Part of the reason for my unfriendly reaction to the latest “girls and young women traumatized by sexy pictures” thing is that it is tired. It is gawdawful tired. Tired, and unsolicited. I didn’t wake up the last three mornings in a row thinking “gee, I wonder if girls and young women get traumatized when they look at sexy pictures.”
Everybody who does polls and studies, likes their polls and studies to be read by someone. And yet, once again, the researchers at the APA did the study they wanted to do. Ostensibly to sound the alarm about something hitherto ignored…and yet…the study said what many studies before have already said.
How about finding out what people want to know, and then going and figuring out whatever that is?
Here’s a hint, researchers and pollsters. Listen up.
I would like to see a study conducted on Democrats. Democrats who use the phrase “Swift Boat” as if it is a verb. I can’t help but notice when you do a pinpoint-precise Google search, you get back an impressive number of results and each and every single one of those results, seems to have something to do with a Democrat being all big-n-bad.
You know, that thing they call “swaggering” when President Bush does exactly the same thing.
Well. I would like a poll to tell me what this phrase means when you use it as a verb. Does anybody really know? If you ask a hundred Democrats in serial fashion in an isolated setting what this means, do you get back one single answer?
Via blogger friend Phil: Self-explanatory. Good thing to remember for later when you see people bickering over whether a demonstration drew ten people or ten thousand.
Germans put price on protesting
They refuse to rally for neo-Nazis, but as long as the price is right a new type of German mercenary will take to the streets and protest for you.
Young, good-looking, and available for around 150 euros (£100), more than 300 would-be protesters are marketing themselves on a German rental website.
Also, “our country’s reputation” with other folks, like in Europe. In Germany, there has got to be a market for this. There would be no market for it at all, none whatsoever, if people just figured out what they figured out without absorbing pre-digested opinions from other people.
No, I’m not going to generalize across an entire continent. But there’s something going on there, and it doesn’t necessarily harbor a good example for us to follow here.
Well, I have personal reasons for stopping to read news like this. We live in an accredited world. You have to have a diploma to get work…at pretty much anything. When your father’s father became a man, people told him the same thing, and they were right to. Get that diploma, son. And so back then, success depended upon sheepskin…nowadays, it likewise does…it just seems logical to assume, every single day in between it was the same way, right?
Well, of course there is that problem with the early eighties, when we got an entire industry going by a bunch of college drop-outs. And the industry actually gave us stuff. That worked. That we use. That defined what a career really was, for millions of people, including me.
Some say I have formed a personal bias from a skewed perspective. They’re right. I’ve learned some things that I just can’t ignore. Back in the olden days, I was a high school graduate…and a “champion.” Not, as in, best of the best of the best — not that by any means. I’m referring to the old-school definition of champion. The Middle English version. You want your side to prevail, you pick a knight, and you declare victory or suffer defeat, based on the victory or defeat of that knight. I was that knight. Employers would dip into their savings accounts to give me paychecks, and to earn those paychecks I would sit down in front of a computer network and make it do what it was supposed to do. I was the “best bet,” college degree or no. And I set out to make sure it was a winning bet.
And so while I do have my personal biases, my real concern is what I’m seeing happening to business. I come from a time when those who made the decision to hire, had a personal stake in seeing things come out right.
Are highly educated teachers worth the extra pay? Those with master’s paid more, but studies cast doubt on benefit
06:53 AM CST on Monday, January 15, 2007
By ANDREW D. SMITH / The Dallas Morning News
Dallas-area school districts spend nearly $20 million a year on extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees.
The payments make intuitive sense: Advanced training must help teachers teach better.
But scores of studies show no ties between graduate studies and teacher effectiveness. Even among researchers who see some value in some master’s programs, many urge dramatic reforms and an end to automatic stipends.
“If we pay for credentials, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide easy credentials,” said Arthur Levine, a researcher who once headed Columbia University’s Teachers College. “If, on the other hand, we only pay for performance, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide excellent training.”
Count James R. Sharp Jr. among the defenders of the programs. The first-grade teacher in the Garland school district says his recent graduate studies at Texas A&M-Commerce in Mesquite improved nearly every aspect of his performance.
“I learned to maintain discipline. I learned to manage time. I learned to communicate better,” he said. “It was a tremendous experience.”
