Monday, October 5, 2009

The Strength of Weak Research Methodology

Granovetter's The Strength of Weak Ties, while riddled with examples of excruciatingly poor execution of the scientific method, is nevertheless a truly enlightening piece of scholarship.

Reading sentences like "the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie," and "A thorough mathematical model would do this in some detail... This analysis becomes rather involved, however, and it is sufficient for my purpose in this paper to say that the triad which is most unlikely to occur, under the hypothesis stated above, is that in which A and B are strongly linked, A has a strong tie to some friend C, but the tie between C and B is absent." make the mathematician and scientist in me want to reject the paper outright as somebody's pet theory being trumped up as rigorous on the foundation of some paltry handwaving. To have the very scale on which he makes the all-important distinction between strong and weak ties be so terribly ill-defined; to assume without even mentioning the assumption that the least likely among a set of alternatives is significantly less likely than all others in the set: even in a paper as aware of its own non-technicality as this one, these are not really acceptable practices.

But my aim isn't to call Granovetter out on this point, but rather to examine what meaning it has in light of the fact that his argument is so intuitively powerful. Despite his lack of rigor, the paper has the Ring of Truth about it (to the degree that it has made me start thinking proactively about strengthening my existing/creating new weak social ties. What does it mean that it has that Ring despite the fact one could support nearly any argument, no matter how absurd, on an equally sound mathematical foundation? I reject the notion that any thus supported argument can acquire the Ring if well enough written. Whence, then, that veridical clangor here? I can only assume that it is a product of the meeting of the text and my mind; that the concepts made explicit in the text speak their truth to me only through my previous experience of those same concepts as they have manifested in my daily life. Would a being with no knowledge of the actual state of affairs 'on the ground' here at Earth conclude from this paper that e too should, upon arrival, begin strengthening eir network of weak ties? I have to conclude that e would not.

If the foregoing is admitted, is this a Good paper? Surely its audience consists entirely in Earthlings. If it can clarify to them their own lives, is there not value in that? There undeniably is. But could it not also be better, were it more general? I want to believe so, but I am not sure.

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Man, The Matrix is such a bad movie. I would be ready to forgive it it's ham-fisted script, high-school-grade acting, and unspectacular metaplot (Wow, the whole universe is a computer-generated fiction? That's amazing! How did that ever come to happen? Oh. We made our robots so smart they not only defeated us, they also developed keen senses of irony and decided they needed to eat us, too. And make us a playground for some reason. Uh-huh.) and appreciate it for its noble attempt to bring philosophy to the masses, but there too it ultimately fails, delivering a message so confused and tangled up with adolescent power fantasy/escapism as to be almost entirely worthless. The resistance movement is founded on the (dubious) principle that it really is better to live in constant danger in a desolate postapocalyptic ruin than in relative prosperity in urban America c. 1999, but Neo's revelatory moment, in which he realizes he can put the last letter of his name in the front, is possibly only within the Matrix; his promise of 'a world where anything is possible' completely devoid of value in the real world; his exhilarating aerial exit a triumph not of Truth over Falsehood, but of Hacker over Game, an entirely in-universe, and thus empty, victory.

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Jameson had some very interesting things to say, about which I in turn have further things to say, but I elect at this moment to trade sleep for speech, in the hopes that I might make the reverse bargain during section.

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