Metasocial Sciences

The study of the study of society. It's the academic equivalent of holding a mirror up to a mirror and trying to analyze the reflection. Metasocial sciences don't examine social behavior directly; they examine the theories, methods, and biases of the people who examine social behavior. It's a field where you can get a PhD for writing a paper about why other academics wrote their papers the way they did, and the ultimate goal is to achieve a state of analytical navel-gazing so pure that you forget there are actual people involved.

Example: "Her thesis in metasocial sciences was a meta-analysis of the citation patterns in papers about citation patterns. It was considered a landmark study by the three people in the world who understood it, and utterly meaningless by everyone else."

Metasocial Sciences by Abzugal February 14, 2026

Metasocial Social Sciences

The recursive discipline of applying social scientific methods to the community of social scientists themselves. It's the study of the academic tribes, their rituals (conferences), their status symbols (citations, tenure), and their origin myths (the "founding fathers"). It examines why certain theories become fashionable and others are forgotten, why some departments are feuding and others are allied, and why the phrase "paradigm shift" is used so often it has lost all meaning. It's sociology for sociologists, and it requires a high tolerance for inside jokes.

Example: "A metasocial social sciences study observed that papers with longer titles and more complex jargon were cited more frequently, regardless of their actual content. This confirmed what every grad student suspected: in academia, sounding smart is often more important than being smart."

Metasocial Social Sciences by Abzugal February 14, 2026