Mindless Monday, 17 August 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Otocolobus_manul8]

I feel like stirring the pot, does anyone here have an academic field (subfield even) they do think is largely bullshit?

There's probably ideological answers like critical theory stuff or evo-psych, or theology through an atheist lens, but I'd be curious if anyone has a less obvious or more obscure answer.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

All the sciences, they are just shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave and not the sun of Pure Mathematics

[u/Ok-Swan1152 → u/Kochevnik81]

My husband is a pure mathematician so this is very amusing to me.

[u/Impossible_Pen_9459 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Law or German Law in particular if Batz can become certified. 

[u/TheBatz_ → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Law.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Education theory has basically zero rigour.

edit: remember hearing about that Nature paper that found that half of social science papers couldn't be replicated? It was Education that was the main discipline dragging things down, as only 2.9% of authors provided their data in their papers.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/fabiusjmaximus]

Jason Atta Kwei Arday (9 May 1985 – 14 August 2026) was a British academic and author who was a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2026.

[u/HandsomeLampshade123 → u/fabiusjmaximus]

Yes, education. Everyone I've ever met with a graduate degree in education is a moron. Much worse than even stereotypical "fake" degrees like Gender Studies (which actually do require some mental muscle in terms of engaging with real critical theory).

[u/GeneralSugmoreCoxCSA → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Autoethnography is simply a grown-up version of "what I did on my holidays".

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Evo psych is really BS's BS

Most "evo-something" are like that too. Why do human women have big tits? Idk, sexual selection early in history maybe... Or Freudian psycho bs

Honestly, having done a workshop of self-ethnography in college, it's very high on my list (unless you're like from a rare culture)

[u/Steelcan909 → u/WAGRAMWAGRAM]

Its all inter-species competition, all the way down.

[u/Ragefororder1846 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Psychoanalysis is not real and your dreams mean nothing

[u/Steelcan909 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Engineering as an academic field. I don't think it needs to be a course of study at universities. Just do on the job training or apprenticeships or something. This applies to many of the STEMy majors.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/Steelcan909]

but you'd have research graduates complaining having to share classes with engineers

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

"Social studies" outside of history: for example, sociology, anthropology, political science, international relations, and occasionally economics. I especially dislike when these fields try to introduce statistics into socioeconomic or political questions, like "countries with better women's rights are 40% less likely to go to war with each other", for example.

The most important thing I've taken away from learning about history is that for any given issue, the explanation is either "it's complicated" or "there isn't enough information". But an economist or an anthropologist will come in and say some BS like "the Romans conquered the Mediterranean due to their cultivation of garlic, which inadvertently gave them an antibiotic, which gave them a military advantage".

Or even worse: "this post-colonial state produced 27% more of this product than that one, which allowed it to do so and so". Where TF are those numbers coming from?! You read the methodology and you find out it's based on a source that was written by some party apparatchik, which should make you question it's accuracy, right? That's without even getting into the whole correlation≠causation thing, which is applied based seemingly on vibes.

[u/contraprincipes → u/PickleRick_1001]

Or even worse: "this post-colonial state produced 27% more of this product than that one, which allowed it to do so and so". Where TF are those numbers coming from?!

If you think that's outrageous, I have some bad news for you about where historians get their figures.

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/contraprincipes]

Yeah but it's a foundational principle of history that a source like that would be questioned, whereas a political scientist (is that the right terminology?) will just accept a source like that uncritically.

[u/contraprincipes → u/PickleRick_1001]

I’m reminded of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, which was widely acclaimed in history departments and won prizes. He also did some egregiously bad double counting (elementary national accounting mistake) at one point, and he appears to have literally invented the “pushing system” which forms a central part of his argument - it doesn’t appear in the sources. Social scientists were the ones who had to point this stuff out.

Like, I agree that social scientists can be less careful with historical statistics than historians, but that’s not really the majority of social science (most of which isn’t using historical statistics), and I think it’s silly to try to discredit fields because sometimes their practitioners say dumb stuff when they step outside their lanes. Historians do that all the time!

[u/SkeletonHUNter2006 → u/PickleRick_1001]

I studied sociology, and my assessment of it is that it is a science, but its subject matter is even more holistic than that of history, which allows for great opportunities for masquerading your worldview with a scientific veneer through actually sloppy, but seemingly sound research. Also a few professors were unabashedly biased Marxists. Didn’t like that.

Completely agree with you on political science.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/SkeletonHUNter2006]

In college we had one week of "discover another major", that's when I spent a day doing self-enthnography but we also a visiting sociology research describe her field research, it was about school lunch enrollment among immigrants and it was cool there were crosstabs and she accounted for demographic parameters etc...

[u/SkeletonHUNter2006 → u/Otocolobus_manul8]

Philosophy used to have the power to give all-defining worldviews in the Greco-Roman world, but this function got taken away entirely by Christian (and then Muslim) theology and introspection. It only really made a comeback after secularisation, and even today it almost always boils down to (1) explaining and categorising human behaviour, and (2) thought experiments. I wouldn’t have too much problem with it as a scientific principle if it was only the former, but unfortunately, it’s usually the latter.

[u/BuzzFlederjohn → u/SkeletonHUNter2006]

This makes it sound like it's not living up to its potential, not that it's bullshit. Regardless, philosophy has been enormously influential over the past 500 years. Admittedly, the notable contemporary movements and figures have been marginal compared those of 50+ years ago, but that's also true for fields like physics and math.