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I'm also a 95 year old female who likes to play MMOs for 80 hours a week and am desperately addicted to the point I'll go on a murder spree if the internet goes down for more than 5 minutes. I have no friends and live in my parents basement; and even though they're over 120 they both have to work 2 full time jobs to afford my medications.

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I'm scared people might actually take this stuff seriously now.

Social science based on anonymous surveys is useless.

In-person interview narrative analysis is less likely to have fake data, if only for the fact that the interviewer can somewhat visually confirm age, race, gender, and apparently, the number of intact limbs.

I was under the impression there was techniques for teasing out false data from anonymous surveys. No idea if any of them were around in the mid 90s, or how well developed they were. It's not like statistics were invented after the turn of the century though. Still you'd think something like various inconsistencies and multiple uncorrelated outlier data points and such would raise red flags before you went back later and realized someone had more arms than they claimed.

Beats me.

Because there are people like these kids - and grown 4channers - who think it's funny to lie in them.

Okay, perhaps "useless" is too harsh a word. But this incident is proof that any data collected from them needs to be taken with a grain of salt... or maybe half a teaspoon.

Nobody takes economics. Its a class you show up to and recover from the previous night. Too early in the morning, they're trying to keep it a secret.

Because there are people like these kids - and grown 4channers - who think it's funny to lie in them.

Almost never an issue, actually, controlled peer reviewed studies aren't internet polls. This is a story because it's visceral and feels like it could happen all the time, and "hur hur they think they're so smaht but look how easy they are to fool!". But it doesn't happen all the time. Selection bias is fairly easy to control for, so are ego dependent questions. Researches don't take data like "only 2% of Catholic teens **********" seriously, because generally people with PhDs aren't morons. Very large studies like Add Health usually are large enough to self control, and usually are capturing data that basically *has* to be self reported. It should also be noted that the "adolescent prankster" theory to explain the anomaly here is a fucking wild guess. Could be that. Could be questions framed poorly for the audience were literally misunderstood. Writing survey questions is itself an important part of social science, removing bias from the question verbiage can be extremely challenging. Could be a cohort of boys loved cock then changed their minds.

There are techniques for detecting BS results in studies. The problem is that when the BS results happen to trend in a direction that supports a desired social agenda, those techniques tend to get forgotten. People tend to question results which counter positions they want to take and accept results which support them. So, it's not surprising at all that sexuality researchers would accept results that showed teen homosexuality was up to 7 times more prevalent than previously thought, and that social problems faced by those teens were greater as well. Cause when you want to highlight the plight of teen homosexuals, that's exactly the results you want, right?


Science is only as good as the people engaging in it. And the more "soft" the science (and sociology is about as soft as they come), the more prone it is to the biases of those in the field.

Then I'd be a liar.

I'm pretty sure that if you were to poll people on the scientific fields most likely to involve geniuses, the only way sociology would even appear on the list would be if exactly the sort of manipulation I'm talking about was used. Really? "Generally held to be geniuses"? By whom?



The practical applications of social science mostly revolves around telling people who pay for their studies what they want to hear. Sociologists who tell people the truth don't tend to make a living at sociology. Hence, the problem with the entire field.


To be fair though, my criticism of the field mostly involves the political rather than market driven aspects of it. I suppose those employed to figure out how best to sell a product to the masses probably do provide accurate results (cause there's an actual way to measure success). In the public sector? It's a total joke field. When the only measure of success is circular, why on earth be surprised when the results end out being completely inaccurate?

I assumed self-described "guy who's sure he's on to how advertising works" made up 100% of the population.

Republicans with a knee-jerk reaction to them there ivory tower elitist science-people and who were taught that it's much more accurate to just assume that whatever self-created conclusion fits their ideology is best and who describe this conclusion as "common sense".

Oh, wait. Probably not by them. Other people, then.

Wow. Kinda butchered that fallacy there Smash. That doesn't even make sense. Begging the Question would be a better one btw.

For the record, No true Scotsman would apply if I argued that anyone who didn't manipulate the questions in a poll in order to achieve the answers he wants isn't really a sociologist, thus invalidating any counter examples disproving my assumption. But, that's not what I did. I said that people don't generally view sociology as a field full of geniuses. And I'm pretty sure my opinion on the matter is accurate.


I'll ask again: Who on earth generally holds sociologists to be geniuses? Cause I'm just not seeing it. Physicists? Sure. Research scientists? Sure. Guys designing the newest cutting edge technological devices? Absolutely. People designing social studies and then writing papers about what they mean? Not so much.

Not that I want to quibble over your self identified logical fallacies, but, no it's one true Scotsman. We just skipped the part where I pitch groups of people at you who consider BF Skinner or Anna Freud or whomever a genius and then you explain why they don't count. Not sure how you could see it as petitio principii, but I'm open to you explaining the flaws in your own logic if only for entertainment value.

Edited, Jan 15th 2014 7:39pm by Smasharoo