Why I Lost Faith in Political Science

I've been meaning to write this for some time, but I never really had the time, so I thought I would finally get around to doing it.

A few years ago, I changed my field completely from political science to communication. Whenever people asked me why, I would often say that it was because political science was interested in large movements of statistical data, whereas communication was more about the specific acts of communication between individuals. Well, that's somewhat true, although there are variations in both sciences that offer alternatives, but for the most part, that's generally how it is. But that's really not the reason why I abandoned political science for communication.

It was political science itself that caused me to realize I'd never be able to answer the questions I had within that discipline. You see, political science has taken a direction since the 1960s that puts it more into a self-reflective paradigm where its members are scared to death to appear to not be doing science that they are going around creating science for the sake of creating science rather than creating science for the sake of answering questions. Most disciplines borrow from other disciplines, and we all accept that. Political science borrowed punctuated equilibrium from biology. Communication borrowed identity theory from sociology and psychology. Each made these concepts their own, so much that they might not be recognized by the original discipline. I was fine with that. However, at some point political science became so engrossed in wanting to appear scientific that it stopped being very relevant.

I was taking a course on Congress from a professor at Western Michigan University when I realized that political science was finished for me. BS (the professor) was all about making science out of political science, and he loved his data files. It was all about manipulating those data files and then publishing his results. This was also the first time I came across the dirty tactic where professors latch onto the work of their students and then sign onto the project so that they can up their publication numbers; that's one of those incest-like behaviors of academia that I've never really found myself to be very comfortable. It's one thing to have a student approach a professor and want to write a paper with that professor, but when a professor acts like a vulture and scavenges off of grad students for material, that just seems so wrong. But that's for another essay, I guess.

Anyway, what I started to discover at this time is that political science has been overrun by the desire to publish material that comes from massive survey data. National Election Studies, student evaluations, and all that sort of tripe is used to make major inferences in the discipline. Every major election is followed by tons and tons of published reports about what scientists have found based on the question and answer sessions at polling booths by science-thinking professionals. And then a bunch of people across the planet keep making connections based on whatever statistical process they think to question in their research. If the numbers don't give them the results they expected, they change the variables, or they manipulate the way they question the variables. At least until they get the results they desire. In other words, we're not a bunch of scientists curious about finding something out, but we have a theory and we use the data to prove it. And then we publish it. And then we continue to publish about it, regardless of whether or not it's really true. We all have heard the joke about statistics (99% of all statistics is made up), but we keep accepting it as canon that it's good information. And we keep publishing it over and over again, and it makes major careers out of people who then call themselves scientists, because they can claim to use mathematics as part of their academia research.

In the 1950s, after World War II, the Ford Foundation sort of changed political science as we know it. In order to receive those elusive grants that were coming from the foundation, you had to show that you were doing "science". The hard sciences, like physics and biology, had an easy time because they were doing actual science. The softer sciences, like sociology and political science, had a much more difficult time doing the same thing. They had to make their social experiments look more scientific, and one of the ways they did it was to start using a lot of statistical information because that looks and sounds very scientific. But statistical data is very misleading. Let me explain why.

There are two types of statistical data. One is hard data, and the other is survey data. The first is actual science. Things happened, they were recorded, and you can use that data to explain natural phenomena. An example is one I did early in my career. I gathered data for a ten year period to display how many violent revolts took place in the world, and I categorized them by the amount of violence that occurred (deaths, financial GDP losses, etc.). I then compared that to the types of governments, the amount of legislation that took place in those areas, the education levels of areas in those countries and the countries at large. I tracked a few other variables I had to gather. I then plugged them into a statistical formula to eventually surmise a few things, such as "as more legislation occurs in a yearly period in countries with low to mid levels of education, they tended to suffer more violent outbursts". There were a bunch of other findings, but that's the basic style of what I was trying to do.

