3 ms·

> After a lot of arguing and furious paper writing in the late 80s-90s, everyone began working on how to deal with that bias, moving it front and center where i

> After a lot of arguing and furious paper writing in the late 80s-90s, everyone began working on how to deal with that bias, moving it front and center where it can be handled instead of subtly hiding it in a bunch of numbers and pretending it didn't exist. And the result of that is... what exactly?

thrwayxyz 7y ago
The homeless epidemic mostly. Sometimes doing badly is better than doing terribly. In the name of the perfect and being 'non prejudiced' the current generation of psychologists have doomed the mentally ill to living standards lower than the 19th century and a life expectancy on par.
- mancerayder 7y ago
  That's a bold claim, perhaps worthy of elaboration.
AlotOfReading 7y ago
Vastly improved methodology and understanding of results. One of the issues of modernist research was that objective data was trash, but no one knew it. For instance, anthropologists would throw out / fail to collect artifacts that weren't usable with the analyses available at the time. You can't recover that from a table that says 50 bone shards were found in a pit. You can begin to recover that if the researcher flat out says they don't believe small bones are useful for the easily (an ideological position). Or, to use the example I gave earlier, if both a white male researcher and a female Afghani researcher studied menstruation in Kabul, they very well might get different results without any deficiencies in methodology by either. You can start to explain that if the researchers both flat out state their approaches and assumptions in interacting with their female subjects. Doing that requires us to understand that the researcher affects the results though, which is a fundamentally different view than standard empiricism.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > You can start to explain that if the researchers both flat out state their approaches and assumptions in interacting with their female subjects. I would think that the foundation behind your argument - which I agree with - implies that this isn't actually possible. You have an infinite regress of biases. Empirically, what you can do - to take your example of those menstruation researchers - is to get more data from researchers of different backgrounds to try and statistically isolate those biases. This is part of "standard empiricism". You also always have to live with the fact that data is sometimes too noisy to be meaningful.

thrwayxyz 7y ago

The homeless epidemic mostly. Sometimes doing badly is better than doing terribly. In the name of the perfect and being 'non prejudiced' the current generation of psychologists have doomed the mentally ill to living standards lower than the 19th century and a life expectancy on par.

mancerayder 7y ago
That's a bold claim, perhaps worthy of elaboration.

AlotOfReading 7y ago

Vastly improved methodology and understanding of results. One of the issues of modernist research was that objective data was trash, but no one knew it. For instance, anthropologists would throw out / fail to collect artifacts that weren't usable with the analyses available at the time. You can't recover that from a table that says 50 bone shards were found in a pit. You can begin to recover that if the researcher flat out says they don't believe small bones are useful for the easily (an ideological position). Or, to use the example I gave earlier, if both a white male researcher and a female Afghani researcher studied menstruation in Kabul, they very well might get different results without any deficiencies in methodology by either. You can start to explain that if the researchers both flat out state their approaches and assumptions in interacting with their female subjects. Doing that requires us to understand that the researcher affects the results though, which is a fundamentally different view than standard empiricism.

gridlockd 7y ago
> You can start to explain that if the researchers both flat out state their approaches and assumptions in interacting with their female subjects. I would think that the foundation behind your argument - which I agree with - implies that this isn't actually possible. You have an infinite regress of biases. Empirically, what you can do - to take your example of those menstruation researchers - is to get more data from researchers of different backgrounds to try and statistically isolate those biases. This is part of "standard empiricism". You also always have to live with the fact that data is sometimes too noisy to be meaningful.