BS Science Research

BS= Bad Scholarship

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bloggs.fredbloggs.fred
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On Saturday, 29 August 2015 06:37:46 UTC+10, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrot e:

This may reflect another well-known fact - nobody published negative or mar ginal results. If the papers that originally got published are the ones whe re statistical fluctuation delivered up a reasonably strong-looking result, you'd expect replications to generally throw up a weaker correlation.

This effect has caused enough heart-ache in testing pharmaceutical that the re's a movement to make the results of all clinical trials accessible on so me kind of suitably anonymised data-base.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

ote:

arginal results. If the papers that originally got published are the ones w here statistical fluctuation delivered up a reasonably strong-looking resul t, you'd expect replications to generally throw up a weaker correlation.

here's a movement to make the results of all clinical trials accessible on some kind of suitably anonymised data-base.

Looks like the False Discovery Rate is the main undoing here:

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Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

marginal results. If the papers that originally got published are the ones where statistical fluctuation delivered up a reasonably strong-looking res ult, you'd expect replications to generally throw up a weaker correlation.

there's a movement to make the results of all clinical trials accessible o n some kind of suitably anonymised data-base.

d/

I suspect that I can claim is that is what I would have cited if I'd known about it. Experimental psychology does a lot less testing than pharmacy, a nd there's a lot less money hanging on the outcomes, so the situation there is not as bad. And interesting work there does get replicated frequently - in different environments, sometimes looking for subtly different effects.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Academia is a cloistered, mean-spirited bunch.

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"By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a "sea of hands," comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.

Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications."

"...A 2012 survey of social psychologists throughout the country found a fourteen-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans."

Also amusing was the fact that none of them thought they were biased, despite objective tests showing that they were.

