What were you THINKING?

The BBQ Pit
2213

Maybe we can make a little space for Sage_Rat’s just asking questions about studies in the Diversity Equity and Inclusion thread in GD.

@Sage_Rat,

Here is the reason we are questioning your implicit motivation. For the most part scientists know what they are doing. If multiple peer reviewed studies reach a consensus it is probably the right answer. There is reasons to be skeptical at least initially but generally for one of the following reasons.

  1. There is only a single non-repeated study finding the effect.
  2. There are multiple studies which contradict each other.
  3. The effect is highly surprising and would lead to extraordinary conclusions, and so therefore should require extraordinary proof.

None of these apply in this case. There are multiple studies, the literature is entirely consistent (if you have a contradictory study please post it), and the conclusion is what we would expect from common sense.

So given that there are multiple studies and they are all pointing in the same direction, it appears to me that the reason you feel the need to demand extra scrutiny is the thrid one. You believe that DEI is beneficial is such an extraordinary claim that, it is more likely that the experiments are flawed then that

If someone were to ask the questions to cats sleep more than dogs, and someone else answered with five studies indicating that yes cats do indeed sleep longer than dogs, would you feel the need to say. Those all seem to be small studies (despite the fact that 350 of dogs were studied). Or maybe the experimenters exercised the cats but not the dogs before the study. Are we sure that the authors couldn’t have run the study 20 times and only reported that one instance that it happened that cats slept longer than dogs? (despite the fact that for the reported p-value of p<0.001 the study would have to have been repeated over a thousand times).

Or would you simply accept the perfectly reasonable conclusion that cats are in fact the lazy bums they appear to be.

ETA: I just noticed that the only other time I put a user in this thread it was also Sage_Rat. I think this is purely coincidental I’m not specifically targeting him, it just happened that the two times that I felt a discussion I was involved in was getting out of hand and hadn’t been moved that he was at the center.