Yet a large body of research casts doubt on the value of master’s programs, of any kind, in the classroom. A roundup published in 2003 by The Economic Journal, a publication of the international Royal Economic Society, unearthed 170 relevant studies. Of those, 15 concluded that master’s programs helped teachers, nine found they hurt them, and 146 found no effect.
:
“We teach practical matters: curriculum, law, reading, classroom management,” said Madeline Justice, [Texas A&M] interim department head for educational leadership. “Students tell us wonderful things about our program.”
Asked if she knew of any studies that showed systematic benefits of master’s degrees, Dr. Justice said her school was conducting a study of its master’s degree students but that data had yet to be tabulated.
William Sanders, who pioneered many analytical techniques while at the University of Tennessee, has found no clear benefit of master’s degrees from any education school.
“I did one study that compared graduates from 40 different schools of education, everything from tiny no-names to national powerhouses,” Dr. Sanders said. “Each school produced great teachers, mediocre teachers and lousy teachers in roughly the same degree.”
Look, I’m not going to sit here and type in something to the effect that a Master’s Degree doesn’t mean anything. It seems like a given that someone who has one, has achieved something that has not been achieved by someone who does not have one.
But at the same time, it’s pretty easy to see how the Dallas-area school districts got here. The requirement for a formal education, is a requirement that tends toward absolutism. In other words, you insist this position over here be filled by someone with a degree, you have to insist that position over there also be filled by someone with equal credentialing. And then you insist on the same thing for that other thing over there too. Before you know it, everyone has to have the same degree.
And position after position after position is filled this way, with no one ever called on the carpet to account for how this helps to accomplish the job at hand. Yeah, the certified people are going to be performing at-or-above the level of the non-certified people…more or less. But from working with highly educated people, I’ve noticed something over the years: A problem one of them can’t solve, tends to be a problem many of them can’t solve. Their backgrounds tend to overlap to the extent that it becomes an occasion when someone “brings something to the table” that hasn’t already been offered by someone else.
Kind of like giving your children a narrow gene selection by marrying your sister.
But of course when the higher-education folk can do everything asked of them in their positions, that is fulfilled by someone without the same credentials, is that so wrong? I suppose maybe not. The article makes mention of some $20 million allocated for teachers with Master’s Degrees. I guess whoever’s paying that $20 million would be in the best position to answer that question.
And finally, there is the marriage between those who make the decision to hire, and those with a stake in having the requirements of the position filled well. Performance goals being met or exceeded. The unthinking insistence on degrees that may or may not be related to the demands of the position, tends to drive a wedge between those two parties.
For example, in hiring a zookeeper, most people would be unable to articulate just how a candidate’s application could be bolstered by a degree in…let us say…astronomy. But, hey. It’s kind of technical to deliberate that issue, isn’t it? We can’t burden our human resources guy with the chore of figuring out if astronomy has something to do with hosing shit off the floor of a bear cage. Maybe there’s some overlap. Maybe there isn’t — but we know it takes something to get an astronomy degree.
So once the job offer goes out to the guy with the astronomy degree, can the human resources guy who made the decision, really bet that he’ll make a good zookeeper? That’s the question. And the answer is…well, nobody knows. You see, the human resources guy isn’t betting that. What he’s betting, is that if the candidate turns out to be a lousy zookeeper, he will not be blamed. It won’t be his fault. See, he hired someone with a degree.
That’s a ludicrous example, since of course zookeeping is a far cry from astronomy. But it’s not that distant from…botany. Or climatology. Shift the degree to those, and it becomes more realistic. And the ramifications remain the same. The human resources guy, is effectively outsourcing the vital decision-making that he’s earning good money to do. He’s leaving it up to an outside source, in the form of the degree-criterion. It’s human nature to do this. You have to make decisions day-to-day, you find ways to take the decision-making out of it.
That isn’t to say I think higher education is meaningless. But I think it’s fair to say that sometimes, we get a little too caught up in confusing “certification” with “having accomplished something related to the job at hand.” So I’m not surprised that some studies have gone out looking for payoff from hiring teachers with Master’s degrees, and have come up a bit empty.
After all, you probably don’t have too many people ready, willing or able to say, “THIS is how a teacher with a Master’s degree is going to do a better job than a teacher who doesn’t have one.” Yeah, you’ve got James R. Sharp. And I’ll wager everyone in his position, is going to say the same thing. He’s simply saying he had an experience that makes him better at his job. Hell, I’ve had lots of experiences that made me better at every job I’ve ever held. That’s what experiences do…formal ed, or other.
