Scientific Bias in Favor of Studies Finding Gender Bias
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
1. Complete anonymity so people can't dig up your comment history to attack you or try to dox you.
2. No voting system. These are commonly seen as "I agree" and "I disagree" buttons. And once side of an argument reaches 51% of voters, the other 49% quickly become buried and it snowballs from there.
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I too wish to know the actual truth of these matters, and to arrive at the truth by polite and thoughtful discussion.
There's something about these topics that just brings out the worst in people, or draw in a worse kind of participant than the usual topics.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gender+bias+peer+review...
Assuming the results are valid, and most of the studies that show bias toward men have small sample sizes and most of the studies that show bias toward women have larger sample sizes, I wonder whether it might be that bias is affecting the makeup of the studies themselves.
For instance, if there is actually a bias against women in peer review, could it be that the same forces that lead to a bias against women's research also lead to a bias against studies that show there is a bias against women's research? Keep in mind, the studies in this analysis represent only what got through the gate of peer review; if that gate is biased, then we don't necessarily know whether there is additional credible research that didn't get through because of bias.
I'm not necessarily arguing that this is the case. But it would be an interesting way for people who do believe the bias exists to respond to this analysis.
(Honest) stats question: Given that n=10 is itself a small sample size, how does the computation of statistical power in meta studies differ from that of the underlying studies?
Is there an accepted methodology? I couldn't remember doing this ages ago when I took stats.
A big amount of their publication either follows political bias or, the academic bias of the moment and this happens all because they aren't really sciences. They don't follow the scientific method, they lack a criteria of refutability. You can say whatever it is fancy at the moment, and if some other study comes to contradict it, it doesn't matter.
In the end, I think, they are lengthy at fault for today's public opinion lack of trust in science. Anti-vaxers, flat-earthers, and less extreme examples, are enabled by the media presenting social science's findings as scientific when in fact they are clearly not scientific in nature. And with that, we end up taking credibility away from real sciences.
Every time we see the word "science" associated with this kind of practices, the word "science" looses meaning for the ones that can't understand the clear methodological difference between sociology and biology for instance.
Take the social science I studied, linguistics. How does it lack falsifiability? Theories of how languages evolved can be disproven by contradictory evidence in the same way theories would be in any scientific discipline. For example, we know English and German ultimately have a common ancestor, because we can see the similarities between their modern and older forms and explain them in terms of consistent sound changes, and we can systematically explain the differences between the older forms of the two languages such that we can reconstruct what we think is their precursor, and then show in the same fashion that they are related to other European languages. Now, if you believe English and German are in fact descended from ancient Chinese, you can falsify the current theory by showing how they could have evolved, but you can't, because any similarities are superficial and can't be explained systematically.
Or did you mean only social sciences that you don't like? Which ones?
Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar [1] in linguistics which is the de facto accepted theory, although there is data from other researchers like Dan Everett that totally disprove the Chomsky’s theory with at least one concrete example. [2]
That is exactly the issue I am talking about. You have your in vogue theory in that field and everyone in the academia loves it, and when someone brings you concrete evidence of one of more cases where the theory clearly doesn't apply, what do linguistics do? They dismiss all evidence and carry on just using the theory that is popular.
Can you just wonder what would happen in a real field of science if someone brought forward evidence that the de facto theory clearly doesn't apply in one measurement that was made and you couldn't find anything wrong with that observation or measurement? Can you even imagine if someone came forward with a clear case where the velocity of light in vacuum was surpassed by something else? Or if someone was able to measure precisely the momentum and position of a particle? Or if someone found that the environment affects the genes of a living being in order for it to adapt? Or if someone found evidence of fossils much older than we though life in Earth to be?
Of course, eventually the evidence grew until it was impossible to ignore. But let's not forget that even physicists can succumb to what's in vogue. Physics does have a great culture of trying to combat this, though that has its own problems.
But what the social sciences lack is the scientific method. No testable hypothesis. Not science.
That said, linguistics is not a science that is commonly referenced in politics, nor the exemplary "social science". It's arguably closer to hard sciences like mathematics. The science that are trusted when making public policy decisions are usually social/political science, psychology, economics et al.
Do you have evidence supporting this Ad-Hom, or is it just an imperfect initial theory?
Testable explanations and predictions. Linguistics, interesting as it is, isn't science. Neither is mathematics. Does that mean linguistics and mathematics aren't worthwhile? Of course not!
For historical linguistics, yes, you can't summon new historical evidence out of the void, but you still have a huge amount of existing evidence to work with, and you can always go looking for that which has been overlooked: you have the entirety of written history at your disposal.
You start with a set of axioms. Then you derive and prove theories that are explanations and predictions made by those axioms.
more like math attempts to make a verbal map of how our brains understands the external stimuli. It is usually physics that makes predictions about the external world, math doesn't need to do that.
E.g. basically math solves a problem for N-dimensional spaces. I have problems thinking in 3D, not to mention 256-dimensional.
ha. even though the mechanisms may be intractable for humans eventually the inputs and the outputs of math transformations must be dumbed down to be understood by human brains or else they are useless (to humans). neural nets come to mind
There are plenty of very valid disciplines of human knowledge that aren't sciences (and they seem perfectly fine in not being sciences since they have a clear aim and methodology for their work that, by impossibility of what they do, just can't follow the scientific method). History is a clear example.
It's refuting their validity as sciences. Science is often taken as more authoritative and objective as other subjects, so the label matters.
I may be a perfectly good dentist, the fact I am not a neuro-surgeon doesn't invalidate my worth as a dentist;
But If I claimed to be a neuro-surgeon I should be investigated before I cut open any skulls.
I meant that by stating that social sciences aren't actual sciences and have profound problems, one is in no way stating that disciplines that aren't sciences (like History, the example given) aren't not valid pursuits of human knowledge.
Hypothesis: Troy existed
Prediction: there's a buried city in asia minor
Test: dig it up
Hypothesis: What happened in Armenia was a genocide.
How do you disprove this? There are arguments for and against, but ultimately this would require reading the minds of the leaders at the time. You can also present logical arguments (which I totally buy, this is just an example), but there is no way to test this.
There is only one historic timeline, so History is not a science.
Why work hard collecting data from 1000 people and finding nothing exciting, when collecting data from 50 is accceptable with the added kicker that chance alone might throw up something supporting the politics of your peers.
At least, this is my N=1 experience ;)
As long as people honestly try to do the right thing and not just to gamble the science system, we are on the right way. This doesn't preclude that the contemporary consensual understanding of a problem under study turns out being little more than bullshit some day.
Sociology and economics are different beasts altogether. By definition, you can't conduct any meaningul controlled study, so using the name of "science" is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, you can't deny that certain "laws", however fuzzy they be, do exist in these fields, and studying them can be very useful, no matter if we call these science or not.
I'm not sure why this is considered a sensible discussion for these pages.