I have many friends who are STEM majors, and many of them care about social issues and sometimes like to develop their own social theories or share social theoretical ideas. I've noticed that there's a general thought style that these theories tend to lean, and dissecting them tells us a lot about how different disciplines think in different paradigms. First and unsurprisingly, stem people like to use natural science metaphors. A clear example of this is the idea of "meme" which tries to transl...

Inside academia (or at least in the field of sociology), scholars like to emphasize that they are producing works that speak to a broad audience, address pressing social issues, and engage people. This all sounds great, right? Who wouldn't want public-funded research to be accessible to the public? Wouldn't it be elitist and undemocratic to lock up research away from the public? The problem with people producing popular social science works (think Freakonomics, Why Nations Fail, Evicted, The Vi...

There's a joke that your gender can be anything you want, so it can even be a fighter helicopter if you so desire. Many people use this as a way to point to the ridiculousness of contemporary gender studies. Feminists, for the most part, treat this as what it is, a joke, but let's examine this "joke" in more detail. So, why can't one's gender be a fighter helicopter? The short answer is: you can't because you're being disingenuous. When gender studies scholar talk about non-conforming gender id...

To do list Apps are great, or so they seem. To do list Apps help us keep things organized but freeing our brain from the mental clutter of juggling too many tasks at once. Since using Tick Tick, the new to do list app developed by __, I've noticed some changes in the way I operate. I'm here to share some of these thoughts with you. The basic interface of most to do list apps is simple: there's a place where you enter the things on your to do list, and a space that shows the items on that list. ...