The issue with gender science(politics) is that its so heavily left biased. In Sweden you get grants based on certain "strong" fields such and gender equality, women rights, trans studies etc. No matter what you are researching if you add those keywords you have a much larger chance of receiving funds.

We have a universities that are churning out "humanitarians" that have read all of those fields and have no real education outside of the made up fields and all wants to research it from the flawed information that they have recieved during their own studies.
Does anyone believe that their results will be anything other than biased from their own perceived version of reality?

If your results lean left and confirm what you have been taught you get further grants, if not you dissapear or get called racist/sexist/etc untill you are forced out of the limelight...

That there're bodies that recognize credentials for the sake of selling their services to the general public is kind of a separate issue than the institutions having the ability to grant the degrees in the first place. Both are important but we should be clear about what we're critiquing.

1) You don't need a journal to publish results. If you have a recognized credential and are willing to put yourself out there you can get attention....

2) I don't agree. Plenty of people are eager to make a name for themselves, especially in the name of something they believe in. You see this in people like jordan peterson that everyone keeps posting videos of - he's pushing a fairly inconsequential issue on a matter that's outside his discipline with respect to a bill that's intended to include gender identity as a protected group in canadian law with some aspects that he disagrees with.

3) This isn't a problem unless policy makers are using studies from unknown academics that haven't been replicated to shape policy. In a properly functioning system the work of PHDs is a starting point that policy makers can use to guide their own research.

This applies to few people (note that i said "most" and not "all" in my original post). Most academics need to be published in peer-reviewed journals. Most Promotion and Tenure committees will not count other outlets as equivalent.

Again, a few can do this. But most need to go the traditional route in academia to get tenure.

The system is far from properly functioning. It's a giant mess in academia.

The original position seemed to be that PHDs are unable to scrutinize the work of their peers. Whether they can do it (especially in a way that'll be impactful) is separate from whether they'll get tenure for it. Most studies themselves are a waste of time and effort... what sense is there in incentivizing their replication? It's only when the paper has the potential to lead to changes in policy that it's worth looking into, and when that happens plenty of people do take a closer look.

My apologies. I did not mean to imply that they CAN NOT do it. They certainly can and have the skills. I meant to state that they [generally] WILL NOT do it for the reasons i outlined (and more).

I used to think this as well, until i spent 20 years in academia and found that even when it affects policy (and real lives), most academics simply don't have the desire to scrutinize anything. Keep in mind that we're generally very busy during the school year, and have our own research interests and goals. It takes time to read a paper and think it through. We don't get paid extra for that time, so most just don't bother. I do it personally bc i teach Stats and Methods, so it's my job to know how ****ed up things are.

Most academics are not well-versed enough in others' research to know what to question. A cognitive psychologist who reads a social psych paper and wants to question it, doesn't have the time it takes to get up to speed on the literature and methodology used. Much easier to ignore it.

I'm not the first person to point this out. It's been covered widely in the recent literature (the problem, not the solution), but still the problem persists because no good solutions have been posited.

I think your statement in the first post goes well beyond the evidence you've presented, and I'm going to disagree with abba and 13ball and say that your cited evidence doesn't provide any justification for extrapolating beyond psychology, although I think there are valid complaints to be made about academic publishing across many fields, and methodological challenges in the social sciences that go beyond psychology.

First, your wording is obviously misleading with regard to fraud. You don't have any evidence of a widespread problem with fraud. You just have a few isolated examples with no attempt to establish a general problem, whether within psychology or more generally.

Secondly, with regard to replicability, the reason these replication studies don't generalize well to other social sciences (I'm thinking of sociology and anthropology specifically) is that the other disciplines very rarely use the same methods as psychology, which emphasizes certain kinds of experimental designs which are generally not even possible in other social sciences. Nor are sociological studies always interpreted (or intended to be interpreted) with the expectation of universal generalizability in the same way as psychological studies often are.

Note that I think it's reasonable to expect that the way in which publishing is tied to tenure, the desire for novelty and positive results, and other problems related to the culture of peer review have consequences across disciplines, but you can't prove a replicability problem in sociology or anthropology by referring to these studies of replicability in psychology given the differences in methodology. It might be reasonable to expect similar problems with statistical competency, but not all social science research is quantitative either, and you certainly aren't demonstrating a general problem when your evidence is limited to one field.

