuaded by results from Approach A because you really need results from Approach B to be able to assert the conclusions of this paper with any real confidence.

The thing, though, was that I went on to take for granted that analysis using Approach B wouldn't yield statistically significant (i.e., publishable) results. My colleague asked how I could be so certain of this, since no results from Approach B were reported in the paper.

I replied that, if Approach B would have yielded the same results as Approach A, the author would have announced this fact to assuage the concerns of people like me. Especially because the author clearly understands how to do Approach B and it would have only taken, say, five minutes to check. So when I saw that the paper contained these weak arguments for the superiority of Approach A over Approach B, and made no mention of what the results would have looked like using Approach B, I read this as basically equivalent to the paper containing a giant invisible footnote that said "We tried Approach B and it doesn't work."

I hate this.

institutional review boards have no jurisdiction over the dead

Three people in the past month or so, independent of one another and with various degrees of committment to the idea, have mentioned to me the possibility of doing an ethnographic study of funeral homes. If you, too, are working on this topic, I guess I would urge you not to dally.

Is this social science having a late-blooming Six Feet Under effect? Have funeral homes always been an attractive topic for ethnographers but something about the topic has prevented their from being (to my knowledge) The Great American Funeral Home Ethnography?

As a different matter regarding ethnography, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance recently about a prominent sociology ethnography in which the author, with the consent of the research participants (members of a minority group living in poverty), used their real names. The acquaintance was of the position that this was definitely wrong and asserted that their view was the consensus among people who do ethnographic research. I have to admit I don't really understand this as a general position. I do understand it in the obvious, but special, case in which naming an informant would allow one to determine the identities other people who don't want their names used. Otherwise, it seems like newspaper editors have the right idea in fretting about negative consequences of anonymous sourcing; namely, that there is basically no accountability for the writer to represent the source accurately rather than tweaking statements in ways that suit the author's argument. I recognize that people who do interview-based studies get very cross when someone says "I think you're just choosing quotes that fit your argument" or, worse, "How do we know you aren't just making this up?" But, irritation is not quite the same thing as counterargument. I can understand the idea that confidentiality is unfortunately what must be offered to get interviewees to provide honest participation, but the idea of swaddling it in ethicky goodness even for participants who express no reluctance about speaking on the record--this I don't buy.

so, how was the conference?

(me, presenting at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings)

The most common problem with giving talks at conferences is that one doesn't actually get an audience, and one is left talking almost or entirely only to the other panelists.* This leads one to feel like presenting is pointless, that one is producing a good no one else is actually interested in consuming, and various related issues that cause existential and morale crises in academics. Alternatively, one can sometimes get good attendance at a talk, but then one is dealing with this stochastic process where each additional person at a talk increases the probability that someone in the audience will be a crank or twit that provides some kind of irksome distraction that is then does much to decrease the value of the session.**

At the Eastern meetings, I gave two presentations: one fell into the first category above, and one--the panel on Freakonomics--fell into the second. The main session vandal for the second was this guy who was apparently the spouse of a sociologist, but I somehow missed this and spent much of the time when he would talk thinking, "How can this guy be a sociologist and know so little about social science?" Anyway, fellow sociologists: if you want to bring your spouse (or child, or pet) along to a presentation, that's fine, but just like if you were going to a restaurant or movie theater, try to have them behave. If he is doing things like interrupting other audience member's points with asides where everyone is supposed to raise their hand if they've read Freaknonomics, that's not behaving.

Another person in the audience wanted the panel to discuss whether Freakonomics was "the son of the Bell Curve," which I regarded as being too beyond ridiculous to know how to address and yet seemed to resonate with some other people in the audience. I suppose maybe I should consider it a victory that no analogies to the Nazis were drawn.

* I haven't had this problem with any panels I've been on, but one consequence of the rise of internet in hotels is that one can't necessarily even count on the attention of fellow panelists.

** One may be more likely at ill attended talks to be on a panel with someone who is a crank or twit and does much to compromise the panel for everyone, especially if they go on for twice their allotted time with a presider who just lets them.