77 Replies to “How Sociology Majors Destroy the World”

  2. Aaron @3:27 – that sounds great.
    It depends. A lot of people get into anthro now because they want to do forensics – blame CSI etc. I fancied archaeology (stupid! stupid!) But not to get too off topic… At an undergrad level, and from what I’ve seen of the postgrad level too, it’s a lot of squishy, made-up stuff about how other cultures are nice and like to share. Just boring fluff – “marxiology”, as an academic I know characterized the Humanities. It’s completely “non-judgmental”, in the sense that Bushman hunter-gatherers are in no way to be thought of as operating at a less sophisticated level than, say, the Florentines of the high Renaissance. Not, of course, that you’d study Europeans.
    The only interesting bits are topics like, say, Navajo kinship-marriage patterns and so on; the honest-to-goodness, how people organize themselves information. And even that needs to be taken with a bucket of salt. Nobody’s dug up Margaret Mead and staked her yet.
    At the post grad level it gets into the seriously unreadable theory laden “praxis of power-dynamic re-interpretation…” blah blah.
    I’d like to add that 8 out of 10 archaeologists are:
    a] certifiable flakes with severe ADD
    b] barking mad neo-hippy leftists or
    c] highly abusive drunks. (b may overlap with either a or c.)
    I don’t think that’s too OT as we’re meant to be talking about how useless degrees are useless.

  3. I have two years college diploma in Math and physics
    I have also engineering degree I took 4 courses in Economics as elective courses too I like it.
    With 6 courses in masters in IT (information technology) and diploma in computer programming which I never liked it
    I know Canadian agriculture in some areas not all
    I like political science and history and Geography and study of religions
    So many thing help so many thing or courses waste time for people co op education is best to learn and work while you study and find fast and easy way to learn is important.
    ======
    Job is not only what courses you are taking while it can help you brain exercise more like body need exercise to be in shape
    Science is priceless and study and learning science in so many subjects is good and possible but you need to focus in one or two majors all the time as knowledge is important
    So as behavior some times too much self confidence and low self confidence lead you to criminal mind and /or bad behavior but key point is total package to get good job
    Take the job is matter of so many factors
    Finding a good job is only opportunity and May good luck not necessary all courses you took
    The key points for all government home work is to how to keep the job for long period of job is matter of knowledge research and upgrading and good behavior I still have weakness of hate working with stupid or regular people directly which some times you must do that or train some one to pass the message for you some times doctores must deal with patients or engineer work with labor workers are you ready to work all kind of stranger in public is question you need to ask before take any question public job and private job are seperated from each other how to bring up your talent to put environment around you with understandable people not with strangers
    study of Sociology helped to reduce my weakness and know people before I talk to them
    Government is not idiot or bad they are confuse for their direction and how to keep it in long period of time steady growing keep changing is not benefit anybody so far as keep change government every 4 years I believed it is waste time some times and resources and not used those experience to get develop for further correction. You know it all but facing government who judge you for your background and race or where you come from people with less education made money today with people who had have lots of education but not originally are Canadian are bring question what is waste doing it all !
    I like helping people if I can and not get frustrated

  4. Oh, there’s a d]; creepy dead-eyed careerist hacks who’s “work” consists of “networking” at conferences on University money.
    SOME archaeologists are very nice.
    Okay, I’ll shut up now.

  6. “In a culture where we must pass everyone, total morons get to the level hard workers used to get to.”
    OT/
    It’s interesting that you say this today. I just had a conversation with my 9yr old yesterday. She told me the teacher held a “class meeting” and that that kids who failed the class will be “held back” next year. You can imagine my surprise when my daughter told me about this class meeting. My wife and I wondered if the teacher is bluffing, trying motivate the class, or softening some of the kids up for the upcoming bad news.

  7. Regarding the history bashing: what would a study of history of finance revealed about current conditions as of 2007?
    I know that it’s possible to read the relevant books on the side, but there’s a lot of ’em. Studying that branch formally would have amounted to the same thing.