I think it's useful to understand the epistemological limits of these disciplines, which are quite real and pressing, the necessity for triangulating results across studies, and the need for skepticism about methods. In some ways I think other social sciences tend to be less prone to over-interpretation in the media and pop-culture than psychology as well (for various reasons I can try to elaborate if necessary), but in any case you haven't presented an argument that justifies dismissing the social sciences in general. You've presented an argument for skepticism about the certainty of conclusions drawn from psychological experiments, which I think is entirely warranted.

Psychology is still growwing right before our eyes, along with the rest of developing knowledge.

From the youtube, I'd guess the point is supposed to be that Gender Studies courses deny that there are important biological differences between people determined by sex. What is not in the video is any evidence that Gender Studies courses (as a general rule) deny this. It's not even clear that the woman in the video denies this in general, she mostly seems to be denying that biological differences are meaningful in discussions about social policy, although she seems to deny a biological basis for gendered differences in aggression.

I don't have any first-hand experience of what is taught in Gender Studies programs, and since they are (I believe) mostly inter-disciplinary, it might vary a lot by program, i.e some might be more humanities-based and others lean more on sociology or anthropology.

Here, you appear to be criticizing me for not providing enough citations to back up my point.

Here, you make a strong claim (pretty much in line with what i said) without any citations.


The irony.

That's not a strong claim (it's not even specific), and it's my opinion. I'm not sure what you expect me to cite. In any case, I only offered my opinion for the purposes of clarifying that I don't think social sciences are perfect, but that your apparently absolute dismissal seems unjustified.

well named, you're so scrupulously even-handed and open-minded that you pretty much stand for nothing, as far as I can tell. But you do it very amiably, props.

proff peter, just to get you back on track i'll highlight the op and where things went

im talking about what is being taught on campuses. you want to shift the discussion to suit yourself. as we will see, you aren't even familiar with what is being taught at a large number of respected universities or the consequences
ok so would you believe that womens and trans studies are as bad or worse? i never compared the two. for example womens studies don't need to contradict mainstream psychology, it contradicts biology. on top of that, what do you think is more biased, scientists conducting science (with biases and flaws) or womens and trans studies with political and personal biases conducting studies and cherry picking supporting nonsense as course material?
maybe steer the conversation towards what you want in your own thread. this isnt the medical journal thread. this is about what is being taught in womens and gender classes on many respected campuses
again, these things have consequences. thats why i care. i got banned for being critical and people are being silenced for their own self interest because challenging these professors doesnt end well with the viscous pc crowd. its a problem

what happens when nobody challenges the wage gap nonsense? well we hear obama and clinton parroting it for political gain. its a problem if the political strategists think its a valuable message, right? if its a "problem" that effects half the population then surely its worth fixing, right? i'm sure you can see the problem with bad ideas going unchallenged now right? fixing a fake problem affecting half the population that now feels slighted. yeah thats worth caring about probably

maybe if you haven't thought about it yet, think through the consequences of falsely telling people that things like gender and identity are just a social construct. think it through. what road can or will this go down? what are the consequences? do these scientific claims hold up to any sort of scrutiny? why arent they being challenged?

you have people teaching and arming students with nonsense that leads to political activism. the video i posted shows a study that demonstrates that freedom results in greater gender disparity. if you are being taught the opposite and your goal is to remove disparity politically, can you see the problem yet? you are now educating students that women are being slighted and screwed in places they aren't. the consequences are going to be political action to "fix" these things. this is real

a starting point to all of this is they are after free speech to the point of compelled speech and the opposition displaying any sort of sanity has their career at risk. imagine a world where the number of identities people have can and has continued to grow. imagine if they keep inventing words and demand you use them which is enforced by law. well, thats happening. its real. think through the consequences and think outside psychology when looking for contradiction
studies show the opposite effect of what gender studies will tell you. that is because gender studies are full of fallacy. gender is a social construct, the patriarchy, etc. its all made up nonsense that contradicts human nature and what we see in the animal kingdom. if you pay even a little attention to their messages you should start to grasp the absurdity

as you know i believe our physiology affects our behavior. i have already pointed this out in very simple ways showing behavior differences between gender and age. hormone levels. there are actual scientific studies back this up which i have cited in the trump thread. for example i posted a video talking about studies showing that testosterone levels and physical strength even have a statistically relevant impact on your political views and your likelihood to end up in jail or be violent. womens studies make a habit of dismissing things as social construct. sounds familiar right?

