Reply #21: No, you understand you are wrong and now are trying to save face [View All]

[notesdev]

It's cool. At least understanding you are wrong - admitted or not - puts you heads and tails above many others who swallow this pseudo-scientific grant-seeking charlatanry on a daily basis.

This is what you wrote, by the way:

For example, we would first select our community very carefully in order to make sure that it is especially representative of the rest of the country or that we understand the relationship of this country to the others.

Obviously when the community is made up of volunteers, as the article states, there's no careful selection going on, the sample is selecting itself; so the rest of the paragraph you quoted, whether true or untrue (and on that I have no particular opinion), simply does not apply to the case at hand.


If this were an actual scientific study, the establishment of political orientation would have been the last thing done, not the first thing done, as doing it beforehand predisposes the rest of the observations to bias based on the researcher's opinions.


You may wonder why I am so obstinately pressing the point. One, sloppy garbage like this "study" pisses me off as a waste of precious resources and as a mispractice of science. Two, whenever I see something like this I ask myself, what will the next George Bush do with it? Allow this type of "research" to proceed on the public dime and the next thing you will see is biological tests for political opinion. It's a very short hop from testing for drugs to testing for something else.

"Yes, you are perfectly qualified for the job, but our corporate policy is not to hire liberals, and your test came up positive for compassion."