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Methodology is THE main criticism of research; it’s the most important piece. It’s more important than nit-picking results or anything else. Unless your the typ
by bumby 8mo ago
Methodology is THE main criticism of research; it’s the most important piece. It’s more important than nit-picking results or anything else. Unless your the type to believe in starting with a conclusion and working backwards, but that’s bad science.
And that doesn’t mean the method has to be perfect. But if it doesn’t reflect the true problem, or if is too weak to drawn conclusions from, it’s just story-telling.
The point I’m making is we should acknowledge the model assumptions. If we’re saying, for example, a living wage is expected to provide the average car, we need to acknowledge it now becomes the floor and is no longer the “average”. That’s a fine point to debate, but it requires some data literacy that is absent in this discussion.
And, as an aside, if you think snark is somehow justified because someone is criticizing a tool or method in legitimate way that you don’t like, you need to revisit the HN guidelines.
- etchalon 8mo agoYou're not criticizing the methodology. I think you think you are, but you're not. All you have said is "the average doesn't match my experience" and "diet bad." Neither of those are methodological criticisms. They're just saying things.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bumby 8mo agoIt’s been discussed elsewhere , but we can’t get to details if we can’t get past the simplest of concepts. I think you are missing the critique because you’d prefer to argue than understand, but I’ll try to be more explicit. Significant parts of the method are built on surveys. Surveys are often a poor measure because they tend to be more subjective and biased. That’s why nutrition surveys of dietitians have significant amounts of error. In addition, the surveyed data isn’t normalized for socio-economic class; that is, it sets the expected value at the “averages”. The implication is the living wage should provide the average level of subjective consumption. That, in turn, means the current average is now the lowest we are willing to accept as a society. That’s all well and good to discuss, but that’s more nuanced than anything you’ve brought up. And that’s doesn’t scratch the surface of the flawed reporting, where uncertainty isn’t part of the main discussion. It’s clear the site is for laity but the problem (as we’ve seen) is that it just feeds people’s confirmation bias when they are more interested in being right than in understanding.