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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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A lot of important decisions are made on the basis of expert claims!

And most of the trust in them is misplaced. You gave a particularly extreme example, where I would agree with you mistrust would be unwise, but it only worked because what the expert suggested was verified on a large scale, and the person he was giving advice to was particularly unable to make judgments on his own.

No I agree social workers r mostly bad, I'm just saying that they're an example of why more public data won't fix anything.

My point was that this is a bad example. Yes data would fix things if it existed. The kind of data I was talking about simply does not exist in case of social work, and sociological theories.

I mean, there were decades of terribly done pseudoreplications until the replication crisis.

I was under the impression people didn't really try replicating these studies because they assumed they were done correctly? Also that most of them weren't bad because the data was literally made up (it's true of some cases but not a lot), and in the case it was made up it wasn't publically available.

And most of the trust in them is misplaced

I don't think this is true. Another example of 'trusting the experts' is trusting that the judge in your legal case is fair and not corrupt. Another is trusting that the wikipedia article you just read is accurate.

Yes data would fix things if it existed.

I think the 'bad experts' would manage to interpret the publicly-available data in exactly the terrible ways they currently do, and not be able to tell the difference?

I was under the impression people didn't really try replicating these studies because they assumed they were done correctly

Well, they didn't try to adversarially replicate them. But there were plenty of replications in the sense of studies on the same thing that also got positive results.

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