That doesn’t mean a prospective employer is going to come out ahead, by insisting every candidate have the same experiences. If they were to do such a thing, an honest study would come to the conclusion that employer had effectively been wasting money. And it looks like that’s what has happened here.
But there’s more…
“America has 3.2 million teachers who together make up the nation’s most powerful political lobby, and more than half of them hold master’s degrees. They’ll fight for that money,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based nonprofit that funds and reviews education research. [emphasis mine]
Ah…there ya go. Read back up at TIK #40. We are a — what? Tribal species, although we are loathe to admit it. It’s demonstrated that a big chunk of this “money for people with degrees” thing, is nothing more than “I want everyone to be exactly like me, and if they aren’t I just want them to go away.”
I finally tracked down that disgusting and reprehensible leadership training exercise I attended ten years ago, which more-or-less marks the pivotal point in time where I realized something about the world was going horribly, horribly wrong. It’s called “Wilderness Survival” and you can find it here.
This petulant hostility to the way individuals think — I do not know where it comes from. It seems to be coupled with an ignorance of history, since it can be fairly said we don’t have anything in our lives that make life more bearable, that wasn’t created or inspired in some way by an individual. To the things that came from groups, we owe very little. Why this perpetual allegiance to “brainstorming” sessions where they’re not necessary? I have some ideas. First, people thinking in groups do make things happen; more often than not, a group of people will control purse strings. And so, groups appropriate money for things. This creates an illusion that groups make things happen. But for coming up with the idea in the first place, and validating it as a truly worthy idea capable of solving an identified problem — these are the domains of the individual. Groups can’t do this. One of those things everybody understands to be true, you’re just not always allowed to say so out loud.
Also, the group setting is good for identifying attributes to a platform that are offensive to one important faction, albeit innocuous and harmless to a different faction. The group deliberation process, therefore, is roughly akin to sandpaper. It removes protrusions that would be otherwise offensive. And an individual, no matter how bright he or she is, can’t do that. But — you don’t build with sandpaper. You don’t even shape things with sandpaper, not really.
The exercise has to do with crash-landing in in the wilderness in an extremely remote location in the Arctic. Subsequently, you have to make decisions about things in order to survive. The point of the exercise…at least, this was the point a decade ago, when I went through management training…was that people make better decisions in well-managed groups, than they do by themselves.
There are many flaws involved in this argument.
Flaw #1. Who leads the group. You’re going to make a different choice about your leader, under the flourescent lights of a comfortable conference or training room, than you would in the Arctic Circle. An innocent demonstration of what a fun party-animal you are, maybe a witty joke or two, an anecdote about that time you got rip-roaring drunk and pulled over by a cop…these are going to do wonderful things for your candidacy as the group’s leader when you’re in a comfortable office environment. They show you have this thing called “personality.” It won’t mean jack-shit out on the tundra.
Flaw #2. Individuals and groups are both capable of making bad decisions, and groups are decidedly inferior when it comes to self-policing. An individual makes a bad decision, and he or she may put it to some kind of test. If so, the bad decision will be shown for what it is, and the individual will say “well, that sucks donkey balls” and try something different. After all, if there is a price to be paid for implementing something bad, the innovator will bear that burden personally. Now, groups do this too. And when it comes to making sure the test is applied, rather than overlooked, groups are actually superior. The problem comes up when there is a “consensus” that the idea is so good, that any skeptical tests that might be applied to it, must be “bad.” And when that happens, the group inherits all the weaknesses of an individual and adds another weakness. The new weakness is that awareness of a test that remains un-applied, no longer translates to assurance that it will be applied. In a group, if a test is worth leaving un-applied, it’s worth forgetting about entirely. On the other hand, if an individual knows a test is worth applying and has not yet been applied, the individual will either apply it or remain instinctively aware that something has not yet been tested, and therefore should not be used.
