Hoaxing the gender studies prof

[Liquor Box]

Where exactly that distinction is gets fuzzy, but there is a distinction to make. With that said, mathematics is a bad example here - that axiomatically correct answer is a quirk of math in particular, and the stuff generally considered hard sciences are data driven. Physics, chemistry, biology, you need actual results from those and if a model that makes sense mathematically isn't getting them it's time to question the model. So you see Newtonian physics revised when relativity is developed, you see the transition from understanding rubbers and plastics as primarily intermolecular forces to the development of polymer chemistry and recognition of macromolecules, and you see taxonomic models updated to reflect discoveries like horizontal gene transfer that weren't present in the gross mechanisms of macroscopic life. The divide between the hard and soft sciences is nowhere near as bright and clear as the divide between the sciences and math. There's still a lot of math in these disciplines, but they are fundamentally different from math and merely using it as a tool, where soft sciences operate in much the same way as hard sciences where the best techniques are less developed and the subject matter is intrinsically different to study due to the complications that come with the involvement of people.

What is the distinction you seek to draw between math and the natural sciences? In the natural sciences there is also generally an axiomatically correct answer, but we cannot always prove it to that standard. For example, the laws of physics were exactly the same before and after relativity (or before and after Newton for that matter), it was just that our understanding of them improved (we think).

Anyway, this is all getting a little off point.

This isn't the widely accepted narrative. It's presented as the widely accepted narrative, and it getting published in a journal is used as evidence that this presentation is accurate. That's where the whole thing went wrong - being rejected by a low prestige journal and then getting accepted only in a vanity press doesn't demonstrate that a paper is in accordance with a field. It demonstrates that the paper is terrible, and trying to use it as evidence that the field is terrible is extremely disingenuous. Doing that while presenting yourself as a bastion of scientific thinking is downright irritating.

I think you are missing the point here. Whether hyperbole, abstract concepts and ridiculous narrative are prevelant in gender studies is subjective, and also a matter of degree. The authors of the paper think that those things are prevelant, you think that they are not. I agree with you that their getting published does barely more to prove their position than you baldly stating "This isn't the widely accepted narrative" does to prove yours.

As for the irritation you feel, I don;t really think it is rational. Whether the article getting published is at all persuasive is a matter of opinion. That your opinion differs from the authors does not make their disengenuous. And I'm not sure that they present themselves as a bastion of scientific thinking - where do they do that?

[Bohandas]

And I think this is where the comprehension gap manifests itself. The scientist considers that the important thing about a question is to answer it. The philosopher considers that the important thing about a question is to ask it. (OK, that's generalising, but sufficiently on point, I think).

This is most apparent in the field which is probably most applicable to life in general and one which you don't mention at all: ethics. Ethical questions, by their nature, can't really be answered definitively using the scientific method, or at least not without constructing an arbitrary framework of basic principles which are themselves not scientifically provable. But they're questions that deserve to be asked.

You know, in that movie there really wasn't any reason why they shouldn't have. The problems all stemmed from the fact that the park was designed poorly, not from the fact that they cloned dinosaurs; it was really not materially different from that zoo in San Francisco in real life where the tiger got out and mauled that guy

[Aedilred]

You know, in that movie there really wasn't any reason why they shouldn't have. The problems all stemmed from the fact that the park was designed poorly, not from the fact that they cloned dinosaurs; it was really not materially different from that zoo in San Francisco in real life where the tiger got out and mauled that guy

Yes, because that's the point of that quote

And yeah, recreating a millions-year-old ecosystem in the modern world and then opening it as a tourist attraction sounds like a fantastic idea.

[Tvtyrant]

You know, in that movie there really wasn't any reason why they shouldn't have. The problems all stemmed from the fact that the park was designed poorly, not from the fact that they cloned dinosaurs; it was really not materially different from that zoo in San Francisco in real life where the tiger got out and mauled that guy

I think there is a Titanic style lesson in there. The guy in question was pelting the tiger with bottles and cans, and it leapt over the trench designed to keep it contained and killed him. Do we fault the trench for being too shallow? If only we had built 101 hulls!

The problem is that some ideas are inherently stupid, like pissing off apex predators or sailing into icebergs, or recreating animals that could then prove to be invasive when some of them get out.

[Amazon]

Why?

If you had to ask…

What specifically is it about this article that you think makes it not real criticism?

