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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Is there any randomize or blinded evidence for sex ed? Having been a teenager who went through the class, I feel it was entirely useless. In many ways anti-informative about the truth of the world.

How much overall empirical evidence is there in education in general? It seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of credible research on exactly what works and what doesn't, as well as to whom and how much, and I'm reminded of the line about marketing, that you know only 10% of it works, but you don't know which 10%. And with the replication crisis in social sciences that has shown no signs of getting any better recently, it seems unlikely that there's much credible research on this out there. This problem is compounded by the fact that researchers of this sort are overwhelmingly professional academics, which would bias them towards overweighting the value of the education system that they themselves have invested so much time and effort into, as well as the well known partisan bias, which, in the case of sex ed, would lead to the vast majority of researchers being biased in favor of discovering that the type of sex ed being implemented right now is really useful and valuable.