January 05, 2004

Social-science parody

Posted by Chris

I’m always keen on parodies of social-scientific writing and this one from John Adams at spiked-online , complete with typologies, weird and complicated diagrams and so on, reminded me of Daniel Bell’s “The Parameters of Social Movements: A Formal Paradigm”, from the Dwight Macdonald collection I mentioned a while back. Great stuff! (via A&L Daily )

Posted on January 5, 2004 02:46 PM UTC
Comments

Fee fi fo fum, I detect the spoor of Frank Furedi …

Posted by dsquared · January 5, 2004 05:11 PM

Has everyone read Isidore Nabi’s On the Tendencies of Motion? (Modern social science replaces Newton, as envisaged by Lewontin and Lewins.)

Posted by Danny Yee · January 5, 2004 10:14 PM

Um, the joke is that it’s not a joke, right?

Posted by Matt Weiner · January 5, 2004 11:43 PM

I was puzzled by the piece at first. But Chris’s take seems to me to be right.

Posted by jam · January 6, 2004 01:18 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.