Scientific Studies, Markets
As a side-thing, I occasionally participate in paid academic studies to cover the cost of monthly bills. There are a couple sites where you can sign up for them; you can do them quickly while listening to music, it's easy money. But I've had some trippy experiences: a friend linked me a headline-grabbing article about a psychological study with a heady conclusion. Looked at the details - all from one of these websites, good chance I was a participant in it*. Which made me think of the claims in the article versus my experience doing it. I mean, I was barely paying attention. To make meaningful money off of these sites, you have to churn the surveys out. They don't pay enough for you to really slow down and reflect.
And these studies aren't just from small colleges. The most common are: Harvard, Stanford, Yale & Wharton.
This is an utterly broken approach. Selection Bias Imagine I came to you and told you I know how the average American thinks about stuff. You ask, oh yeah how? And I say: I interviewed 100 people who are really into insane clown posse. You'd be like: well that seems like you're just getting info about people into insane clown posse. Similarly, when you read a yale study about how people think, you might be really only learning about how the group of people who sign up for an academic studies website thinks. And even then, not really what they think, but what they think will make them money.
Now there are some safeguards against this: you have to answer all sorts of demographic questions. Like some studies screen for people making over 100k a year. But who, making over 100k a year, is taking surveys online for ~minimum wage?The answer, I think, is no-one. You're getting people with multiple email accounts who know that it's beneficial to have a 'portfolio' of demos.
There's one longitudinal study I'm taking now about whether you've gotten the covid-vaccine, that only gives you an invite to next week's study if you say you haven't taken the vaccine yet. It's tracking people who don't take the vaccine, of course, but its baldly incentivizing you to say that you haven't taken the vaccine yet.
Point of all of this? I guess: be very skeptical of studies that involve surveys, and 'markets solve everything' approaches to academia.
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* wasn't totally sure. I took surveys that had the exact same [interpret emotions from pictures of eyes] test mentioned in the article, but there was a spate of studies using that same test, over a ~six month period. This is another thing. There are academic 'fads' that come and go
And these studies aren't just from small colleges. The most common are: Harvard, Stanford, Yale & Wharton.
This is an utterly broken approach. Selection Bias Imagine I came to you and told you I know how the average American thinks about stuff. You ask, oh yeah how? And I say: I interviewed 100 people who are really into insane clown posse. You'd be like: well that seems like you're just getting info about people into insane clown posse. Similarly, when you read a yale study about how people think, you might be really only learning about how the group of people who sign up for an academic studies website thinks. And even then, not really what they think, but what they think will make them money.
Now there are some safeguards against this: you have to answer all sorts of demographic questions. Like some studies screen for people making over 100k a year. But who, making over 100k a year, is taking surveys online for ~minimum wage?The answer, I think, is no-one. You're getting people with multiple email accounts who know that it's beneficial to have a 'portfolio' of demos.
There's one longitudinal study I'm taking now about whether you've gotten the covid-vaccine, that only gives you an invite to next week's study if you say you haven't taken the vaccine yet. It's tracking people who don't take the vaccine, of course, but its baldly incentivizing you to say that you haven't taken the vaccine yet.
Point of all of this? I guess: be very skeptical of studies that involve surveys, and 'markets solve everything' approaches to academia.
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* wasn't totally sure. I took surveys that had the exact same [interpret emotions from pictures of eyes] test mentioned in the article, but there was a spate of studies using that same test, over a ~six month period. This is another thing. There are academic 'fads' that come and go
Comments (54)
Wait, was this a dating site?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I don't want to impugn the character of the researchers, because I don't think the problem comes down to character. It feels like this is when you really know its bad - everyone knows something is wrong - but the incentive structures push people to keep doing this stuff nevertheless. It's this weird zombie thing. I wonder what would really crash it, and force a meaningful restructuring?