Flaw #3. Groups are incapable of having “excellent” ideas, since they tend toward moderation in what they do. Therefore, if you define “excellence” as something mutually exclusive from being “ordinary,” rather than being a subset of what’s ordinary…and I do define it that way…this is entirely outside the domain of a group process. Extraordinary things — all extraordinary things — are going to be left undone. Think of the Wankel rotary engine, just as an example. Once you get a piston-driven internal-combustion engine working, as far as any group environment will be concerned this is what an engine is. If the Wankel is to be invented, it will be done on a piece of paper taped to the drafting board…of an individual. And like any idiosyncratic idea, this design will survive until it reaches the group, at which time its life-expectancy will be placed in significant doubt. Groups of people simply don’t innovate well. Where there is evidence available to demonstrate that they do, it’s usually because a group stole something from an individual and claimed credit for it.
Flaw #4. Although they are often given credit for drawing on the common experiences of the individuals who comprise them, in my experience it’s more accurate to say groups draw from the common experineces of sub-groups of two or three or more. Which, generally, is a good thing (see Flaw #5). The fact remains, the “drawing from individuals” paradigm is overly simplistic. Groups, more often than not, need a critical mass. The group environment will require a co-sponsor, someone to say “yeah, I think that might be a good idea.” Until then, the idea suggested by a solitary individual, tends to be non-existent in the mind of the group unless that individual happens to be the “ringleader” or an immediate lieutenant.
Flaw #5. Having a group come up with meaningful decisions, is a little bit like a car drawing gasoline out of the bottom of the tank. Crap after crap after crap, just keeps flowin’ on down the line, as participants struggle to prove the criticality of their continuing participation. They want to be invited to the next meeting. And so a beefy filtration system is needed, and invariably, it is forthcoming. But to filter ideas effectively, you need to do a lot of thinking. A group of people filters ideas, and what they do isn’t really “thinking.” Approvals and rebukes are muttered most quickly, with the greatest volume and enthusiasm, when they’re most obvious — but the filtration system is most important to the session overall, when the decision is not so obvious. The eventual result? An individul builds a statue of a horse by carving one part at a time, and fitting them together; the group starts with a block of marble and chisels away whatever doesn’t look like a horse. Each of these methods has its place in certain things. But when you’re stuck in the wilds and freezing to death, with dwindling resources, you’re going to want to build the horse one leg at a time.
Flaw #6. Groups crave approval. That is what they are supposed to do. They anticipate what an identified audience is going to like or dislike, and they jump ahead of the parade to “lead” it. If you want to construct an exercise where the group consistently produces inferior results compared to the individual, all you have to do is find a scenario where the approval of an outside party is either meaningless, or decidedly subordinate to something more important. Rescuing a drowning swimmer, or birthing a baby; maybe deciding at what moment the cord of a parachute is to be pulled. In situations like those, nobody wants a group to decide a damn thing. Everyone who gives it a few seconds of quality thought understands this to be the case.
I keep on hearing that science is in danger of being destroyed by politics. I believe this has already taken place.
People we like to call “scientists,” or whom we insist on embracing the belief that they have something to do with what we call “science,” are voting in groups on what to allow and what not to allow. I have a rather eccentric, and lonely, idea of what a “scientist” is, and the group-thing doesn’t have much to do with it. I notice I don’t owe very much to groups of scientists; groups of anybody, for that matter. I’ve got all these useful things sitting around me as I type this that I got because of science. A flatscreen computer monitor, a coffeemaker that grinds my beans fresh at a pre-selected time-of-day, a hot plate that keeps the coffee cup hot and fresh as I type away. These things were not developed because groups of people voted on what worked and what did not work. These things came about because somewhere, an individual fiddled around with something until it became something else, and started doing something.
This is how we get things. Everything we use, I daresay. Groups vote here & there on what to do with these things, and maybe, to take credit for the things coming into existence; they do not actually make the things. It’s up to individuals to do that. Go on, try and find an exception. If you think you’ve found one, you probably got snookered.
And so, when a scientist — what I think of as a scientist — sits in a room full of other scientists voting on something, I expect he or she is usually going to be a wallflower, waiting for the proceedings to be over so that some research in an empty room or cubicle somewhere can be resumed. The guy that’s doing the talking, or holding court, or trying to get some kind of coup going against some hated morsel of existing policy or what-not…that isn’t a scientist. That’s a politician. Credentials or not, that’s a politician wearing a scientist’s coat. To put it simply, trying to get a group to approve or deny something, is not scientific work. Science is the study of nature, and nature is going to do what it damn well wants.
