Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

impure

2022-12-01 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
impure
Votey panel for impure
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a conversation at what appears to be a social gathering, where someone asks a woman what it feels like to be in one of the "impure, not-real, normative sciences" (i.e., social sciences). She responds by describing her work in a way that highlights how complex and important it actually is -- she studies patterns in human systems that don't repeat neatly, requiring sophisticated analysis.

The man then dismisses her field again, claiming his work in physics or a "pure" science is more rigorous. She fires back by pointing out that his "pure system" amounts to putting 400 men on an island to study particles, while she's studying systems that actually affect billions of people's lives. When he says "I never thought of it that way," she responds with resignation: "No compromise and no change, that's how it works." The comic satirizes the academic pecking order where "hard" sciences look down on social sciences, despite the latter dealing with far more complex and consequential systems. The irony is that the dismissive scientist can't see the value in studying human behavior -- itself a very human blind spot.

View History (1) Original Comic
← Previous Comic Next Comic →