The other type is survey data, and that's where you question a lot of people and try to make some type of statistical connection in the data, like "how does education reflect whether or not someone feels good about a particular political figure". To me, this kind of data is somewhat useless because I've never been a fan of the opinions of people because I don't believe people really know what they believe. It's like the mass communication theory that states that people are influenced by media because they think their friends are influenced by the media, but they don't think they are personally influenced. The theory shows that they are obviously mistaken about themselves and right about how they feel about their friends. The fact that they might be mistaken about their friends never seems to creep up into the literature, and that sort of interpretation is why survey data is such a problem for me. People interpret it as they desire.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, and it reminded me of this. She's worried about her data efforts because others have suggested that using another command in the statistical program might achieve different results. That's where we're so focused on the "how" rather than the "what" or "why". Scientists aren't doing the statistical work anymore by hand, which means that the software has become so complicated that they may be making mistakes just because they don't have every proper button pushed when running the data. I had someone try to tell me that once in a statistical data set I was running, and I asked what are the implications of that "other" command he was discussing. He said he didn't know, but that he learned about it from another professor. I'm not kidding about this. I asked if the calculus was still correct, and he had no idea there was even calculus involved. For my friend, I would just like to say: Continue doing what you've been doing, unless someone can prove to you otherwise that your data manipulation is an error FOR A SPECIFIC REASON.

This has gotten me to the point where I don't do data manipulations now unless I understand the science behind what I'm doing. I've been to conferences where I realize that's not the case with others because I'll ask such a simple question based on the mathematics involved, and they stare at me as if I just asked the location of the abominable snowman.

For the record, I don't do survey research anymore. I abhor it and have no faith in it. To be honest, I don't care what people think (the ones you survey). I care what people do, what people say and how they carry out what they intended. For projection projects, I now use what I call an iterative approach, involving computer modeling. This is a complicated way to say I use a computer to continue to throw the same independent variable at the dependent variable and then reverse it for effect. I see things over massive periods of time, involving tens of thousands to millions of iterations, to see how things effect based on continuous influence. An example is the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Theory. Rather than focus on one attempt at communication, I focus on change over time as two entities share something in common over generations, until the results start to approach each other (people become a lot more alike as they share common behaviors), and then use that as an additive process to other behaviors to explain why friendships grow over time between nations, or devolve.

I'd probably like to use this process to challenge a lot of political theory, but to be honest, I don't feel welcome in political science anymore, so I have to find my own place in the sphere of science, even if I don't know where that is yet.

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Preying on the poor

As many of you may know, times are kind of tough right now financially, so I've been exploring all sorts of alternative methods of survival in hopes of increasing revenue (or starting some) in hopes of making it through the rest of this summer. It hasn't been easy, and I've not been extremely successful, but one thing that it has done is remind me of how vicious other people can be when it comes to taking advantage of those with little to no resources.

Let me move back a bit in the past to orchestrate an event that happened that opened my eyes to this sort of behavior. Years back, I was in really dire financial circumstances after having gotten out of the Army and unable to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. So, I ended up in San Francisco, and I lived in the impoverished area of the Tenderloin District. I was working security guard jobs for extremely limited income (I made too much to qualify for food stamps, but not enough to pay rent, let alone actually buy food). I had a dollar or so one day and decided my best bet was to buy a carton of milk (you could get a quart of milk for 99 cents back then, and that was overpriced). So I went to the normal corner convenient store that was owned by a Korean family. Their 18-19 year old kid was working that day, and I put the 99 cent quart of milk on the counter. The kid looked at this "tax chart" he had that covered the entire main counter and then said: "That will be $1.34." I almost paid it, but then it suddenly dawned on me that 35% is somewhat outrageous in an area that charges 8.5% sales tax. So I asked him why so much. He said "tax". I said that tax is 8.5, not 35 percent. His reaction was to remove the milk from the bag he had put it in, place it to the side and then order me out of his store or he would call the police. So I left.