You mention trolling, but that word is usually reserved for situations where the person making the comment does not believe in it and is making it only to upset people. My impression is that that authors genuinely (rightly or wrongly) believe that gender studies is "nonsense".

Is the problem the manner of the critique? Would you have hated the criticism less if it had been a direct commentary saying that gneder studies is rife with hyperbole and unsupportable abstract conclusions (which is what I think they are trying to say), and provided examples? If so, would you apply the same hatred to satire, parodies and critical memes of concepts that you happen to support? I mean using a parody as criticism is a pretty widespread technique - and it will often (as in this case) garner more attention that a direct reasoned attack.

Sure that’s the original meaning of trolling, but as you know, the language is a living thing constantly changing and evolving it has (as many words until now) gained an entire new meaning in the past years. But surly linguistics and etymology are not as important as "hard sciences" and have no use for professionals outside that area since knowledge must be treated as ghettos that can’t co-exist.

Satire has no place in science since it suppresses dialogue, conversation and the exchange of knowledge. It points at something different and laughs at it, “You study gender and the effects it has in society? That’s dumb and you are stupid” This is no way to gain new knowledge but to reinforce what is known without questioning and improving it.

You know what was the first step in many totalitarian regimes? To create satires of the people they wanted to oppress, the Jew with long nose and the African with red lips for example, they are all satires, and both didn’t add anything to the conversation, they only serve to ridicule the different and the things you don’t understand making it harder for exchange of information to happen.

It's one thing to say, as others have, that article has failed to demonstrate any failing in the field of gender studies. Quite another thing to say, as you have, that it was wrong for anyone to dared to have make the attempt to demonstrate such a failing in the first place.

I never said that, I’m against the way it was done since it serves no propose and doesn’t contribute with anything.

That's not my interpretation.

It doesn't appear to me that the article (or the accompanying commentary) suggests that gender studies as a social science is not worthy of discussion at all. Rather it appears to me to be suggesting (rightly or wrongly) that the widely accepted narrative in gender studies is full of hyperbole (manspreading being equivilent to rape), abstract and unreal concepts (the penis being a construct, not a thing) and is generally ridiculous.

Having said that, it would not surprise me if the authors have said something that contradicts the above - as Crazz demonstrated to me, they appear to have described what they intended to achieve in various different ways. However, that is my interpretation of what the parody appears to be of.

No one says that, the fact that you truly believe someone would say that, shows how distorted your views are.

The perception I personally have is that philosophy is often concerned with questions that cannot be answered at all because they have no real answers and often the question itself is incoherent (the meaning of life, good and evil, etc); and that the rest of the stuff is just the Tao of the gaps waiting for a scientific answer to be filled in (as in the case of the nature of time and of consciousness).

And @Liquor Box views on gender studies are both oversimplifications of what they really are and mean, and it would be easily solved if you guys took your time to read at least a little about it from a unbiased source before you started talking about something you don’t truly understand and thus speeding misinformation even further.

[Solaris]

I think there is a Titanic style lesson in there. The guy in question was pelting the tiger with bottles and cans, and it leapt over the trench designed to keep it contained and killed him. Do we fault the trench for being too shallow? If only we had built 101 hulls!

The problem is that some ideas are inherently stupid, like pissing off apex predators or sailing into icebergs, or recreating animals that could then prove to be invasive when some of them get out.

Which lesson would that be? To not put together a haphazardly-assembled, undertrained crew unfamiliar with the ship under a complacent captain? 'Cause everything that went wrong with the Titanic, went wrong because of said crew and captain. The Titanic is smaller than many modern-day cruise ships, by the by. The 'hubris' thing was a retcon, as claims to her unsinkability appeared only after she had actually sunk.

... 'Cause if what you're going for is 'don't be an idiot and do things you should know are risky', then I'd have to agree. We just draw different conclusions; the problem with Jurassic Park (book, movie, or reboot) wasn't that they did it, it was that they did it stupidly. Dinosaurs don't have superpowers, after all, so zookeeping techniques we use with modern-day megafauna should work with them too. If nothing else, some Browning M2 HMGs would do all kinds of nasty things to uppity critters. The takeaway from the Jurassic Park series isn't that some things just shouldn't be done, it's that some people just shouldn't be doing things.

[Amazon]

The takeaway from the Jurassic Park series isn't that some things just shouldn't be done, it's that some people just shouldn't be doing things.