  8. Daniel ~ start here: Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841). Of course, that requires understanding; most people would rather just complain and blame everything on something else, such as “government” or “socialism”. But are not governments made of humans? Are not humans social? In other words, the problem (to the degree that there is a problem, of which I am not convinced) is humans: so study anthropology, or look in a mirror 😉

  9. we have the governments we have have because most voters are uninformed idiots. that applies to history and thing else you would care to mention.

  10. Sociology: bad bosses and law makers destroy the world
    Dealing With Incompetent Bosses
    Sometimes, the man in charge shouldn’t be. Learn how to deal with your incompetent boss without getting fired.
    It’s no secret that poor leadership can leave a business in ruins. Consider General Motors’ former C.E.O., Rick Wagoner, whose questionable guidance cost the company approximately $82 billion in the past four years. Is it any wonder President Obama demanded his resignation? Managers come in all shapes and sizes, and you need to recognize their different attributes when dealing with incompetent bosses.
    1)The Corporate Bully
    Characteristics: Rude and drunk with power, corporate bullies will go out of their way to humiliate you in front of clients, colleagues and, of course, their own superiors. Their management strategy consists of making condescending remarks during performance reviews and threatening to fire you every time there’s a problem, whether or not you’re at fault.
    How to Handle This Boss: Dealing with incompetent bosses like the corporate bully can be challenging. The trick is to fly under your supervisor’s radar while drawing attention from the higher ups. Always stand up for yourself, but be subtle about it — a disapproving look can go a long way — and find a mentor who can expose you to new opportunities as well as shield you from your manager’s temper tantrums.
    2)The Micromanager
    Characteristics: Everyone is familiar with the saying, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Micromanagers live by it, nitpicking every aspect of your work, including the number of seconds by which you deviated from your scheduled break. Granted, they provide great support if you don’t mind having someone constantly checking on your progress, but if you value your independence, you’re in trouble.
    How to Handle This Boss: When dealing with incompetent bosses of the sort, it’s important you never appear as if you’re trying to usurp their authority. Micromanagers are typically insecure, so it’s best to keep them apprised of all your actions. However, only do so after the fact. The idea is to give your supervisor the illusion of control while remaining reasonably autonomous.
    3)The Office Politician
    Characteristics: Cowardly and duplicitous, office politicians always put their needs over those of the team. They may act like your best friend, but they’ll stab you in the back the minute you get too chummy with senior management. Broken promises, misinformation and stolen ideas are all par for the course when dealing with incompetent bosses of this kind.
    How to Handle This Boss: The best way to protect yourself against an office politician is to communicate in writing. That way, all your questions, requests and proposals become official record. If your boss tries to finalize the agreement verbally, follow it up with an e-mail confirmation, making sure to CC at least one other person in the company.
    4)The Senior Enforcer
    Characteristics: Usually promoted because of seniority, this type of boss is devoid of common sense, following procedures to the letter and shutting down every effort to innovate. Terrified of making a decision, senior enforcers also have trouble with the notion that maintaining employee morale is among their duties, so don’t expect any sort of flexibility.
    How to Handle This Boss: It’s important you remain solution-minded when dealing with incompetent bosses, especially those lacking initiative. However, keep in mind that senior enforcers are notoriously resistant to change, so don’t bother introducing any groundbreaking ideas until you have a few allies ready to back you up. It’s also best to wait for a large meeting before making your proposal.
    5) The drama queen
    Characteristics: The term refers to managers of any gender who spend most of their day complaining, turning every mild inconvenience into a full-blown problem. Self-centered, disruptive and incapable of forethought, they reject the most obvious solutions just to prolong the situation and make every confrontation personal. Drama queens are never satisfied.
    How to Handle This Boss: Don’t let yourself get sucked in by all the negativity. It’s crucial you remain positive and solution-minded, offering your counsel in private, so as not to offend your supervisor. Another way of dealing with incompetent bosses like this is to ignore their tantrums. Avoid eye contact whenever possible, and schedule your breaks according to their peak complaining hours.
    6)The silent strategist
    Characteristics: Silent strategists often make the workplace unbearable because you can’t tell where you stand with them. They rarely provide feedback and tend to make important executive decisions without informing their staff, relying on a select few to carry out their master plan. As a result, the left hand never knows what the right one is doing.
    How to Handle This Boss: Dealing with incompetent bosses of this sort can be unnerving, but it’s important you keep your paranoia in check. Silent strategists usually don’t realize what they’re doing wrong, so don’t be afraid to voice your concerns and share your innovative ideas. You may become part of your supervisor’s inner circle and bring about real improvements.
    SPEAK OUT
    It’s easy to feel powerless when dealing with incompetent bosses, especially when they’re running the office into the ground, but it’s crucial that you assert yourself and try to affect change. Denouncing your supervisor can be delicate, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t suggest ways to streamline the company. When all is said and done, it may well save your job.