Cheers, James Arthur

~~~~~~~ Why are academic politics so bitter? Precisely because the stakes are so small. --Sayre's law

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Sure. Nobody with sense would want to become a social psychologist.

Reply to
John Larkin

...

Ages ago I visited great friend E. in Pennsylvania, a psychology instructor at the university. She had two of her colleagues over & we chatted pleasantly about the coming election--I don't remember which. Discussing philosophy, they lowered their voices, swore me to secrecy, then told me one of them was a ... R e p u b l i c a n.

I thought it was funny--what's the big deal? At dinner I leaned across the table & quietly, discreetly made a subtle, gentle, non-specific insinuation about it, in a pizza & beer joint jammed full of people & ear-splitting music. They nearly jumped across the table hushing me-- "If anyone found out, he'd lose his job!"

They pretty much all lived in fear.

Cheers, James

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Yet another reason to avoid that trade.

The arts and social sciences keep otherwise useless people from being dangerous.

Reply to
John Larkin

Except they're far from being benign. They're the ones teaching our children.

Reply to
krw

-republicans

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This does assume that political parties aren't fundamentally different.

The problem is that conservatives think that something that has been shown to work - no matter how badly - is always better than something new.

James Arthur prefers Bastiat (who die in 1850) to the more adventurous Karl Marx (who die in 1883) or the infinitely more practical John Maynard Keyne s (who died in 1946 after having used his economic skills to make a lot of money - as well as a towering reputation).

One can understand why academics might not share this point of view.

James Arthur isn't entirely consistent in applying this philosophy - he use s electronic logic rather than pneumatic or hydraulic logic, despite the no velty, and transistors rather than valves - but in politics he thinks that nothing useful has been invented since 1791.

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Why would conservative students join a field where there wasn't a body of l ong established knowledge that they could rely on? They'd feel nervous tryi ng to make sense of all that untested innovation. Lawyers worship precedent , scientists worship experimental and observational results.

Conservative students do prefer the law, and lawyers are over-represented i n the world's legislatures, which exist to make new laws.

pite

They probably weren't. The Republican political commentators who thought th at Republican policies represented a rational choice - as opposed to an emo tion-driven clinging to the familiar - were demonstrating political bias.

James Arthur suffers from the same delusion. The problem with democracy is that the ill-informed majority often is wrong, and it takes a while to educ ate them into a more profitable outlook.

Some, like James Arthur, are impervious to education. He does - at least - appreciate that other ideas exist, but can't bring himself to take them ser iously.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

ased-republicans

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James Arthur has had a technical education, but his demented misconceptions about anthropogenic global warming are exceedingly dangerous. Happily, mos t people who have had a proper technical education (as opposed to John Lark in, who skipped the bits that he thought weren't going to make him money) h ave a better grasp of reality.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Why not? They are in demand for running political campaigns, and as prison consultants, and marketing directors for hard to sell worthless products. And they make an average of 85K.

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Reply to
Bill Bowden

The point of politics is to recruit you to "Us" so that we can be "agin" Them together. Who "Them" is is irrelevant in the long term as long as there's some relatively clear way to differentiate Them from Us.

The point(s) of difference don't have to be anything objectively identifiable, either. You can tar someone with any brush you choose in order to make them one of Them.

The converse is that liberals think that whatever's in place must be destroyed, and what to replace it with is seldom a concern.

Both points of view are of course foreshortened stereotypes, the products of the extremes of both Liberal and Conservative damning The Other.

And don't even consider being any sort of filthy Independent- you'll destroy the sacred two-party system! Feh.

All four of them are wrong due to their fundamental assumptions about how people think, but that's another argument.

Not really. Are you assuming that because academics study many points of view they must therefore be capable of choosing which is "better"?

Who decided what "better" means? Another academic? No pressure there...

Push that date back as many thousands of years as you like, and I'll agree with him. The strongman-vs-the-collective "struggle", the consumer/steward divide, and any other political distinctions are a lot older than most people think.

Oh, and what makes you imply that logic has anything to do with politics?

For the same reasons liberal students would join a field with a selective list of (paradoxically) canonized Free Thinkers from whose thoughts they can pick to build their own worldview.

If they're human, they assuredly are.

As opposed to Democrats with their emotional attachment to anything new?

Please- the lumpen is as carefully "informed" as the elite want them to be. That's true in any political system and always has been.

And what does "profitable" mean here?

That's practically the defining characteristic of academia.

Mark L. Fergerson

Reply to
Alien8752

Here's Bastiat's thesis from The Law:

Premises- o People have a right to be alive, to non-enslavement, and their property (money, land, etc.). o To better ensure those rights, people form governments that protect them from looting, murder; injustice. o Governments, therefore, are the collective organization of the individuals' rights to self-defense of their life, liberty, and property.

Bastiat then posits that, since the very purpose of a government was to protect your right to life, liberty, and property--since people consented to the government in the first place specifically to protect those rights--that the government ceases to be the thing people consented to if the government itself violates those basic rights. Namely, it becomes illegitimate.

For example, a government that takes your property and gives it to someone else, has just done the very thing the government was supposed to protect you from. It's supposed to protect you from people taking your stuff, not help them do it.

