Regarding academic study, sociology is so partisan you need not worry about them using computer science and/or logic to uncover hidden truths in the near future.

In the private sector however, companies such as Premise and Palantir are already eons ahead of academia, but their insights and data are proprietary.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics

The non-fictional equivalent.

This is my field, too. I am a Ph.D. candidate in computational social science, working on a computational model of social belief systems.

I'm quite happy to see this on HN. Like many other disciplines, our field is blossoming with the rise of cheap, high performance computing!

If your involved in this field and on HN, please reach out to me at @generativist on twitter. I'm in the process of setting up a community for CSS work, and will be soliciting feedback soon!

Re policy, it's used e.g. in environmental resource management (regional level), anti-terrorism (networks, opinion dynamics), urban planning, disease control. Policy isn't based alone on it, of course. But it's used as an ingredient. Often the models aren't good enough (lack of data and quantifiable causal relationships) to gain an exact image of the modeled system, but they provide a general system understanding (system behavior under different [intervention] scenarios) that is often educational and gives insights that then need to be empirically validated.

A barrier to increase its use in policy-making is the "science-policy gap" between researchers and decision-makers. Either they don't understand the utility of model results and dismiss them or they trust them too much--both is not good. So researchers had to come up with ways to communicate results, often include decision-makers (and other stakeholders) in the modeling process.

Depending on how you classify him (as an economist or a sociologist), Thomas Schelling's work on residential segregation has likely informed policy over the last decades.

Recently a nice animation of his dynamic models of segregation processes was posted here: http://ncase.me/polygons/

I mean, the field has inspired how Facebook determines to serve up news feed content so, in a way, it has driven policy by way of influencing democracy.

Was the CS department at Evergreen College involved in the protest?

If it's repeated in coming years, you should go to this summer school: https://www.russellsage.org/summer-institute-computational-s...

Since you're in the UK, look at [1] and perhaps check topics that interest you and follow the names at [2]. Then we have the European Social Simulation Association [3] with Summer Schools and annual conferences.

[1] http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/web/home

[2] http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html

[3] http://www.essa.eu.org/