  12. So let’s see if I can summarize the discussion so far:
    A good liberal education in things such as history, philosophy and literature is useless crap — never mind that so many individual counter-examples can be cited to overturn the generalization.
    Yes, I think that pretty well gets it.
    BTW, a friend of mine, head of a biology dept. in a major Can. university, recently acknowledged to me (after I pressed him hard about it) that a proposal to the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada which takes a sceptical view of global warming/climate change is very unlikely to receive funding, despite its overall merit.
    So, since the study of science at Canadian universities has clearly been sold out and politicized, it too can be classified as “useless crap.”

  13. Old white guy — that would depend upon your chosen profession.
    Major of the much maligned English sort here: (yes, I did switch from vet med to English in a mental burp of laziness; yes, while I pulled very good grades with some work in vet med, I pulled great grades as an English major with a lot of procrastination — plus no 8 a.m. labs, and I could ride horses every day and get paid for it, and go drink with my buddies; what wasn’t to love? — I was a stable punk).
    I have no one but myself to blame for my lack of cash now that I’m all grown up and the only real job I can get is teaching. Then again, with all the animal rights nuts, I’m not sure my original dream job would have been without its share of headaches.
    Nonetheless, and all blathering aside, here lies the problem, I did take hard science courses and my English profs were old school and believed in the canon and the laws of aesthetics as laid down by classical Western civ; they also believed in scientific theory and rational thought (I had some good profs). This does not market well in today’s educational sphere; not at all, not one little bit. To actually think or promote thinking is a verboten act.
    Therefore, folks in my particular field who actually think don’t usually wind up with jobs in their profession, or they don’t get very far (once in a great while a rare one will break the ivory ceiling). And this points to why the field/major has become a “worthless piece of crap”, the people who are usually awarded the cherry jobs, the publication of their material, are the ones who like as not follow the party line to a tee, even if the product of their academic endeavors really is worthless, politically motivated crap, and then they go on to teach along those lines, and…vicious cycle, straight ahead.
    — thank goodness I also know how to run machinery and fix things, like tractors, and do office work and balance books; it’s kept me at the very least employed/employable (and I suffer from fewer ulcers and headaches now). Thank goodness for being a barn rat; it’s helped me more than my college education!

  14. Narrow interests = a small mind.
    Read widely, and often. No discipline has a monopoly on wisdom. Only a fool would reject out-of-hand great swaths of human knowledge.

  15. I like his reasoning for which “business” degrees are worthless, and which are not. I wonder if he knows that in most business schools, the difference between a HR degree and Accounting degree is 8 courses. One of his charts totals to ~135%…

  16. @Vitruvius (5:14 PM)
    I reviewed it so long ago, my work’s been demoted to a text file.
    Back at ya:
    Manias, Panics and Crashes – Charles Kindleberger.
    Money Of The Mind – James Grant
    Two I haven’t read but are highly recommended:
    The Art of Contrary Thinking – Humphrey Neill. [Instead, I read a hot-off-the-presses book on the same subject, around 1990. I can’t even recall the title now.]
    Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases In The Money Supply by Doug French. This fellow took one of those economic history degrees; he’s now a senior officer at a bank.

  17. Quite so, Daniel, which is why Marcus Aurelius said:
    “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority,
    but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane”.

