3 ms·

It’s simply invalid science. It’s equivalent to having variables x, y, z, setting x = 0 and then exploring the correlation between y and z. That’s a fair exper

• kristopolous 6y ago
  No it's not. It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others. Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways. Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine was fake but didn't want to mess up the experiment so they played along. Do we throw that out then? Everything real is complex, we aren't dealing with carefully defined clean room abstractions. The Asch conformity test with the lines, many participants expressed extreme indifference to the arbitrary exercise after the confederates disagreed. They simply did whatever was required to complete the experiment. Do we toss that out? All experiments are like this. Every single one. That's why you have to do multiple different kinds and have a preponderance of evidence from a diversity of approaches. That's the whole point The opposite baseline belief, that mannerisms, poise and confidence have absolutely nothing to do with class signalling and that class absolutely does not reproduce itself through social institutions, seems to me to be the more implausible hypothesis here. There'd have to be some new hypothesis to explain why it so clearly looks like going to Eton or Harvard and growing up in the Hamptons affords one preferences in the job market even when the prospect employer doesn't know such details. Personally I think that's the one that should be on the defensive. A confounding factor there is the one that needs demonstration.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    I would fully expect that receiving a good education would provide benefits even if you didn’t tell anyone specifically where you went. I daily use my education to my benefit and very rarely does it come up where I attended.
  • michaelt 6y ago
    If I had to study the effect on fuel economy of having the top down on a convertible, I'd want to control for speed. But if I controlled for speed by simply setting the speed to zero, people ought to question my work even if my results agree with their expectations :)
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      That's not this. It's a false equivalency. You've just restated the same error as the thing I responded to The thing you'd be "zeroing" in this situation would be to find a specified road and weather condition and then demonstrate the existence of a drag coefficient by letting the car coast down the same hill with the top on or off and seeing how far it goes before stopping and how long it takes to get there In your analogy you'd be up against the assumption that fuel economy is universally constant. Here, you're trying to show that it's not constant and the shape of the vehicle is part of the reason why. You do this by removing confounding variables to demonstrate whether a phenomena is real or just a confluence of other things and merely presenting a convincing illusion. We would want to take engine combustion and driving habits out of the tests. We would be pushing the car off at neutral down the hill. You want those noise creating events to not disrupt your signal We're trying to establish if something is potentially real. Coincidentally there's been a slew of bogus fuel efficiency additive products that have measurable effects because the people using them habitually change their driving style creating a false positive. Grifters have successfully been hawking this driving placebo scam for 50 years because when you bring all the other stuff in it's hard to tell what's real and what's just in the head. It's easy to falsely attribute things based on the stories we like to tell ourselves. Also to extend the car pushing thing to the counternarrative example someone could claim that it was merely the tires were warmed up the second run, thus being more inflated and that's what caused a time discrepancy so drag coefficient is still an unsupported idea. No matter what you do, there's always a hole somewhere. That's why it's gotta be more than one type of demonstration. To borrow a French idiom, it's all about cherchez le creneau and constructing new experiments.
• ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "It’s simply invalid science" So the whole peer review comittee was asleep, but you are here to tell us
  • tomp 6y ago
    I don't think it's generally sound life advice to outsource thinking to others. In addition, judging by the topic, this was a sociology department study. Social studies are hardly even science, and the practitioners aren't exactly renowned for their statistical skills. I'm much more confident about my Oxford Masters of Science degree in math.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Can you be an expert in all things that affect your life? Have you studied nutrition, medicine, law, finance, construction and soil stability, to the extent where you can distinguish a phony research paper? All of us rely on others in society to do their part and to get it mostly right. So if you are going to declare research invalid purely based on your judgement, you better have a bullerproof argument. As an exaggerated example, I know a bloke who is "thinking for himself" and has concluded that a medicine is dangerous because it contains clorine, and clorine is toxic. So he has a set of facts, and they are correct, but the conclusion is wrong because he does not understand the basics of chemistry, and that once that clorine atom is part of a larger molecule, it has completely different properties. If you study "facts" without understanding the field these mistakes are easy to make, all the more so if you approach from the high horse of a 'i am clever and have a brilliant degree"
      • tomp 6y ago
        But I’m not doubting chemistry or physics. I’m doubting sociology (not a science), and even more I’m doubting math/stats (the basis of experimental science).