Science often goes and stops according to the presence or absence of funds; sadly, where those funds go, is a question often put before large groups. And so, you see, if I’m wrong about science being dead — I’m certainly correct about it being subordinated to other things. Other things that are anti-science. Call it “Cinderella science,” something forced to mend dresses and sweep floors for ugly stepsisters.
I was given cause to think about this about a month ago when Mary Cheney, the homosexual daughter of our current Vice President, announced her pregnancy.
No Republican in Washington is more beloved by social conservatives than Vice President Dick Cheney, who with his wife, Lynne, has backed and breathed every issue dear to them for six tumultuous years.
News that Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary, is pregnant has therefore touched a raw nerve, as advocates for conservative family values struggle to reconcile their loyalty to the Cheneys with their visceral opposition to same-sex relationships — and particularly to raising a child without a father.
Credit goes to blogger friend James Bostwick for sniffing out the first piece of bull poo in this mini-essay. Do you know any “social conservatives”? Quick, think of five…five, who hold Vice President Cheney in affectionate esteem above & before any other public figure. Aw hell, just think of one. Know anybody like that? While it’s fair to say some conservatives don’t despise Mr. Cheney quite as much as the average left-wing liberal, I can’t think of anyone who regards the veep as “beloved” because of his social positions. Whatever the position on social issues, the conservative viewpoint is invariably that Vice President Cheney is some kind of traitor — in one direction, or in another. The SFGate writer has erected a straw-man argument, to lend importance to her article that doesn’t really exist.
But the fireworks were just starting. I had a fascinating off-line dialog with John Rambo for the last month or so about this one. “JohnJ” is a featured writer at Bullwinkle Blog and blogs his own stuff at Right Linx, both of which are excellent resources worth your time to peruse here & there. Like a handful of other folks who are sufficiently self-disciplined to pay attention to things that don’t fit on MTV, Rambo has developed a curiosity about my still-natally-developed “Yin and Yang” theory and recalled the essentials of it after James Dobson’s guest column appeared in Time Magazine.
And this is where the phony science comes in. It’s fascinating watching what happens from this point; almost like a chemical reaction. Try to leave the emotion-charged social issues out of it, and focus on the thought process…as any decent scientist would.
In the December 13 column, Dobson starts out…
A number of social conservatives, myself included, have recently been asked to respond to the news that Mary Cheney, the Vice President’s daughter, is pregnant with a child she intends to raise with her lesbian partner. Implicit in this issue is an effort to get us to criticize the Bush Administration or the Cheney family. But the concern here has nothing to do with politics. It is about what kind of family environment is best for the health and development of children, and, by extension, the nation at large.
With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father. That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development. The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy–any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.
Dobson is saying, here, that the child will be raised without a father. Is that scientific? Maybe yes, maybe no…but does it even have to be? Unless there’s something else going on that we haven’t been told, it looks like the matter is settled. There is Mary, there is Heather…no male influence in sight, and certainly no need to have such a figure present in the essentials of upbringing. Dobson seeks to examine how this will affect the child at the developmental stages, and this is the part that touches on Yin & Yang — and it also gets him in no small measure of hot water with the community of what we have come to call “scientists.”
The unique value of fathers has been explained by Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School in his book Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child. Pruett says dads are critically important simply because “fathers do not mother.” Psychology Today explained in 1996 that “fatherhood turns out to be a complex and unique phenomenon with huge consequences for the emotional and intellectual growth of children.” A father, as a male parent, makes unique contributions to the task of parenting that a mother cannot emulate, and vice versa.
According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences.
And, almost as if you’d been hearing a dull shrieking noise overhead for a few seconds, there emerges a thunderous BOOM. Dr. Pruett would like to say something about this.
“Time Magazine should take Dobson’s article off the web and pledge that they will never again use his group as a source on family issues,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Focus on the Family has damaged its credibility and should stop misleading Americans by misquoting respected researchers.”
TODAY, Pruett wrote the following letter:
Dr. Dobson, I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission. You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, “What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.” Kyle Pruett, M.D. Yale School of Medicine.
What of the other researcher? Dr. Gilligan is similarly agitated and has a similar beef:
The issue has to do with distorting the findings of science and distorting the conclusions of research. These meaningful words are used in the video, above, over and over again. Shame on Dr. Dobson.
Now, take a look at what we got going on here.