  18. what absolute garbage. The richest people I know (net worth of $10m or more- and 1 who is a billionaire) all have Philosophy degrees plus an MBA.
    it’s not the degree, it’s what you do with it. I know plenty of moronic mech engineers.

  19. Not just old people are acceptable targets. Short, fat white guys are acceptable targets for society as well.

  20. mathematics is the one discipline immune to bluff, fakery and huge grey areas. it is like currency, everything can be boiled down to dollars, ie a NUMBER assigned to its value. some more so than others.
    on the topic of numbers, some of the numbers in the posting dont add up. also life ISN’T that black and white.
    except in the ultra- arch- right wing.

  21. The preponderance of junk diplomas in the ranks of the civil service is a problem.
    Philosphy majors, poli-sci majors, and history majors (I KNOW a few myself) who use their brains and go into the world to work and earn their keep are NOT the problem chumpy.
    And BTW There are PLENTY of MBAs who aren’t capable of running any business anywhere but into the ground. I’ve seen them in action .. every last one playing by rote from the playbook of the program (which I’ve been through) … not one bit of creative ability or an original idea among the lot.
    As for the Captain’s take on History majors …. unless you intend to stay in academe there is no point in majoring in History. There IS a point in learning history and IMO it should be mandatory in all areas that in order to get accreditation History has to be a component of the courses.
    Of course … it should also be mandatory that anyone who teaches history NOT be a raving propagandist.

  22. Aaron @ 3:27, that stuff is paleontology. Now that was extremely interesting stuff, because it was based on real science. The rest of it was just glorification of non-Western cultures and how perfect they are as compared to the West – cultural relativism – and how they were all screwed up by Western imperialism. In fact Western cultures weren’t even considered worthy of study. They were just the bad guys.

  23. chumpdog @ 8:11, I’m betting it’s the MBA that got him where he is. Philosophy is a good foundation, better than anthropology, that’s for sure, but only if it’s topped off with something practical. My BA is only one of three degrees that I can list after my name when I’m feeling self-important. The other two are in real practical professions for which there are real jobs.

  24. Louise @10:31 – Yes. Paleontology or paleoanthropology. I should have mentioned that before my rant. As you say, real science, and very interesting.

  25. Doug, I never said to dispense with the study of history. I said that a degree in history is almost worthless as the basis of a career. Unless you plan on becoming a history teacher/professor, or an author, a degree in history doesn’t do much for you. Naming some historic mathematicians or scientists does not justify a history degree. Their contributions are studied where applicable in the appropriate fields of study. When you study Descartes in history class, you won’t be studying the tangent line problem and seeing how calculus evolved from his work. That will be done in math class. And the work of Descartes and Newton can be studied without learning about the individuals, thus separating the useful mathematics from the interesting but not so useful history of the two individuals.

  26. “mathematics is the one discipline immune to bluff, fakery and huge grey areas. it is like currency, everything can be boiled down to dollars, ie a NUMBER assigned to its value. some more so than others”
    Just to play Devil’s Advocate: where did the square root of -1 come from?

  27. People who push money to one group in maximum and
    cut job and minimum life for living
    will lead society to more mental ill and
    more corruption among Canadian
    why some group made more and one group are become Zero while they can prevent this to happend or
    made new plan to change balance society.
    Capitalism vs socialism may both has advantage and disadvanatge
    but push money to one group moer and made other unemployed will lead to more crime and more
    mentally ill and destroy talent
    compare of African country vs. West
    compare country with more unemployeed and has more crime vs country who balance this down to less unemployee numbers
    If we have more problems it made lawyers and police , politican more busy and if we have less problems made business peopel more busy made the choice
    ===========================
    For more information: How Change for better society – and understand
    what cause of those problems
    Go to ‘Yahoo.com’by typing:
    http://ca.yahoo.com/
    then Go to yahoo mail: sign in to yahoo then type
    Yahoo! ID: then type
    Yahoo ID:
    freepublicemailcontentstoread@yahoo.ca
    Password: freeemailcontents
    Go to inbox:
    Then down load the file called:
    Mental-ill.reference.doc
    read all to change society and know all crime and
    problems are related to those topics

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation