Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[M.L.]

I think there is a big tendency in this discussion toward a typology of social sciences that inaccurately implies that social science folks are all academic theoreticians. I suspect that most people with economics degrees are, in fact, gainfully employed in very practical day to day real life things that could never be defined as "soft."

The implementation failure for HTS, in my opinion, was to become lost in academia and "soft" theoretical analysis. They would have been better of at the HR/Recruiting stage to avoid academia completely and go after "hard" social scientists with deep reasoning skills in real world applications.

Steve:

To be honest, I could care less what someone does for a living, academic or otherwise. The bottom line is that we need people who can think - whether we find them in academia or "real world" occupations is irrelevant.

I did my first graduate thesis on the relationship of experience to job performance. I found (stunningly), that cognitive ability, rather than experience, is the single best predictor of future performance. In simplistic terms - smart people are better at almost everything.

I understand where you are coming from, but the choice between academics and "real world" social scientists is a false dichotomy.