Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus

August 12, 2016 6:56 AM

PSY 607: Everything is Fucked. What does it mean, in science, for something to be fucked? Fucked needs to mean more than that something is complicated or must be undertaken with thought and care, as that would be trivially true of everything in science. In this class we will go a step further and say that something is fucked if it presents hard conceptual challenges to which implementable, real-world solutions for working scientists are either not available or routinely ignored in practice.

The format of this seminar is as follows: Each week we will read and discuss 1-2 papers that raise the question of whether something is fucked. Our focus will be on things that may be fucked in research methods, scientific practice, and philosophy of science. The potential fuckedness of specific theories, research topics, etc. will not be the focus of this class per se, but rather will be used to illustrate these important topics. To that end, each week a different student will be assigned to find a paper that illustrates the fuckedness (or lack thereof) of that week’s topic, and give a 15-minute presentation about whether it is indeed fucked.

posted by srboisvert (14 comments total)

PSY 707: how to unfuck life. (Lab required)
posted by clavdivs at 7:03 AM on August 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

Name and tone aside, this is a serious and worthwhile syllabus on dubious statistics in scientific journals.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:09 AM on August 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

ENG 607: Why "Fucked"? Why is "to be fucked" a bad thing in English-speaking culture? In this class we examine the kyriarchical and sexist underpinnings of a common phrase, and question the assumptions that have allowed it to enter common parlance.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:11 AM on August 12, 2016 [24 favorites]

Computer security is fucked, I know that for certain... the problem is called ambient authority, and it's about as bad as the idea of giving an class of 8 year old boys fully loaded Uzis.
posted by MikeWarot at 8:22 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Week 11: You are fucked
Universities produce 20x as many PhDs as there are academic jobs for those PhDs. Fortunately you are getting a psychology PhD, which at least has some practical applicability. You can take all those years sweating over R and become a "data scientist", applying statistics to improve ad revenue 2.3% on clickbait web sites. Don't tell your boss how fucked those statistics are!
posted by Nelson at 9:33 AM on August 12, 2016 [24 favorites]

I assume the prof has tenure...tenure means never having to say you are sorry.
posted by Postroad at 10:07 AM on August 12, 2016

Grading:

20% Attendance and participation
30% In-class presentation
50% Final exam

Wait, where's the fucking?
posted by chavenet at 10:11 AM on August 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

With my luck, I'd oversleep and miss Week 7.
posted by Cheezitsofcool at 10:18 AM on August 12, 2016

Everyone would be much better off missing week 7.
posted by ethansr at 10:21 AM on August 12, 2016

This isn't quite as great as Kieran Healy's Social Theory Through Complaining:

This course is an intensive introduction to some main themes in social theory. It is required of first year Ph.D students in the sociology department. Each week we will focus on something grad students complain about when they are forced to take theory. You are required to attend under protest, write a paper that’s a total waste of your time, and complain constantly. Passive-aggressive silence will not be sufficient for credit.

...but it's still pretty great! Should I turn out to be one of the lucky few not totally fucked by the job market, I'm going to aim to come up with an intro to anthropological theory syllabus in this spirit, some day.
posted by karayel at 11:15 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

To address Faint of Butt's legitimate concerns, I would rename the course "Everything Is Clickbait." The funny thing about the word "clickbait" is that it can substitute for any number of words designed to do the things that clickbait is designed to do, but with the opposite moral valence:

"This mom made a [painting/clickbait] for her daughter with cancer. What happened next will shock you!"
"Trump absolutely [destroys/clickbaits] MSM on Killary!"
"My jaw dropped when I read this [Jonathan Franzen essay/clickbait]"

Plus, you could cross-list it with PHIL because of the self-referential nature of the course title, which is, itself, clickbait.

god damn i'm clever
posted by radicalawyer at 11:24 AM on August 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Presentation aside, this seems like a handy reading list.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:11 PM on August 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yup, it's definitely an interesting reading list for anyone interested in experiment design, statistics, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:17 PM on August 12, 2016

Yeah, I would love it if this course were offered to students in my department. But it's not dubious statistics that are the problem. As the syllabus makes clear, the incentives for scientists for academic positions and for grant funding are all wrong, statistical inference is fraught with problems even when using the 'correct' statistic and there do not seem to be solutions on the horizon to solve these problems. And these problems are not just in social psychology, particularly the replicability problem, but are pervasive in other areas of psychology and across science even in areas that are traditionally viewed as 'hard sciences'. What was news to me (a research psychologist) is that meta-analysis is also fraught with problems so replicability across even large sets of studies is a problem too! geesh - science was easier when all you needed was an apple and a tower.
posted by bluesky43 at 3:22 PM on August 12, 2016 [7 favorites]