a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
caeli  ·  3432 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tim Hunt, Sexism and the Cult of Science

Interesting articles! I'll have to get back to you when I have a chance to do an in depth reading of the original papers.

    I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science

Wait, so you're telling me that the only thing you've read on this subject is the Washington Post piece on the Williams & Ceci PNAS paper? I alluded to a literature containing hundreds of opposite results assuming you were familiar, but apparently not. If you want a place to start, here are some Google Scholar results for "gender discrimination bias hiring STEM". If you're unfamiliar with how to perform a deep review of the literature of a field, I'd be happy to provide some tips. This article is also a good resource.

Let's walk through how the scientific process works.

1. Observe some phenomenon out I'm the world.

2. Read the litrerature of the field, and formulate a hypothesis to account for your initial observation.

3. Test this phenomenon using an appropriate methodology and statistically analyze the results.

4. Determine whether or not your hypothesis is supported by your results.

5. Write this all up and submit to a conference or an appropriate journal in the field.

This is how every single scientific field works. If social scientists are undeserving of respect and are just pushing an agenda, something in the above process must be going wrong. Let's think about some possibilities:

Possibility 1: Social scientists don't use the process above at all. This is demonstrably false, read and journal article and it goes through each of the steps above.

Possibility 2: Social scientists do experiments, but they all fabricate their data. While technically possible, this would require an extensive conspiracy between thousands of scientists over many generations, and is extraordinarily unlikely.

Possibility 3: Social scientists' studies are so methodological flawed we can't conclude anything from them. While sometimes this is true, bad methodology can happen in any field, and I'm not aware of any studies that attempt to determine whether any field is "worse" than the rest metbodologically. Let me know if you know of any!

Possibility 5: Social scientists are so bad at statistics that even though they have well-designed studies they constantly find false positives and false negatives. Again, while this is possible, statistical ineptitude is a problem in a lot of fields and I know of no evidence that any field is worse than any other. Let me know if you know of any studies on this!

Possibility 5: Social scientists do fine studies, but their conclusions over interpret or overgeneralize their data. Again, possible, but unclear that any field is worse than any other. Plus, this is the sort of thing that peer review us good at catching.

Since you must have a principled reason to disrespect social scientists, which of these possibilities do you think is true and why? Or if you think it's something else, what is it and why?