Ok. I'm done with this thread. ¯\(ツ)/¯

[warty goblin]

Which lesson would that be? To not put together a haphazardly-assembled, undertrained crew unfamiliar with the ship under a complacent captain? 'Cause everything that went wrong with the Titanic, went wrong because of said crew and captain. The Titanic is smaller than many modern-day cruise ships, by the by. The 'hubris' thing was a retcon, as claims to her unsinkability appeared only after she had actually sunk.

... 'Cause if what you're going for is 'don't be an idiot and do things you should know are risky', then I'd have to agree. We just draw different conclusions; the problem with Jurassic Park (book, movie, or reboot) wasn't that they did it, it was that they did it stupidly. Dinosaurs don't have superpowers, after all, so zookeeping techniques we use with modern-day megafauna should work with them too. If nothing else, some Browning M2 HMGs would do all kinds of nasty things to uppity critters. The takeaway from the Jurassic Park series isn't that some things just shouldn't be done, it's that some people just shouldn't be doing things.

I choose to read Jurassic Park as an aspirational series. Clearly dinosaurs were the entire point of life on Earth, and reached utter perfection in the tyrannosaur and velociraptor, but the universe is a big place and there was a rounding error leading to the regrettable episode with the meteorite. The entire purpose of humanity is to resurrect dinosaurs, then be eaten by them. It's why the park's security measures always fail, t-rexes end up rampaging around cities, and why Jurassic World had that otherwise inexplicably dumb subplot about using velociraptors in war. That was really just an elaborate psychological excuse for releasing raptors into the wild where they could begin breeding, expressed via a more 'socially acceptable' reason for wanting to watch dinosaurs eat people. The sooner the vapid protagonists realize that the ultimate purpose of humanity is to be dino chow, the sooner they may hasten this noble destiny.

[Solaris]

I choose to read Jurassic Park as an aspirational series. Clearly dinosaurs were the entire point of life on Earth, and reached utter perfection in the tyrannosaur and velociraptor, but the universe is a big place and there was a rounding error leading to the regrettable episode with the meteorite. The entire purpose of humanity is to resurrect dinosaurs, then be eaten by them. It's why the park's security measures always fail, t-rexes end up rampaging around cities, and why Jurassic World had that otherwise inexplicably dumb subplot about using velociraptors in war. That was really just an elaborate psychological excuse for releasing raptors into the wild where they could begin breeding, expressed via a more 'socially acceptable' reason for wanting to watch dinosaurs eat people. The sooner the vapid protagonists realize that the ultimate purpose of humanity is to be dino chow, the sooner they may hasten this noble destiny.

This forum needs a 'like' button.

[Amazon]

I choose to read Jurassic Park as an aspirational series. Clearly dinosaurs were the entire point of life on Earth, and reached utter perfection in the tyrannosaur and velociraptor, but the universe is a big place and there was a rounding error leading to the regrettable episode with the meteorite. The entire purpose of humanity is to resurrect dinosaurs, then be eaten by them. It's why the park's security measures always fail, t-rexes end up rampaging around cities, and why Jurassic World had that otherwise inexplicably dumb subplot about using velociraptors in war. That was really just an elaborate psychological excuse for releasing raptors into the wild where they could begin breeding, expressed via a more 'socially acceptable' reason for wanting to watch dinosaurs eat people. The sooner the vapid protagonists realize that the ultimate purpose of humanity is to be dino chow, the sooner they may hasten this noble destiny.

That's sound like a lovecraftian cult.

[Lethologica]

What is the distinction you seek to draw between math and the natural sciences? In the natural sciences there is also generally an axiomatically correct answer, but we cannot always prove it to that standard. For example, the laws of physics were exactly the same before and after relativity (or before and after Newton for that matter), it was just that our understanding of them improved (we think).

The same is true of the softer sciences--the difference is the difficulty of proof to a given standard. One could attempt to measure the difference in 'degree' of certainty between different fields, but that itself would be a very soft meta-science.

I think you are missing the point here. Whether hyperbole, abstract concepts and ridiculous narrative are prevelant in gender studies is subjective, and also a matter of degree. The authors of the paper think that those things are prevelant, you think that they are not. I agree with you that their getting published does barely more to prove their position than you baldly stating "This isn't the widely accepted narrative" does to prove yours.

As for the irritation you feel, I don;t really think it is rational. Whether the article getting published is at all persuasive is a matter of opinion. That your opinion differs from the authors does not make their disengenuous. And I'm not sure that they present themselves as a bastion of scientific thinking - where do they do that?