Fast forward to today, and someone recommended online surveys as a possible way of making money. I suspected there was probably something suspicious about them, but I figured I really had nothing to lose, so I signed up for a few of the ones that appeared to be legit. Well, what I soon discovered is that by signing up for one, they really escalate this into signing you up for every one. Now, I'm probably a member of about every survey site you can possibly imagine.

Now, if you've never crossed into this world of surveys, you might get the mistaken impression (like I did) that these surveys are actually interested in your opinion on things, like products or maybe politics or trends, or whatever. They're not. What they're interested in doing is the infamous foot in the door technique and its many variations. Let me give you an example. Blockbuster Online Rentals is one of the ones that almost every one of these surveys has as one of its "surveys". What the survey will do is promise you anywhere from $15-30 for "completing" the survey on Blockbuster. But what the "survey" actually is has nothing to do with surveying. To complete the survey, you have to sign up for Blockbuster's Online service (the one that charges $9.99 + tax per month to have movies sent to you like the MUCH BETTER company Netflix). Having not completed this "survey" because I can see right through its game, I'm assuming that you would then get $15-30 from the survey company (which all tend to have a "you must earn $100 in surveys before we send you a check" clause to them, although that amount varies from $40 to undetermined amounts).

If you start going through more and more of these "surveys", what they are is an endless stream of "click yes or no" to get more information about more companies that want to separate you from your hard to come by dollars. They aren't really interested in your opinion, but in your business. And quite a few of them that I observed are really scary in what they do.

I'll give you an example from the "medical" surveys that I noticed. I know that our country talks about how we're over-medicated these days, but I went through a number of surveys that practically CREATE ailments within me, even when I'm feeling fine. I've had a headache a week ago, so having connected with that information, I'm put through a bunch of self-diagnosing (it diagnosis me, not the other way around) that eventually end up with some pharmaceutical company offering me a 7 day supply of a drug that they want me to take back to my doctor and TELL her this is what I need. If I have diabetes, they want to give me a free blood sugar monitor, but they can only give it to you if you're on medicare, but if you're not, they will walk you through the process of getting ONTO medicare so that they can run the charge through and "NO ONE" has to fork over any money. Yes, I'm sure it comes from nowhere as the government just has way too much money to shell out for these sorts of unnecessary things. I think you get the picture. In about one day, I had "coupons" for 7 or so day supplies of drugs to medicate my ADHD, which I don't have, my insomnia, which is really caused by the fact that my shoulder is injured, not because I need medication to sleep and suffer from ailments that I can't pronounce, all sorts of diabetic medication that is "ground-breaking" and so "ground-breaking" that no one else in the medical establishment appears to know what it is, and my favorite: I've "qualified for medical trials" on at least five different horrific ailments, which will require me to be put into test groups where I might or might not receive life-saving treatment in a ground breaking study. I think you get the idea.

The problem, for me, is that they are preying on people who generally are at wit's end and don't know where else to turn. Instead of helping them, as they are claiming to do, they are turning their lives into a living hell from which they will never escape. You don't help someone solve his financial burden by offering him ten different credit cards (the other thing these surveys have been doing nonstop) from "banks" I've never heard of before. I mean, come on, when I get a credit card offer from Fred's Bank, there's something really wrong here.

But like poverty itself, I don't expect anyone to care. The people who are targeted here are unimportant to the rest of American society. They are the losers in the game of capitalism, and as long as the fantasy of everyone having an equal chance in this country exists, they will continue to be victims, exploited by those who care only about their own wallets. It's like Hurricane Katrina when it happened. We all saw the pictures and wanted to do something. But no matter how many people DID go and help, there were so many people who saw it as an opportunity and swooped down, doing what they always do. And as we rarely hold them accountable (white collar crime never will be, no matter how much rhetoric we use), that's why it will only continue as perpetrators become more and more blatant in how they do it.

And I think that's sad. But what's that matter. It's not like anyone reads a blog like this anyway.

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