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The passage you quoted is the standard "cover your ass" disclaimer that you can find in almost any social science publication today, where the authors basically
by p-e-w 3y ago
The passage you quoted is the standard "cover your ass" disclaimer that you can find in almost any social science publication today, where the authors basically state that their results become invalid the moment they are used to draw potentially controversial conclusions.
I've long learned to just ignore such statements. Either the data can be analyzed, or it's worthless. But which of the two is the case doesn't depend on the conclusion being drawn. In the Soviet Union, it was common for scientific articles to emphasize how the authors used "Marxist-Leninist science" to achieve their breakthroughs. I view those disclaimers as a modern equivalent to this phenomenon, unsurprising considering that scientific freedom during the past 20 years has been lower than at almost any point since the 18th century or so.
- drewdevault 3y agoThe passage I quoted is one paragraph out of seven pages spent addressing the challenges in defining and analyzing ethnic groups and drawing conclusions from that data, not to mention numerous caveats and counter-examples provided throughout the text intermixed with his methodology and data analyses, or the extra text re-enforcing these problems in the conclusion -- not some brief cover-your-ass passage but rather one quote from a lengthy and detailed academic analysis of the problems inherent in this data. It would be obvious had you read the paper -- but you selectively pick and choose whatever information and "data" that supports your racist conclusions and don't examine it any further in case it would turn out not to, a trend seen in every source you have cited in this discussion.