There needs to be a word in English for subjectivity that is bounded by certain facts, as opposed to reducing all discourse to "that's what they think, that's what you think, your opinion doesn't invalidate theirs, everyone's opinion is equally legitimate." To the extent that the article persuades people to believe that getting their satire published in a pay-to-play vanity journal represents an especial problem with the field of gender studies among the sciences, those people are wrongly persuaded. That doesn't mean everyone must conform to a mythical single way of thought among students of gender.

And it's perfectly rational to be irritated by the prospect of ideologues undermining a legitimate field of study through misinformation.

[Bohandas]

Which lesson would that be? To not put together a haphazardly-assembled, undertrained crew unfamiliar with the ship under a complacent captain? 'Cause everything that went wrong with the Titanic, went wrong because of said crew and captain.

Seconded, with the addition that they also cheaped out on the construction and put appearance over function. The watertight compartments might have saved the ship if they had been built as originally designed, but in order to save money and make the upper decks better looking and easier to navigate they only built the bulkheads halfway up, allowing water to spill from one compartment to the next. If they kept the original [u]practical[/u design they potentially could have stayed afloat long enough to be rescued, maybe even long enough to make it to New York.

... 'Cause if what you're going for is 'don't be an idiot and do things you should know are risky', then I'd have to agree. We just draw different conclusions; the problem with Jurassic Park (book, movie, or reboot) wasn't that they did it, it was that they did it stupidly. Dinosaurs don't have superpowers, after all, so zookeeping techniques we use with modern-day megafauna should work with them too. If nothing else, some Browning M2 HMGs would do all kinds of nasty things to uppity critters. The takeaway from the Jurassic Park series isn't that some things just shouldn't be done, it's that some people just shouldn't be doing things.

Seconded again.

And furthermore, the the dinosaurs getting out wasn;t even merely the result of error either. IIRC despite the park's flaws it took an additional act of deliberate sabotage for the dinosaurs to get out. If they had done background checks on the staff it could have run without incident for a good long while.

[Donnadogsoth]

Seen on Skeptic.org



I guess the lesson is that if you use enough jargon and play buzzword bingo skillfully enough you can publish just about any gibberish you choose .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The relevant observation here is not that hoaxes can be perpetrated, but that such material is so easily accepted by journals and their readers. Ideas about "conceptual penises" help those who would nail men into a box. It doesn't matter that it's a hoax. Believing in it makes it real, and there are multitudes ready to believe in it.

[warty goblin]

That's sound like a lovecraftian cult.

Some may label us a cult, but more people are finding fulfillment in New Dinosaurism. And the t-rex certainly finds it filling.

[Gnoman]

Seconded, with the addition that they also cheaped out on the construction and put appearance over function. The watertight compartments might have saved the ship if they had been built as originally designed, but in order to save money and make the upper decks better looking and easier to navigate they only built the bulkheads halfway up, allowing water to spill from one compartment to the next. If they kept the original [u]practical[/u design they potentially could have stayed afloat long enough to be rescued, maybe even long enough to make it to New York.



Seconded again.

And furthermore, the the dinosaurs getting out wasn;t even merely the result of error either. IIRC despite the park's flaws it took an additional act of deliberate sabotage for the dinosaurs to get out. If they had done background checks on the staff it could have run without incident for a good long while.

The dinosaurs were already out and breeding, and had been doing so long enough to generate a normal population distribution instead of the "wave" distribution they should have had. This would have been exposed if not for Hammond's cheapness.

[GloatingSwine]

It's more the second part, and more that they don't consider it worth anyone troubling themselves with the field. It's not seen as easy, just not worthwhile.

And as for the tangentially related question of the soft sciences, personally I view them not as easy but conversely as effectively impossible in practice. To do truly rigorous experiments, or even just to free not-strictly-experimental observations from noise, you would have to manipulate people's lives on a Truman Show-esque level (and potentially also perform Ishii-esque human vivisections) which would present insurmountable political, moral/psychological, and logistical obstacles

On the other hand, neurophysiology and neuroscience (and much of the wider biology of humans) are also limited by the moral implications of experiment. It's not ethical to, for instance, remove parts of a living brain to see how it gets on without them. (even though that actually has a lot of experimental value when carried out for other reasons, eg. split brain patients where the link between the two halves of the brain is severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy teach a lot about how the two halves communicate and what each is responsible for.)