(I occasionally, if in a particularly 'Jesus, c'mon!' mood, leave a comment in the study to these effects, but as good as it feels, I suspect that probably won't heal the sickness)
I don't impugn characters. They're rational people responding to incentives. You're a young postdoc. You've busted your butt for years to get your Ph.D. then busted it again to find an academic job. You know that you have to "publish or perish." So you publish. You or I would do the same. And if you're not in a hard science, any research you do will be fuzzy and subject to all kinds of subtle biases. Your deadline's due, you need to show results to get your grant renewed. So you publish what you can. And everyone else is too busy to notice because they're playing the same game.
That's my understanding, anyway. The softer the science, the more it happens. You can't get away with irreproducible results in physics, but you can in sociology.
And medicine and biology and ecology and genetics and...
Yes true. And actually a lot of physics is irreproducible these days, being entirely mathematical and not subject to any experimental verification at all. Industrial-scale rationality is failing entirely, as is industrial-scale everything.
Old saying: "Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter, because nobody listens."
Quoting fishfry
From the same publication as the remark above (from the 1970s):
"If it's green or if it wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it does not work, it's phyics."
So true. I used sweat blood sweat and tears to show the preservation of energy in action with a simple, very very simple, heat-transfer experiment in first year. And I still had to fudge the data to get the result the TA wanted, by needing to say "some heat was transferred to the external environment." He bought it, that TA did.
I am sorry, but if someone can't copy numbers from one sheet to another, he should't have earned his post-doc standing in quantitative analysis of nanomolecules suspended in highly viscous medium flowing through carbon-based hex molecules.
If you can be ordered about by incentive structures, you have no character. Character is that which resists manipulation.
I suggest we cut the soft sciences some slack if only because its harder to put them on a firm foundation of mathematical precision. Its one thing to quantify mass, speed, etc. and another to put emotions, thoughts, etc. on numerical scale. I suspect it all boils down to the fact that the soft sciences deal with matters that have a more subjective component to them, making measurement, if that's possible in the first place, harder and imprecise. Reminds me of the hard problem of consciousness somehow.
If character's the ability to resist manipulation (this is a reallyslippery slope though...) then character's on a spectrum. It may be true (i'm not sure) that saints with extreme self-determination + capacity for suffering can remove themselves entirely from incentive structures, but sainthood would be a high bar to clear in order to do labwork. When I say I don't want to impugn their character, I don't mean 'I think that scientists have better developed character than 99.99% of the population.'
Yeah, that's the Christian tradition, though. The religion of love brooks no compromise. If you blather on about the sanctity of knowledge, you have to uphold your own values. Bish bash bosh. If you have no love you are no Christian, and if the truth doesn't come first, you are no scientist.
Disgruntled prof linked
1 Corinthians 13:2
In the matter of what Christianity is, if in no other case, The New Testament is definitive.
:up:
That blog is a goldmine, it gives me the impression that internal squabbles in academia play out very much like they do on the forum. Posturing, misdirection, playing out the emotions rather than the facts, motivated reasoning. Easy to be reasonable when you're used to defining yourself as reason's voice etc.
To go back to the main point, I think its easy to call-out failure, and much harder and more interesting to figure out why failure happens. I'd invite you to think about the implications of the relationship between character and manipulation you describe when applied generally. It's a slippery slope.
I'd be more wary of this:
Russell Group university accused of Soviet-style censorship
Camilla Turner 7 hrs ago
A Russell Group university has been accused of Soviet-style censorship after requiring new humanities courses to “move away” from a “white, Eurocentric” curriculum.
Academics at Exeter University’s department of Social Sciences and International Studies (SSIS) have been told that they should “integrate” these changes when updating existing modules or creating new ones.
One lecturer said he is “shocked” at the stipulation and claimed the faculty - which oversees a number of disciplines including law, politics, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology - is undermining academic freedom “in the most profound sense”.
"It is like there is a Maoist cultural revolution taking place in our centres of learning,” one academic told The Telegraph.
