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Thank you for taking the time to read this; it took me long enough to write that I was afraid it would be for naught. I think you are reading me more narrowly

Thank you for taking the time to read this; it took me long enough to write that I was afraid it would be for naught. I think you are reading me more narrowly than I want to be read, but I don't fault you there. I am not good at communicating this concept yet. I picked the first study because I start at the beginning, and look for loose threads. I didn't pick on this study because I think its methodology is terrible. I just picked on the first few loose threads I found, and pulled. I pulled on the threads to (try to) model and promote how I go about searching for things that aren't facially obvious, and to demonstrate how applying this process (showing my math) leads me inexorably to one conclusion: it is very hard to think and communicate about things like this in a sound, lucid manner. I'm not here to poke holes in individual studies or "prove" anything, but to encourage you to look for loose threads in the epistemic fabric, here. In closing, and to be more specific: listing a bunch of issues with the study doesn't make it wrong. Proving the study wrong is not the point. The issues highlight some of the epistemic hubris in the study, and hopefully to expose how that sort of hubris can compound as we summarize work like this and weave it into higher-level narratives. It may help to see this as laundering unearned/unexamined assumptions at lower levels.

btilly 7y ago
If you haven't already, you may be interested in the Replication Crisis and various related research on metascience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis has an overview and you can dig in from there. That said, I've run across enough lines of evidence, both from anecdote and research, that this particular phenomena seems likely to be real.
- abathur 7y ago
  Last fall, my father asked what I thought about a video on YouTube that took a passage from the Book of Revelation, upcoming astral events from Stellarium, and interpreted them into an end-days prediction. I said that it held about as much water as predictions based on numerology. And then he asked what I would think if the astral event happened when and as described in the video. I said I had no reason to assume Stellarium was wrong, but that the fact of some arrangement of astral bodies doesn't inherently validate any interpretation that the arrangement is significant, nor any subsequent interpretation of what its significance is.
  - btilly 7y ago
    And the relevance of your example is...? Hormonal differences are known to cause a host of physical differences between the genders, a host of behavioral differences (have you read the research on what testosterone does?), and a tremendous amount of mental differences in other species. But political correctness causes us to reject out of hand the idea that biology could cause modest differences in average mental abilities and interests in homo sapiens. There is no question that a few decades ago people casually accepted conclusions about gender differences that we today recognize are fallacious. But the current consensus is an absurd overreaction.
    - abathur 7y ago
      It feels like you're lobbing points from trench to trench. I am not in either trench, and wouldn't like to be (there are weird things in both trenches), so I'm doing what I can to avoid the established battle lines. I am not trying to debate or argue or win, so there is no satisfying crunch. I am just hoping to say a few things you can chew on (without being too much of a jerk along the way).

btilly 7y ago

If you haven't already, you may be interested in the Replication Crisis and various related research on metascience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis has an overview and you can dig in from there. That said, I've run across enough lines of evidence, both from anecdote and research, that this particular phenomena seems likely to be real.

abathur 7y ago
Last fall, my father asked what I thought about a video on YouTube that took a passage from the Book of Revelation, upcoming astral events from Stellarium, and interpreted them into an end-days prediction. I said that it held about as much water as predictions based on numerology. And then he asked what I would think if the astral event happened when and as described in the video. I said I had no reason to assume Stellarium was wrong, but that the fact of some arrangement of astral bodies doesn't inherently validate any interpretation that the arrangement is significant, nor any subsequent interpretation of what its significance is.
- btilly 7y ago
  And the relevance of your example is...? Hormonal differences are known to cause a host of physical differences between the genders, a host of behavioral differences (have you read the research on what testosterone does?), and a tremendous amount of mental differences in other species. But political correctness causes us to reject out of hand the idea that biology could cause modest differences in average mental abilities and interests in homo sapiens. There is no question that a few decades ago people casually accepted conclusions about gender differences that we today recognize are fallacious. But the current consensus is an absurd overreaction.
  - abathur 7y ago
    It feels like you're lobbing points from trench to trench. I am not in either trench, and wouldn't like to be (there are weird things in both trenches), so I'm doing what I can to avoid the established battle lines. I am not trying to debate or argue or win, so there is no satisfying crunch. I am just hoping to say a few things you can chew on (without being too much of a jerk along the way).