Restriction of experiment is not limited to social sciences.

Social and other "soft" sciences (like eg. economics) have to be understood statistically.

[Fawkes]

Setting aside the painful misinterpreting of the Jurassic Park series, can we jump back to whatever this is:

to study the soft sciences properly would entail doing the kind of things where you have to move to Argentina afterward

What?

[Lethologica]

The relevant observation here is not that hoaxes can be perpetrated, but that such material is so easily accepted by journals and their readers. Ideas about "conceptual penises" help those who would nail men into a box. It doesn't matter that it's a hoax. Believing in it makes it real, and there are multitudes ready to believe in it.

This is exactly why it's reasonable to be irritated by the ideologically motivated misinformation put forth as this satire's conclusion. In a few quick rounds of contorted meaning, "getting published in a worthless vanity journal after even the low-impact publication turned them down" becomes "they got published in a journal," becomes "their satire is easily accepted by journals and their readers," becomes "multitudes of people are ready to buy into this baloney for the sake of putting men in a box." All because one nonsense paper got published in a journal that nobody would turn to unless they only had nonsense (or fluff) to publish.

The ideology doesn't care what was actually observed. It only cares about what bits of the observation can be pieced together to support the ideology.

To be clear, I attribute these contortions in meaning to the study's authors. They know exactly what inaccurate version of their story is going to spread, and they wrote their study with that goal firmly in mind.

[halfeye]

What?

It's a reference to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_h...xperimentation

[Liquor Box]

If you had to ask…

You imply that the answer should be obvious, but yet the distinction exists and is relied in throughout society. Universities organise their programmes by differently classifying hard and soft sciences, I expect many countries fund them differently. So it is not like it is obvious that there is no reason for the two to be distinguished. If you don't want to discuss it, that's fine, but I don’t think this is a question where the answer is so obvious it goes without saying.

I wonder if you may have misunderstood. I am not saying social sciences are without value, only that they are a different thing from natural sciences.

No one says that, the fact that you truly believe someone would say that, shows how distorted your views are.

I didn’t say I though anyone would say that, read what I wrote again. I was only explaining my interpretation of what the article was parodying.

Sure that’s the original meaning of trolling, but as you know, the language is a living thing constantly changing and evolving it has (as many words until now) gained an entire new meaning in the past years. But surly linguistics and etymology are not as important as "hard sciences" and have no use for professionals outside that area since knowledge must be treated as ghettos that can’t co-exist.

Again, I have not said a single negative thing about soft sciences, or any other field. Your hostility toward me is as misplaced as your hatred of the article. Neither of my degrees are in the hard sciences, and both are probably closer to the soft sciences.

Satire has no place in science since it suppresses dialogue, conversation and the exchange of knowledge. It points at something different and laughs at it, “You study gender and the effects it has in society? That’s dumb and you are stupid” This is no way to gain new knowledge but to reinforce what is known without questioning and improving it.

You know what was the first step in many totalitarian regimes? To create satires of the people they wanted to oppress, the Jew with long nose and the African with red lips for example, they are all satires, and both didn’t add anything to the conversation, they only serve to ridicule the different and the things you don’t understand making it harder for exchange of information to happen.

I never said that, I’m against the way it was done since it serves no propose and doesn’t contribute with anything.

Your first sentence answer my question completely – you are against satire as a form of criticism (in the context of social sciences). Fair enough, so long as you consistently reject satire as a form of criticism even when it is aimed at concepts in social sciences that you disagree with, then your opinion is fair enough. I don’t personally agree, but at least now I understand your hatred of the article – it is satire so therefore bad in your mind.

[Donnadogsoth]

This is exactly why it's reasonable to be irritated by the ideologically motivated misinformation put forth as this satire's conclusion. In a few quick rounds of contorted meaning, "getting published in a worthless vanity journal after even the low-impact publication turned them down" becomes "they got published in a journal," becomes "their satire is easily accepted by journals and their readers," becomes "multitudes of people are ready to buy into this baloney for the sake of putting men in a box." All because one nonsense paper got published in a journal that nobody would turn to unless they only had nonsense (or fluff) to publish.

The ideology doesn't care what was actually observed. It only cares about what bits of the observation can be pieced together to support the ideology.

To be clear, I attribute these contortions in meaning to the study's authors. They know exactly what inaccurate version of their story is going to spread, and they wrote their study with that goal firmly in mind.

