
The real difference between liberals and conservatives - raganwald
http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/the_real_differ.php
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Brushfire
What a crock of shit. Plus, who cares? Personally I'm getting a little tired
of the excess of political stories here that seek to explain why something is
in an unscientific, biased, and heavily left-leaning way. Plus its off-topic
and irrelevant, in my opinion, to the topic of startups, technology, and new
business. Has all the BS from the valley hippies finally started to ruin this
place too?

~~~
dissenter
It's bad scholarship. A political ideal is an extremely complex object. All
he's done is cherry-picked five filters through which to view it. He's taken a
very big n-dimensional object and inspected a handful of the shadows it casts.

Does he think he's pinned it down with these five criteria? This is why people
make fun of the humanities. Sloppy, runny thinking. You could select just
about any value and the two political ideologies would fall somewhere on
either side of it. Those on which they aren't opposed aren't worthy of
mention, and so aren't. You could play the same game all day. In fact, you
might even argue that it is a defining property of a two-party system.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sloppy science makes people feel good when it plays into their preconceived
ideas. I fully await the day that the left starts defining other ptolitical
views as forms of mental illness. Who knows, maybe Pfizer could find some meds
for it.

Kuhn and Popper should really be taught in schools more. There's this
incredible propaganda people are taught in regards to science which has very
little to do with how actual science is done. People get this warm and fuzzy
around the general idea of "science" without the hard knuckle reality that
skepticism, falsifiability, the inductive problem, and the difference between
correlation and causation, just to name a few problems.

So it's easy for a soft scientist to do all sorts of amazing and miraculous
things in the name of science. And heck, it sounds dead right too! Let's just
not poke around behind the curtain too much, okay?

It's the ultimate in laziness. Instead of learning political theory,
philosophy, economics, and history, we've got internet video! From TED! Can't
get cooler than that.

~~~
timr
Ya know, I get really frustrated whenever I see a bunch of armchair scientists
work themselves into a lather criticizing the "sloppiness" of published
research, based on nothing but a short blurb on a website.

Contrary to the belief of most indignant internet geeks, there's a lot more to
scientific analysis than parroting "correlation vs. cause!" whenever data are
presented. The fact of the matter is that, while correlation doesn't _imply_
cause (that's the actual expression; it is rampantly mis-stated), a strong
correlation is usually evidence that an underlying cause exists, whether
direct or indirect in nature. Furthermore, there's not an accepted result in
the history of science that doesn't depend on the analysis of correlations in
observed data. Even falsifiability (that sexy buzzword of Popper-idolaters)
depends on the collection of observations, and correlation of those
observations with previous data. Thus, in a very real way, science is the
_study_ of correlations, and you can take the amateur correlation/cause pot-
shot at _any_ scientific result.

So, when a _scientist_ points out that correlation does not imply cause, what
she means is _not_ that the observed relationship doesn't exist, but that the
correlation could be caused by latent, indirect factors. This is a _very
different_ thing than suggesting that the result is invalid -- which is what
most armchair, Popper-loving internet-scientist types are trying to do
(including the parent posts).

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. My lather was starting to dry and
I needed a good rinse.

One thing and I'll let you go. "a strong correlation is usually evidence that
an underlying cause exists, whether direct or indirect in nature"

Oh really now? Well that explains my theory as to how carrots are deadly
poisonous. You see, I've found a 100% correlation between the consumption of
carrots and death, usually within 80 years. I'm also working on a theory that
sunlight is a cause of all cancer, seeing as how there is another 100%
relationship between all people with cancer and exposure to sunlight.

Science is the creation and study of models, abduction, based on the use of
deduction and induction. Correlation is simply a tool used to create the
model. When we forget we're comparing models, then it's easy to simply fall
back on simple correlation-based arguments. That's like forgetting geometry
and simply observing the circumference of a circle is usually about 3 times
the diameter. It's true, but it's not creating an abstract calculus that can
then be extended.

I find your continued use of "armchair scientist" to be an ad hominem, as if
by using that name my argument would carry less weight. Last I checked we
weren't providing credentials to express opinions.

I'm done playing. timr -- you can follow me around to another comment on the
board and continue your picking. I have to go get my armchair adjusted for
physics.

~~~
timr
Your examples bely either a fundamental misunderstanding of the mathematics of
correlation, or a willingness to ignore them to fake an argument.

First, you can't "correlate" with incidence of death -- it's not even a binary
variable, since everyone dies. Of course, you _can_ correlate with _onset_ of
death, but that would make your example silly; if there _were_ an observed
acceleration in onset of death due to carrot consumption, it would only serve
to illustrate the value of correlative studies in science.

Likewise with sunlight exposure -- you've just flipped the constant to the
predictor (everyone has experienced sunlight exposure), and attempted to
correlate with a variable output (cancer occurrence). Again, mathematical
nonsense.

That said, I don't dispute anything you've said about models, abductive,
deductive or inductive reasoning. But you can reason all day long, and without
empirical data, you've got nothing but a castle on a cloud. Ultimately, you're
always going to come back to correlating at least one observed variable with
another -- the predictor, and the response. This is basic science.

Why do I refer to "armchair scientists"? Because I couldn't think of a better
term to describe those people who want science to be just like math, but
conveniently forget that mathematics rests entirely upon a set of fundamental
axioms that are simply _asserted_ to be true. The people who learned about one
logical fallacy some time in high school, and latched on for dear life,
conveniently forgetting that _every scientist in the world_ knows about the
same fallacy.

Moreover, these folks aren't familiar with the details, so they don't see that
the places where mathematics most closely touch science -- quantum theory,
string theory, etc. -- tend to be extraordinarily messy. The math frequently
depends on assumptions and approximations that are accepted based on their
similarity to _observed data_. For example, right now, thousands of scientists
are banging subatomic particles together in a subterranean tube in France, in
order to _observe_ something that the mathematicians think _might_ be there.
If it isn't, the mathematicians get to start over.

Again: it all comes back to observing things. And as long as we're observing
things that are difficult to observe, I have a feeling that cranky internet
scientists will be there to argue from the comfort of an easy chair that
empiricism has it all wrong.

~~~
asdflkj
How can a non-scientist better understand science? Do you know of any good
books?

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adamc
Well, I liked it, anyhow. Then again, I'm one of those TED-liking liberals...

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mattmaroon
Isn't this pretty much the same as the Edge article (by the same guy) that got
deaded a couple days ago?

Fascinating.

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scudco
Yes, because liberals and conservatives in the sense he is talking about are
so amazingly different. How about we get real and start to talk about how we
all want to control our neighbors. Both liberals and conservatives, in his
definition, _love_ aggression and guns.

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patrickg-zill
More psychobabble and pseudo-intellectualism. [Sushi-eating Republican here
...]

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johns
Lipstick

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kingkongrevenge
I love how these TED people always make a point of congratulating themselves
on how important and good they are.

~~~
helveticaman
At least they got rid of the crescendo at the beginning.

