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Bias and deliberate dishonesty are entirely different things. One can have a bias and still produce a relatively objective study. The Gallup study referenced
by skh 8y ago
Bias and deliberate dishonesty are entirely different things. One can have a bias and still produce a relatively objective study.
The Gallup study referenced in the NYT article you cited says:
State of the American Workplace delivers unprecedented analytics and advice on the changing workplace, using data collected from more than 195,600 U.S. employees, more than 31 million respondents, and insight from advising leading Fortune 1000 companies.
What it doesn’t say is that this is a random sample of all employees. Indeed one of the stated purposes of the study is
enable people to work successfully from locations besides the office
I don’t know the percentage of all workers that work in an office but I’m guessing farm laborers, miners, cleaning staff, delivery drivers, retail workers, etc. make up a significant portion of the working population and I gather from Gallup’s writing about its study is that it is focused on big companies with large numbers of office workers.
One must also take into account the Murray-Gellmann Amnesia Effect. A NYT article is not on par with a study by an expert.
Regardless of all this you miss the point of my original response. You’ve come up with possible objections to a study by an expert. Rather than assume you are the one missing information you assume the expert is being deliberately misleading. A reasonable person would not assume this. A reasonable person would assume that the professor, while possibly wrong, still knows more about the issue and use the opportunity to learn more.
The most natural question by you is, “Why does the professor make the conclusion he makes despite these objections?” One answer is bias. Another is because the objections are easily debunked. Which one do you think is more likely?
- bko 8y agoAppeal to Authority: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. I don't know why there was no followup or mention of these obvious objections I came up with by thinking about it for a few minutes. But it wasn't. I'm not going to take his claims at face value and it appears he is pushing an agenda through hyperbolic language (e.g. "killing us")
- skh 8y agoYou are incorrectly stating the Fallacy of the False Appeal to Authority. Citing an expert in their area of expertise is not an argumentative fallacy. I have no views as such on the study in question. I just know that there is a study by an expert and there are bko’s objections to it. Which one is more believable? I think it is much more likely that you are wrong and he is right. I’m guessing you haven’t read the professor’s work. The academic work he published and not an article in a magazine. So you don’t know if your objections have been accounted for in his work. You won’t take an expert’s claims at face value and instead trust your judgments on an issue you have no expertise on? This reminds me of Asimov’s famous quote. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/456687-there-is-a-cult-of-ignorance-in-the-united-states https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/456687-there-is-a-cult-of-i...
- bko 8y ago> You won’t take an expert’s claims at face value Again this is appeal to authority. I trust the numbers coming out of the Fed that tell me unemployment and working hours are down Now another expert tells me people are facing crazy hours and layoffs that. So I choose to believe the Fed.
- skh 8y agoYou don’t understand what the fallacy of the false appeal to authority is. It’s interesting that you accuse me of “appeal to authority” and then right away cite an expert source. Do you not see the hypocrisy in this? The professor lists a series of things that cause workers stress. Layoffs being one of them. The claim is not that every source of stress is increasing but rather the aggregate level of stress is increasing. It’s clear from the focus of the statistics you cite that you are likely much more uninformed than the professor.
- skh 8y agoAs I suspected your statititic for the average number of hours worked per year does not tell the whole story and is not pertinent to the discussion at hand. Front he OECD source you quoted: The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources. Part-time workers are covered as well as full-time workers.
- Latteland 8y agoI'm curious why you think your own sense of how workplaces treat people and hiring is tight map into the endless stories about people who can't find jobs, or jobs that don't pay enough to live on. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6335063/Americas-hidden-underclass-62-jobs-DONT-pay-support-middle-class-lifestyle.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6335063/Americas-hi... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/magazine/americans-jobs-poverty-homeless.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/magazine/americans-jobs-p... https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/30/jobs-62-percent-fall-short-middle-class-standard-us/1809629002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/30/jobs-62-perc...