If a government does this with laws, it has used the law to allow someone to do something that they could not have done themselves without committing a crime.

Where, in there, has he made a fundamental wrong assumption about how people think? It's mostly logic.

There's lots of logic, though we rarely see it. Politics isn't just blow-dried hair and kindergarten jabs, and wasn't always practiced so. There are serious works from our U.S. early history that explain the age-old impulses of men, then lay out their best plans to balance same.

Bastiat wrote The Law in 1850, a couple years after Marx's Manifesto. Bastiat, who was an economist and an experienced legislator too, had actually studied and seen those things fail. He destroyed many of Marx's arguments then, but we're still having the exact same arguments today. If you read The Law and ignore the style, by the content you'd think it was written yesterday.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

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" Them together. Who "Them" is is irrelevant in the long term as long as th ere's some relatively clear way to differentiate Them from Us.

fiable, either. You can tar someone with any brush you choose in order to m ake them one of Them.

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stroyed, and what to replace it with is seldom a concern.

That would be *a* converse. But that description is usually reserved for ra dicals. "Liberal" used to mean "more in favour of free trade and industry r ather than agriculture". Americans now use it mean "left of centre".

In general the left is susceptible to the idea that something new might wor k better than what we've got at the moment, but they tend to want to work i n small steps, when they can, and like having trial schemes and model commu nities to prove the point. If enthusiasts can get a scheme to work, it's no t going to be generally applicable.

ts of the extremes of both Liberal and Conservative damning The Other.

You probably mean Radicals and Reactionaries.

stroy the sacred two-party system! Feh.

Karl

ynes

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ow people think, but that's another argument.

Keynes doesn't seem to have been wrong. The other two - your arithmetic ski lls aren't any more impressive than your vocabulary - were wrong in very di fferent ways. Bastiat was tediously reactionary. Marx was prodigiously radi cal.

James Arthur is wrong too, but scarcely worth mentioning. He aspires to Bas tiat's clarity of expression, but only succeeds in making it obvious that h e doesn't think about what his opinions actually mean.

f view they must therefore be capable of choosing which is "better"?

They study and compare many points of view. Working out which point of view is better involves adopting a particular point of view about what constitu tes "better" and that's another academic study.

Academics tend to rank one another on citation rates - which academic has p ublished stuff (in peer-reviewed journals) sufficiently interesting to be c ited by other academics (in publications in peer-reviewed journals).

John Maynard Keynes was cited a lot, but he also made a lot of money - both for himself and his college (he was Bursar of Kings College, Cambridge fro m 1927 to 1946).

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ree with him. The strongman-vs-the-collective "struggle", the consumer/stew ard divide, and any other political distinctions are a lot older than most people think.

The "strongman-versus-the-collective" image doesn't capture James Arthur's apprehension. He sees the modern socialist "collective" as a "strongman" ri pping off the assets of people foolish enough to be better off than the col lective.

He's wrong. Germany and Scandinavia have a lot of rich people - they aren't as rich as their US equivalents, but there are more of them - and they get rich because the German and Scandinavian economies offer them a lot of sup port, notably in terms of healthy, co-operatirve and well-trained and well- educated employees.

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Politicians make decisions. If they do it illogically, they will make the w rong decisions. As in invading Irak.

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ve list of (paradoxically) canonized Free Thinkers from whose thoughts they can pick to build their own worldview.

The selected list gets added to quite frequently, and liberal students are free to get their particular hero added to the list.

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The Democrats look distinctly conservative to any European liberal, and mos t right-of-centre Europeans as well.

Their enthusiasm for "anything new" hasn't shown any sign of reaching out a s far as - say - proportional representation (which showed up - in the Sena te elections only - in Australia's 1901 constitution) and is widely used in Europe.

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be. That's true in any political system and always has been.

British democracy hasn't got as far as it needs to go, but

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said "we must educate our masters" in 1872 and the UK now has universal edu cation, that can take bright kids to inversity, no matter where they came f rom. Fewer working class kids take advantage of it than middle class kids.

People with money do spend quite a bit of it on misinforming the public, bu t the lumpenproletariat isn't exactly inert. Karl Marx got slung out of the international socialist movement in 1870 for his undemocratic enthusiasm f or the "leading role of the party" and the "lumpenproletariat" has maintain ed it's dim view of his ideas in that area ever since.

A bigger economy, more income per head - that sort of thing.

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Not the academic communities I know. Junking out-moded theories can be a wr ench, but embracing more comprehensive theories that include and expand the old ones is a regular thing.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

shown to

destroyed, and what to replace it with is seldom a concern.

ucts of the extremes of both Liberal and Conservative damning The Other.

destroy the sacred two-party system! Feh.

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Keynes

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how people think, but that's another argument.

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Carefully neglecting to notice that legitimate governments have been taking away citizen's stuff and giving it a professional army for as long as gove rnments have existed. Road-makers, law enforcement officers and customs off icials would have been equally familiar to Bastiat. Universal community fun ded education was coming in a the time, and he didn't like that. He wanted to be able to hire his own teachers to misinform pupils as he saw fit.