EVERYTHING is orchestrated by this “Truth Wins Out” outfit, which appears to have been acting in a way similar to Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. Hey, Dr. Pruett and Dr. Gilligan, did you know your work is being cited this way? Do you know what kind of parties you won’t be invited to because of this? If you like, we can produce a video for you…
Is that science?
How about guitar music playing in the background of the video? Is that what we call “research”? How about the heavy implications that Dr. Dobson is engaged in some kind of a pattern of falsification going back-a-ways — but, if you listen to the words, you see this all comes from the single piece in Time Magazine about the Cheney pregnancy? Science has a lot to do with identifying trends and patterns of things. Was that done accurately here, or was this implication done to appeal to people’s emotions? Is it scientific to appeal to emotions?
How about Dr. Gilligan’s use of the actual word in the video? You might want to watch it again; she uses it several times. Is she referring to a discipline where you prove and/or refute things by means of research and experimentation? It does not appear so. In fact, I’ve noticed James Dobson’s guest column simply prints two short sentences each dealing with the two disaffected docs. He does not say Dr. Pruett is opposed to homosexual marriages or non-traditional families. He does not say this about Dr. Gilligan. He does not say a single word about what the researchers have concluded from their research. If he did, why would I care about that? No, he simply reports what they have learned.
Pruett and Gilligan angrily retort that he has “cherry-picked” and “distorted” their research. Listen and read very, very carefully. They could have said Dobson’s article is wrong. They could have said NO. Dr. Pruett’s research was “distorted” as saying “fathers do not mother.” Pruett could have said “my research indicates that fathers DO mother.” Or, he could have said “my research has no indication on whether fathers are capable of mothering, or not.” Gilligan’s research was “distorted” with the summary that “mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty.” Again, Dr. Gilligan could have said NO. She could have said this directly contradicts facts. Why not? She’s accusing Dobson of distortion…show us a concrete distortion. She could have said mothers and fathers share completely interchangeable roles. Or, that she doesn’t know — jury’s still out on that.
No, it seems — at the behest of this TruthOut outfit — Drs. Pruett and Gilligan object to the conclusions drawn from their research, which, on its own, was reported accurately.
Science is getting into the opinion biz. People throw the S-word around…and they aren’t really talking about “science” anymore. Look at Dr. Gilligan’s video one more time. What she calls science, is not a process but a simple exercise of argumentum ad authoritarian fallacy. Dr. Gilligan does not oppose gay marriage. Her research shows that fathers and mothers tend to contribute different things to a child’s upbringing, but you are not to use this in advancing an argument hostile to gay marriage. If you try to do this, she will stop you. She says so.
I don’t want to be too hard on the scientists, I’m sure they’ve got “reputations” to worry about. As I said at the beginning of this posts, scientists decide things in groups nowadays; that’s what creates the problem with calling them “scientists.” And I’m sure when Dobson comes to a conclusion out-of-favor with the scientific peerage, and he uses the work of “respected” (read: accepted into the clan) researchers, to them it feels like slander. So on an emotional level, I suppose you can’t slight them for wanting to treat it that way.
But based on what he wrote that I read, their objections are just plain silly. He’s taken what they said — and he’s reached conclusions, based on what they said, that they don’t like. And so they’re insisting on playing traffic-cop, with their scientific credentials, on the conclusions to be reached from the work they did. According to what we used to call “science,” that’s utterly invalid.
It’s like me agreeing to the terms of a credit card, charging things up on that card, and then objecting to the balance on my bill at the end of the month. Hey, it’s a conclusion drawn from your research; it’s not the research itself. You don’t have to like it, and if your reputation is being somehow tarnished because of the conclusion someone else drew from your work, it shouldn’t be. And if your invitation to a cocktail party somewhere has been withdrawn, or your grant money for some project is no longer forthcoming, well you know what? That’s just tough. It says more about the person who made the decision to withdraw or revoke than it does about James Dobson.
Update 1/5/07: Additional contribution from Rambo, George H. Taylor speaking on “consensus science”. Must-see.
Derrick Z. Jackson links the issue of race, to the decidedly non-race-related issue of taxes.
“Taxes” has become a code word for “we got ours, forget the rest of you all.” “Taxes” avoids real discussion of white privilege. “Taxes” avoid s how old-line white families were able to transfer wealth and property during slavery.