Indeed. Hence, culture war.

[Liquor Box]

The same is true of the softer sciences--the difference is the difficulty of proof to a given standard. One could attempt to measure the difference in 'degree' of certainty between different fields, but that itself would be a very soft meta-science.

You think so? Taking political science as an example, do you think there is a truly correct answer to the question of how best to deal with separation of powers? Most countries that are widely considered democratic do it differently?

I accept that the line is blurred (Knaight’s point) and that there probably are things in social sciences that are truly right or wrong (even if we don’t know which). But I understand that is still the distinction between the two. Indeed, I thought that the reason why psychology s considered a hub science, and is sometimes grouped together with the hard sciences at universities, is that it does contain elements where there is simply one correct answer.

There needs to be a word in English for subjectivity that is bounded by certain facts, as opposed to reducing all discourse to "that's what they think, that's what you think, your opinion doesn't invalidate theirs, everyone's opinion is equally legitimate." To the extent that the article persuades people to believe that getting their satire published in a pay-to-play vanity journal represents an especial problem with the field of gender studies among the sciences, those people are wrongly persuaded. That doesn't mean everyone must conform to a mythical single way of thought among students of gender.

You miss the point, I don’t suggest that everyone’s opinion is equally legitimate. If we accept for the sake of argument that the article was completely unpersuasive and its authors were wrong to think it was, my comments still stand.

If the authors wrongly believed that their points were valid (and Knaight’s disagreement was right), then that does not make the article disingenuous. So long as they believe their points valid (even if they are wrong) then their argument is made in good faith.

Of course it can still be dismissed as wrong or invalid (and largely has been on this forum). But that Is different from saying that the article was written in bad faith.

And it's perfectly rational to be irritated by the prospect of ideologues undermining a legitimate field of study through misinformation.

Irrationality may have been the wrong word, but if you get irritated whenever someone you think someone is spreading misinformation (saying something you think is wrong), then the internet is going to be a very irritating place for you.

[Fawkes]

It's a reference to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_h...xperimentation

No, I got that.

But how did we jump from 'soft sciences' to 'nazi experimentation' in one move?

Either I'm vastly misinterpreting the intent of that post or it's the most blatant Godwinning I've ever seen.

[Bohandas]

On the other hand, neurophysiology and neuroscience (and much of the wider biology of humans) are also limited by the moral implications of experiment. It's not ethical to, for instance, remove parts of a living brain to see how it gets on without them. (even though that actually has a lot of experimental value when carried out for other reasons, eg. split brain patients where the link between the two halves of the brain is severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy teach a lot about how the two halves communicate and what each is responsible for.)

Restriction of experiment is not limited to social sciences.

Since you mention it, vivisecting people's brains is one of the unfeasible/immoral experiments I had in mind as something that might be necessary to do all of this rigorously (I did mention "Ishii-esque" experiments IIRC). Particularly given the enormous amount of chaos and bias inherent in these fields (and I'm not talking specifically about left leaning bias or right leaning bias, just bias in general being inevitable due to the closeness of the subject and it being something that people have strong opinions on and that is relevant to day to day life; unlike, for example, astrophysics or celestial mechanics, which are also rather limited in experiments that they can perform {at least when it comes to anything not found in the inner solar system} but which have the advantage of being about things that behave in relatively uniform ways and which are distant enough both literally and figuratively that many people don't have strong attachments, feelings, beliefs, sentiments, preconceived notions, or other conflicts of interest about them; the city lights help)

Perfected forms of psychology and psychiatry in particular would wholly be subfields of neurology (and possibly CompSci), as would much of sociology, although this latter field also overlaps with ecology and logistics.

[Vinyadan]

The problem isn't ideological bias. The problem is ideology; period. Any ideology. If your "science" has any ideology (other than basic "hey, this should be based on empirical measurements and/or reproducible experiments" and things like that) than it's actually philosophy and carries about the same weight and significance as online argumemts about D&D alignments.

I have no idea of what philosophy has to do with anything, I mean, of why you use the term philosophy. "Philosophy" isn't normally defined as "results achieved by scientific research if tainted by ideology".

Sure that’s the original meaning of trolling

I disagree! the original meaning of trolling as a verb has to do with industrial fishing: trolling is "a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines, baited with lures or bait fish, are drawn through the water". In the Internet, this firstly referred to the practice of certain experienced users to ask questions about matters often discussed in the chat room, with the result that newer users would be identified by the fact that they took the discussion as something new and interesting. So they were "trolling for newbies".

