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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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The researchers are not "putting their thumb on the scale" when designing their study to address a certain subset of the homeless population that actually wants to leave their condition of homelessness by explicitly excluding the long-term homeless from its cohort (who presumably are more content with that lifestyle, having been in that situation for longer).

Correct, it's more like both hands, both feet, and possibly a small elephant on the scale.

They excluded the homeless who are the biggest problem, then when half their study population disappeared with the money that didn't count against their claim that the results were good.

But how about this:

Those people will eventually die, and stop being a problem.

Whereas, if we lived in a world that gave everyone money as soon as they became homeless, then in that world there would be no such thing as people who have been homeless for 5 years without getting that money.

In a world where the policy is 'people get money to help recover as soon as they become homeless', there would only be people who got money as soon as they became homeless, so those are the people you'd want to study to understand how a world with that policy would look.

Those people will eventually die, and stop being a problem.

Emphasis on "eventually". These people would in a less functional society just die from their numerous public drug overdoses, or freeze to death in winter, or choke to death on their own vomit drunk off their asses under a bridge, or just starve. I suspect this is what happens to them in China or the third world. In the USA or Canada, however, they are rescued from the brink time and again at either taxpayer expense or by private charities.

Those people will eventually die, and stop being a problem.

So will we all.

Whereas, if we lived in a world that gave everyone money as soon as they became homeless, then in that world there would be no such thing as people who have been homeless for 5 years without getting that money.

You're assuming that if you gave money to everyone as soon as they became homeless, this would solve the problem, and trying to avoid that objection by technically qualifying your statement to not actually imply that.

You're assuming that if you gave money to everyone as soon as they became homeless, this would solve the problem, and trying to avoid that objection by technically qualifying your statement to not actually imply that.

I am not sure how this statement is any different from 'you are secretly making a different argument than the one you actually said, and that secret argument is wrong, so you are wrong despite the thing you actually said being true'.

I have no idea how to respond to that other than saying 'no, I'm not'.

The argument you're implying is that that if we gave people money as soon as they became homeless, there would be far fewer 5-year homeless; that is, we'd prevent long-term homelessness by giving money to the short-term homeless.

The argument you stated is a tautology -- if we gave people money as soon as they become homeless, there'd be no long-term homeless who hadn't gotten the money.

The point is that this study is precisely what we would do to find out what would happen in that world.

That's the reason you do studies.

I suppose that PNAS then has utterly lost all ability to critique experimental design and question the results of papers in the peer review process?

Yes, or they never had it in the first place.

You can shout about the replication crisis all you like

Consider it shouted.

but this critique of the paper precedes any attempt at replication and is targeted towards the very design of the study itself, as well as the conclusions drawn from its methodology.

It would be a bad idea to try to replicate this study with the flawed methodology, because such a "replication" would be pointless. "We gave money to a bunch of short-term homeless people who didn't have any of the serious problems associated with homelessness. We didn't hear from about half of them again, but of those we heard from, they're doing better" is just pointless; it demonstrates little.

The purpose of this "study" was to manufacture evidence for programs to give cash to homeless people. It wasn't intended to be actually valid.

When you've seen enough of the sausage being made at academic journals, you're not surprised about the occasional bullshit thing that happens. I could see being that reviewer, thinking, "Whelp, their study design is pretty bullshit, but there's not really a way to say that it's wrong, especially if they've detailed it and are careful with the way they write their conclusions." Of course, just because they didn't write a totally bullshit conclusion in the article itself doesn't mean that there is anything stopping a mountain of journalists from filling in that work for them in the popular media. Like, what are the actual words that the reviewer is supposed to say to recommend rejection? And even if we could come up with some good ones, what good would they actually do in the face of a politicized editor who is willing to handpick reviewers who are sympathetic to the cause (so such good words would never be spoken) or to just run roughshod over one complaining reviewer (if one existed)?

I don't think the design was fraudulent or the researchers stooges, but the reporting of anything will become trivial if you add enough conditions and disclaimers. Obviously if you give some people thousands of dollars, /some/ of them will be /some/ degree of better off. But the bridge between the magnitude of that benefit from the study to "And that's why this would be a good policy for governments to implement" is weakened by every one of those conditions and disclaimers which reduce the level of generality the study is good for.

No, but the design is so obviously flawed before the data was gathered and further ignoring those they lost track of should have been more than enough for any reputable journal to reject the paper. I’m personally suspicious even of the good faith of the team here, these flaws are so large and obvious to outsiders that it seems impossible that people doing professional research could just accidentally make them.

I think the opposite is true, though, in this case. You don't need a well-designed study to tell you that drug addicts and the mentally ill and people who prefer sleeping on the street when shelter beds are available probably aren't going make the wisest decisions when given large sums of money. We already know that; the more interesting question is what happens if we give people who don't have all these problems large sums of money, because homeless people are usually lumped together into one homogeneous mass of derelicts.

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