What Bastiat was objecting to was them taking away stuff to use for purpose s he didn't like.

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And a certain amount of selective blindness.

of view they must therefore be capable of choosing which is "better"?

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agree with him. The strongman-vs-the-collective "struggle", the consumer/st eward divide, and any other political distinctions are a lot older than mos t people think.

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Pity their best plan wasn't a little better. Others have improved on it sin ce.

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Sure. The careful use of selective omission is familiar. The demagogue work s the same way in every age, leaving out the bits of the argument which con tradict the case being made.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Why do you feel so qualified to pronounce expertly on something you can barely spell?

The People's purpose in organizing a collective self-defense--in creating a just government--is *precisely* to pay an army, a police force, and a system of justice, to more economically secure the individuals' right to life, liberty, and property.

Of course many--if not most--governments throughout history have been imposed by violence on unwilling peoples. They practice arbitrary redistribution with gusto, and their peoples live oppressed, in misery.

You keep citing taxes for legitimate purposes of government as justification for taxation for any purpose whatsoever. That's kindergarten. Should the government tax people for not accepting dogma? For not having the right religion? Or to take thirty hours from someone's eighty-hour week, and give it to someone who works forty hours a week?

Once you have your government based on redistribution, operating on the caprices of politicians, you've incited a death-spiral. When socialism pays better than work, people work socialism.

_____

Inherent to socialism is the idea that ordinary people can't manage their own affairs (or even feed themselves) without guidance and support from their betters.

American Exceptionalism was precisely the idea that ordinary people can run their own lives, better. Socialism says they can't, then makes it so.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

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be destroyed, and what to replace it with is seldom a concern.

products of the extremes of both Liberal and Conservative damning The Other .

'll destroy the sacred two-party system! Feh.

bout how people think, but that's another argument.

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king away citizen's stuff and giving it a professional army for as long as governments have existed.

You don't have to be an expert to notice the gaping hole in the middle of B astiat's argument.

You do have to be brainwashed right-winger to ignore it.

Sure. And Bastiat's over-simplified proposition ignored that, and the conse quential argument that the people could change their minds about what they' d do collectively as the got richer, and new possibilities became available .

Bastiat didn't like the idea of community funded universal education, becau se he would have to pay for it, and lacked the imagination to see that it w as - in the end - a good long term investment. Most people now disagree wit h him.

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Like every modern socialist, I'm quite selective about what the legitimate destinations of tax-payers money might be, and I'm well aware that anywhere the free-market works, it's a better way to distribute goods and services.

Unlike you, I'm well aware that the free market doesn't work well in every application, and can take quite a lot of fine tuning to work well in a lot of applications where right-wingers like to see it used. Enron comes to min d.

Sadly for your sound-bite, socialism is not an alternative to work, just a different way of mobilising people for work. Your existing government is ba sed on redistribution - though, like Bastiat you want to ignore this awkwar d fact - and the argument is about which services work better when they are paid for by the community. Universal health care is an obvious sticking po int.

No more than the idea inherent to your generation of right-wing ideologues that ordinary people can't organise their own military defence. The US cons titution talks about well-regulated militias - which were collections of or dinary people who had enough money to buy their own weapons and military eq uipment, and enough spare time to be able to train to act as coordinated un its (which weren't as good as regular army units, but good enough to be use ful).

Even brainwashed reactionaries like you are now happy with the idea of sub- contracting defence to a professional army. Most of you are happy to sub-co ntract teaching to professional teachers. Quite where we should draw the li ne and insist that individuals should be allowed to make their own mistakes is a matter for debate. Jamie wants to insist that he should be allowed de cide whether his kids are vaccinated (withdrawing their contribution to her d immunity).

un

The US constitution was sold on that basis, but it works on the basis that the people who own the country run the country. Socialism wants to spread t he power a bit wider. You see yourself as one of the elite group that runs the country, and resent the idea that your power might be diluted

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

No it didn't, you're simply spewing. Bastiat addresses it quite explicitly, which you'd know if you'd read this world-famous classic you're commenting on. It's 64 pages, but you might manage it. Free on the web --

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That a government may legitimately take money for one purpose, does not mean it can legitimately take for anything you choose.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

te:

a different way of mobilising people for work.

You're the shining example of working socialism rather than socialism working. Socialism made it possible for you to refuse work you felt beneath you for years, and live off the work of others with less than you.

[...]

run

t the people who own the country run the country. Socialism wants to spread the power a bit wider. You see yourself as one of the elite group that run s the country, and resent the idea that your power might be diluted

Wanting people to be free to run their own lives is 'elite,' and taking their property and imposing their life-decisions on them isn't. Marvelous Orwellian inversion.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

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