A fair bit of "science" is about providing training to the following generations. Sure, your example isn't going to turn up any new insights into structural racism but it is something that you can point grad students at to learn how to capture data.

Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.

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timr 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.

Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.

Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.

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thinkthatover 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.

Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.

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timr 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research.

I mean...not to be too flippant, but they don't. They're busy with hard problems to actually get people out of poverty, and don't have to worry about pesky partisan politics getting in the way. Plus, like, Mao is not that far in the rear-view mirror, y'know? It would be at least a little bit ironic to spend a lot of time researching that question.

	▲	nixon_why69 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_in_China Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation. (Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)