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> And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts. You had me until the very end. You made a very pe

by wahern 7y ago

> And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts. You had me until the very end. You made a very persuasive argument regarding the framing of research questions. The problem is that it's too persuasive. Clearly almost all studies are heavily biased by their framing, and it stands to reason politically-based framing biases abound in science generally. IMO, we'd be better to err on the side of more empirical data and empirically informed policies, however flawed. And we should be prepared to mitigate biases with more data at least as much as we're prepared to shutdown research altogether, which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.

wybiral 7y ago
Yeah, the entire argument was "there might be some bias from the scientific approach so we should just avoid it entirely" which itself is a biased approach in the opposite direction.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
I agree with you that more research would be better, but the problem remains how to get the politics out of it. > which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether. The text of the Dickey amendment was: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control". That's not actually a research ban, but under a Clinton Whitehouse it had been their motivation for doing the research. And at the same time Congress reduced the CDC's funding, so even though they could have potentially still done research on e.g. methods to reduce firearms deaths without gun control, they didn't actually do that and the research was cut out entirely. We then had some Democrats calling the text a "research ban" because it banned politically-motivated research they wanted, but the larger barrier was really the reduced funding combined with a Democratic executive that didn't really want to do gun research that wasn't directed toward promoting gun control. Both of those have actually changed as of this year, because Trump signed an appropriations bill last year providing more CDC funding. The risk now is that because the shoe is on the other foot, if a Trump CDC produces research to the effect that e.g. not prohibiting upstanding adult citizens from carrying a gun in a school zone would help to deter or mitigate school shootings, or showing that a large proportion of shootings are drug/gang related and proposing solutions to address homicides related to that, you may see Democrats decrying bias the other way. Or just ignoring the results entirely and pretending they don't exist. And that's really the problem. You need people acting in good faith who are willing to take solutions that address the problem without scoring political points against the other team. That isn't a research problem, and more research doesn't fix it if whichever side the outcome of the research disfavors will only dismiss it for not supporting their existing policies. But if you want more research, it looks like we may be getting it. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it also may not do any good, unless we can get past the partisanship -- because there almost certainly are ways to reduce "gun violence" other than gun control. Which should make everybody happy, other than the people who would rather score political points than actually solve the problem. And those people are themselves the bigger problem in general.

by wahern 7y ago

wybiral 7y ago

Yeah, the entire argument was "there might be some bias from the scientific approach so we should just avoid it entirely" which itself is a biased approach in the opposite direction.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

I agree with you that more research would be better, but the problem remains how to get the politics out of it. > which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether. The text of the Dickey amendment was: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control". That's not actually a research ban, but under a Clinton Whitehouse it had been their motivation for doing the research. And at the same time Congress reduced the CDC's funding, so even though they could have potentially still done research on e.g. methods to reduce firearms deaths without gun control, they didn't actually do that and the research was cut out entirely. We then had some Democrats calling the text a "research ban" because it banned politically-motivated research they wanted, but the larger barrier was really the reduced funding combined with a Democratic executive that didn't really want to do gun research that wasn't directed toward promoting gun control. Both of those have actually changed as of this year, because Trump signed an appropriations bill last year providing more CDC funding. The risk now is that because the shoe is on the other foot, if a Trump CDC produces research to the effect that e.g. not prohibiting upstanding adult citizens from carrying a gun in a school zone would help to deter or mitigate school shootings, or showing that a large proportion of shootings are drug/gang related and proposing solutions to address homicides related to that, you may see Democrats decrying bias the other way. Or just ignoring the results entirely and pretending they don't exist. And that's really the problem. You need people acting in good faith who are willing to take solutions that address the problem without scoring political points against the other team. That isn't a research problem, and more research doesn't fix it if whichever side the outcome of the research disfavors will only dismiss it for not supporting their existing policies. But if you want more research, it looks like we may be getting it. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it also may not do any good, unless we can get past the partisanship -- because there almost certainly are ways to reduce "gun violence" other than gun control. Which should make everybody happy, other than the people who would rather score political points than actually solve the problem. And those people are themselves the bigger problem in general.