What I find somewhat hard to understand is if the authors think that there is a good way of doing gender studies, and that the current problems are the result of the perceived takeover of the whole discipline by a certain mindset, or if they believe that gs in general are utter bollocks.

[Lethologica]

You think so? Taking political science as an example, do you think there is a truly correct answer to the question of how best to deal with separation of powers?

Hm. I was writing a long argument to the effect of 'yes', but on closer examination I think I may be fooling myself about the extent to which that argument applies. Suffice to say that I think subjectivity in such cases is overstated--but I will change my mind and agree that it is still substantial.

You miss the point, I don’t suggest that everyone’s opinion is equally legitimate. If we accept for the sake of argument that the article was completely unpersuasive and its authors were wrong to think it was, my comments still stand.

If the authors wrongly believed that their points were valid (and Knaight’s disagreement was right), then that does not make the article disingenuous. So long as they believe their points valid (even if they are wrong) then their argument is made in good faith.

Of course it can still be dismissed as wrong or invalid (and largely has been on this forum). But that Is different from saying that the article was written in bad faith.

The standards for intellectual honesty are higher than the standards for honesty. It's not enough for someone to believe they're making a valid argument and be honestly mistaken; intellectual honesty demands that they at least check that they aren't fooling themselves--and, in making the argument, fooling others.

These self-proclaimed skeptics and rationalists either disregarded these tests, or are so wildly incapable of applying them that their very monikers are a lie. Knaight selected one of these possibilities; I am reluctant to ask the study's authors whether they would prefer the other.

Irrationality may have been the wrong word, but if you get irritated whenever someone you think someone is spreading misinformation (saying something you think is wrong), then the internet is going to be a very irritating place for you.

The Internet is filled with abundant opportunities for every possible emotion. It is up to the user to curate their experience and their emotions.

I do note, however, that you have elided some portions of the irritation I described, and made out other portions to be more subjective than they are.

[Bohandas]

No, I got that.

But how did we jump from 'soft sciences' to 'nazi experimentation' in one move?

Either I'm vastly misinterpreting the intent of that post or it's the most blatant Godwinning I've ever seen.

The intent of the statement was that in order to remove noise from experiments you'd basically have to orchestrate people's entire lives from birth to death, observe their every action, and possibly vivisect their brains. And needless to say you'd have to do it without informig them as knowing they were being watched and manipulated would influence their actions.

The human brain is a complex and chaotic system, sensitive to even slight changes. Events unexpected or unknown and unaccounted for could produce massive skews in results

Furthermore, ethical constraints eliminate most of the obvious experiments right out. We cannot for example take a large cohort of children and raise them in isolation from the outside world in an artificial society with different gender roles or stripped of all gender roles or with a novel system of gender roles to see, for example, what is innate and what isn't. Instead we must wait for isolated cases taking place in the real world with all of its many many confounding factors.

[edit: deleted potentially inflammatory non-sequitur rant about equivocation]

[eggynack]

You think so? Taking political science as an example, do you think there is a truly correct answer to the question of how best to deal with separation of powers? Most countries that are widely considered democratic do it differently?

Sure, pretty much. Or, theoretically as close as you'd get in normal science, because we're still in science induction zone rather than in math deduction zone. First, you figure out a metric for, I dunno, country quality? Go by average surveyed happiness, or average income, or average life span, or all of those in some combination, or any number of other things. This is non-trivial, of course, but when we get to later steps we'll at least be able to say, "This is what you do if you want a lot of income," or whatever. Which is useful. Then, we start creating countries. A lot of them. You want enough that you can control for stuff like initial tech level, geography, resource aspect, and any number of other things. Then you wait. A thousand years, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a million. You might want to recreate test countries in the ashes of old desiccated ones. You do regular surveys, maybe once a year, maybe once every five years, whatever you want, and you plot it longitudinally. The sheer volume will let you control for a lot of factors, and creating these countries manually will mean that we won't get something stupid interfering, like, "Countries that do this thing would have wound up cool anyway. The country's nature is the cause of the politics and the high quality." And then you have an answer.

