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by api
2520 days ago
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Another observation: as with any slushy area of science, peoples' willingness to apply skepticism and what they are willing to question tends to be determined by their politics and other biases. Liberals are happy to question IQ and especially race/IQ work while conservatives are happy to question stuff like those gender blinded recruitment studies or those academic trolling studies that try to link conservative opinions with mental illness. The reality is that all of it is very questionable because the entire field is riddled with shaky methodology and down right bad science. From what I've seen of the replication issues the whole field is worse than nutritional science, and that's bad. The degree to which a scientific field is politically weaponized is usually inversely proportional to its "hardness." You don't see the same thing in math or physics. Liberals and conservatives oddly never disagree on the value of Pi or the formula for the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine. The closest things to hard science that you find massive political disagreements on are climate change and evolution, and I've noticed that more serious conservative thinkers are coming around on those topics because the evidence is overwhelming. |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
> The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2.[1] The bill never became law [...]