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Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results

26 points by geox

by jjk166

2 subcomments

This is why the goal of experiments needs to be falsifying hypotheses. If you can make a model that fits the raw data without absurd assumptions which contradicts your hypothesis, then the data doesn't support your hypothesis.
If you're checking whether a coin is fair and you toss out significantly more tails than heads because you didn't feel they were proper tosses, of course you're going to reject the null hypothesis that the coin is fair. Even if your criteria for what was a proper toss is objective and reasonable, you're no longer testing whether the coin is fair, you're only testing whether your criteria for counting a toss is fair assuming the coin isn't.
When you construct your experiments to reject a hypothesis - this particular model can not be right if we see this - then you can make real progress towards truth.

by xve

1 subcomments

The foundation of science was built on a certain "political" view (the enlightenment). It's interesting that maybe science isn't exactly science without those values.

by ratelimitsteve

0 subcomment

when i took stats in high school our final had one set of data and two questions. one was to use that set of data to prove a hypothesis, and the other to use that same set of data to disprove it. the trick was manipulating confidence, and the real trick was realizing that this was almost certainly happening any time we allow someone else to make the critical decisions for how to crunch any particular dataset. there seems to be an unspoken translation layer: you ask a question in english, then use statistics as the process of translating that question from english to math, then apply the translated question to the dataset and get an answer. if translation were mechanical that would be fine, but often the english has to go through interpretation. How confident do we have to be in a "yes" answer? 99%? 95%? 50/50? What constitutes an outlier? Sometimes a very slight shift in the line between good and bad data will include or exclude a single data point that can shift the calculations. The problem seems to be standardization of this translation layer as much as anything else, which is to say that everyone is ostensibly trying to answer the same question but under the hood they're asking very different questions of the data.

by wtcactus

4 subcomments

No, they aren’t scientists, they are social “scientists”.
Physicists, geologists and other kinds of real scientists’ personal politics don’t determine the outcome of their research.
It’s high time we denounce and publicly defund social “sciences” for that they really are: astrology at best and political propaganda at worst.