It sounds ridiculous, because it is. But at the end, I think that's a truly correct answer. Or at least a really close to correct answer, for most purposes. To some extent, a big problem for these sciences is small sample size. For an economics example, we have limited understanding of deflation, what causes it and how to stop it, because it happens so infrequently. Add a thousand more instances of deflation, and we have something to work with. For a vaguely politically oriented example, there was that thing where that guy punched a journalist, and 538 was saying that they have no idea what will happen, because we don't exactly have a lot of instances of a candidate punching someone before election day. These questions have answers. Solid and measurable answers. It's just improbable that we'll ever know the answer. It would take too long, and in many cases it would be too unethical. Commanding various politicians to punch journalists without telling anyone why they're doing it would probably be at the low end problematic ethics range.

[halfeye]

Sure, pretty much. Or, theoretically as close as you'd get in normal science, because we're still in science induction zone rather than in math deduction zone. First, you figure out a metric for, I dunno, country quality? Go by average surveyed happiness, or average income, or average life span, or all of those in some combination, or any number of other things. This is non-trivial, of course, but when we get to later steps we'll at least be able to say, "This is what you do if you want a lot of income," or whatever. Which is useful. Then, we start creating countries. A lot of them. You want enough that you can control for stuff like initial tech level, geography, resource aspect, and any number of other things. Then you wait. A thousand years, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a million. You might want to recreate test countries in the ashes of old desiccated ones. You do regular surveys, maybe once a year, maybe once every five years, whatever you want, and you plot it longitudinally. The sheer volume will let you control for a lot of factors, and creating these countries manually will mean that we won't get something stupid interfering, like, "Countries that do this thing would have wound up cool anyway. The country's nature is the cause of the politics and the high quality." And then you have an answer.

It sounds ridiculous, because it is. But at the end, I think that's a truly correct answer. Or at least a really close to correct answer, for most purposes. To some extent, a big problem for these sciences is small sample size. For an economics example, we have limited understanding of deflation, what causes it and how to stop it, because it happens so infrequently. Add a thousand more instances of deflation, and we have something to work with. For a vaguely politically oriented example, there was that thing where that guy punched a journalist, and 538 was saying that they have no idea what will happen, because we don't exactly have a lot of instances of a candidate punching someone before election day. These questions have answers. Solid and measurable answers. It's just improbable that we'll ever know the answer. It would take too long, and in many cases it would be too unethical. Commanding various politicians to punch journalists without telling anyone why they're doing it would probably be at the low end problematic ethics range.

Sure, working out what is the best is difficult. Working out what is acceptable isn't that difficult. Third Reich vs mongolian horde? probably mongolian horde. Representational democracy vs mongolian horde, I'm pretty sure that's democracy.

First past the post versus proportional representation? that depends how important the person is, and that's hard.

[Donnadogsoth]

Furthermore, ethical constraints eliminate most of the obvious experiments right out. We cannot for example take a large cohort of children and raise them in isolation from the outside world in an artificial society with different gender roles or stripped of all gender roles or with a novel system of gender roles to see, for example, what is innate and what isn't. Instead we must wait for isolated cases taking place in the real world with all of its many many confounding factors.

Actually--poor kids--it's been tried:

“Israel kibbutzim have for years tried to remove the sex stereotyping of boys and girls. Children's clothes, shoes, hairstyles and lifestyles were fashioned on one sexless, neutral model. Boys were encouraged to play with dolls, sew, knit, cook and clean, and girls were motivated to play football, climb trees and play darts.

“The idea of the kibbutz was to have a sexually neutral society in which there were no rigid formulae for each sex and each member had equal opportunity and equal responsibility within the group. Sexist language and phrases like 'big boys don't cry' and 'little girls don't play in the dirt' were removed from the language and kibbutzniks claimed that they could demonstrate a complete interchangeability of roles between the sexes. So what happened?

“After 90 years of kibbutzim, studies have shown that boys in the kibbutz constantly displayed aggressive and disobedient behaviour, formed power groups, fought amongst themselves, formed unwritten hierarchies and did 'deals', while girls co-operated with each other, avoided conflicts, acted affectionately, made friends and shared with one another. Given a free hand to choose their own school courses and subjects, each opted for sex-specific courses, with boys studying physics, engineering and sports, and girls becoming teachers, counsellors, nurses and personnel managers. Their biology directed them to pursuits and occupations that fitted the wiring of their brains.

“Studies of neutrally-reared children in these societies show the removal of the mother/child bond does not reduce the sex differences or preferences in children. Rather, it creates a generation of children who feel neglected and confused and are likely to grow into screwed-up adults.”

--Barbara & Allan Pease, Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps