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by Mangalor
4402 days ago
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> It's also why hard science majors make fun of them. Hard science recognizes social science work when solid data is used and the methodology is well understood and effective. You're generalizing. > That's because just about any other discipline is capable of conducting a controlled experiment > You can't just order families of a particular race to stop having more or less children than other races so that you can get a good control group, so you have no control group. You look at families of a race that had less children and compare them to families of the same race with more children. That would be a data experiment controlled for race. Read Freakonomics if you want to understand data experiments better. |
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That's exactly how you expound the problem and get the wrong answer. How do you know that the factors causing parents to have more or less children are the same between races, or that those factors don't directly impact parenting ability? Suppose the predominant factor in low income Asian Americans having three or more children is a calculated decision that the couple's extended family has enough resources to responsibly raise that number of children (i.e. rich uncle), but the predominant factor in low income African Americans having three or more children is accidental pregnancy.
At first you had to take into account income level, but to do that you have to factor out fertility rate, and to factor that out you have to account for the different causes behind the differing fertility rate. If we then discover that the predominant cause of accidental pregnancy in African Americans is religious opposition to birth control or abortion, don't we have to then account for the causes and consequences of a higher degree of faith in religion?
Nobody has the resources to go all the way down the rabbit hole. But everywhere you look there is some factor that would change the outcome by 50% in one direction or the other if you take it into account. Which means you can make the numbers say whatever you want just by looking in the places you can expect to find support for the result you like.