Thanks for your quality posts. People get banned for bad modding. Hidden rule.

My experience, took a psychology of adjustment class, was actually a HUMANISM class, a philosophy void of any true substance, and I dropped it in a week. Lol college subsidies and this liberal dream of college for all. Diarrhoea through the intestinal track of the new K-14 education system.

I do think anecdotes from college students is evidence, and for that reason, I think it'd also make a decent Student Life thread.

Fair enough. My opinion is based off of years of personal experience, and is impossible to "cite" sufficiently on a message board. I respect your opinion, as it is also clearly based off of experience. Good discussion.

When someone shows me that (in the top journals in their field):

1) Stats are done incorrectly 50% of the time
2) One in eight journal articles contained a grossly inconsistent p-value that may have affected the statistical conclusion
3) 95% of the findings match the alternative hypothesis (which are almost always unusual findings, as the journals won't publish no-brainers)
4) Dozens of famous people in the field are being caught making up data
5) Textbooks are failing to correct the errors even after the journals retract the studies

Then yes, i tend to view the whole field through a lens of suspicion. Does that mean that ALL studies are flawed? Of course not. But how am i to know which ones are and which ones aren't? So they all come under suspicion until those idiots clean up their field.

My point was not that these results shouldn't make you skeptical about psychology, but that psychology is not sociology, or anthropology, or economics, or poli sci, and so on. They are different fields.

Also fwiw it appears to me that, based on your link (here), you're overstating the significance of the "50% of stats are wrong" claim. Only 13% of the errors affect the conclusions of the papers, which you note in your next bullet point. There's a big difference between an error that changes a conclusion and an error that doesn't, and if you look at the methodology of the StatCheck program the reason so many of the errors don't affect conclusions is that studies also tend to report lots of insignificant correlations. A mistake in the reported p-value there is irrelevant to the findings of the study.

That said, obviously more rigor is needed. It's an embarrassing problem. But when your conclusion is that the research is entirely unreliable, the difference matters. 13% is not 50%. You also haven't demonstrated that "dozens of famous people" in the field have been caught fabricating data.

You've made claims about what is taught, but never backed them up.

So you say.

The wage gap is around ~5% when accounting for all known variables. Seems like an actual problem. And we know that gender discrimination exists, so it seems reasonable to ascribe at least some of the gap to discrimination.

You seem to be purposely intent on misquoting me and trying to put words in my mouth, so i'm going to bow out now.

If you feel misrepresented I'd like to suggest that you've made a lot of exaggerated claims and then you seem to back away from them when challenged.

"Psychology and its related fields (psychiatry, sociology, etc) is so full of fraud and poorly conducted research that it's become almost useless"

"Dozens of famous people in the field are being caught making up data"

Those are direct quotes, and the ones upon which I've based my objections, i.e that psychology is not sociology (quote 1), and that I think you're going too far in rejecting the entire fields ("it's become almost useless"). I'm not sure what words I've put in your mouth that you object to. Certainly it's not my intent to misrepresent you.

He came, he derailed, he huffed and puffed, he displayed total ignorance of the subject matter, he complained about his feelings and left

Not surprised. Pretty common exit strategy

This a million times over. It then serves to reinforce itself when those of us who reject this nonsense are asked to back our claims up with data and studies. You might as well ask Galileo to back up a heliocentric orbit using the Bible.

Who is this Galileo guy anyway? What are his politics?

A very unpopular guy in his time. Similar to people who stand up against left-wing tyranny today

well put! a brave iconoclast. We need more of those right now.

That post was pretty terrible.

Apparently people are mad at something called "gender studies" but nobody can be bothered to come anywhere close to anything resembling a specific criticism.

OP began with:

But there's nothing to even shout down here. Anyone? Buehler?

Most of these links do not work because the (...) replaces the url linked to.