"It is just ridiculous - we are supposed to be a leading Russell Group university. This affects thousands of students and hundreds of academics.”
The academic said the movement to “decolonise” the curriculum has swiftly progressed from a “faddish fringe theory” to being “adopted as the new orthodoxy” in universities.
He likened the approach to the Soviet Union where academics might be asked to prove how their courses would advance radical socialism in the face of reactionary capitalist imperialism from the West.
“What’s the difference here in the UK, where we are supposed to be a free liberal democracy?” he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/russell-group-university-accused-of-soviet-style-censorship/ar-BB1gL6aH?ocid=msedgntp
Your privilege. I won't drag you.
Quoting csalisbury
Ha! That is rich! A moral hard line is a slippery slope! You'll have to spell out those implications if you want me to think about them.
Here's a few ways to look at how moral hard line falls on its face:
1. Fudge -- by a socially well-accepted way among your peers -- data or else don't, but at the price of letting your children starve, or not allowing them to reach their potential because you can't afford to support them in that endeavour.
2. Be a maverick, and fail to publish, due to a character that gives breaking social customs more importance than the importance it gives to complete economic, academic and social failure.
3. Be praised for character, for not publishing anything, since you can't obtain repeatable data. This stops your academic advancement in its tracks. But since nobody will notice you, your character won't be praised after all. You sacrifice yourself for a cause for action that nobody will notice.
4. Your character will make you not publish; but your character won't create a way to publish the truth. Finding out and publishing the truth will remain evasive. Unrepeatable social experiments, no matter whether you create them or not, have no alternative to them.
Exactly! The carbon copy why I was not allowed to study philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. I objected to the forceful, totalitarian, and basically unnatural feminization of the School of Philosophy. They were frothing at their mouths, and they called me in to sit with rabid feminists working the top echelon of administration. If looks could kill they probably would have. All I said (in my usual and customary provocative style) was that it was self-contradictory to exclude white males for the benefit of males of visible and other minorities and for the benefit of women in the department, because males are males, whether they are white, purple, black or a very intelligent shade of blue.
I spit at the dean and the faculty at Western. They are a bunch of frightened little piggies and tapeworms, who fear for their careers and their pension, so they let the rabid feminists run their lives like Stalin run the entire Soviet empire.
Indeed, no good deed ever goes unpunished, usually by crucifixion. Principles are an expensive luxury, and not recommended for comfort lovers.
Sacrificing anything of value for nothing, however, is recommended not to comfort lovers, but to suicidal people, the insane, and the extremely stupid.
And there we arrive at the inescapable conclusion - that principles are nothing, that values have no value. Now that's what I call a slippery slope!
It's the deliberate biasing of academic research; and it reminds me of Superman II - where Lex Luthor, played by Gene Hackman says one of the most profoundly evil things I've ever heard. He says: "It's not enough that I succeed - everyone else must fail." That's the left wing academic agenda in a nutshell. They cannot make their arguments stick where others are free to point out the obvious, and systematic inadequacies of their ideas - which simply fall flat if not shoved down people's throats under threat of excommunication. That is, if you can penetrate the unnecessary jargon, hiding a post modern philosophical basis that encourages deceit insofar as it downgrades objective truth to socially constructed power relations, constructed, they claim, solely to oppress women, homosexuals and people of colour. Who thinks like that? ...other than Lex Luthor?
Our health education group used to administer a survey on gay male sex behavior and condom use at the annual gay pride festival (back in the late 1980s). Our cohort of survey takers was dominated by men who were eager to report their sexual behaviors and who, apparently, like taking surveys alfresco. As a result, our surveys (which were quite long and detailed) showed that the guys were performing all of the expected behaviors and that too many of them reported using condoms consistently. IF all the men taking the survey were both honest and representative of the much larger gay population, then why did we have so many new cases of AIDS in our community?
So, the results were probably not valid or reliable. It was a useful exercise because we got "data" we could use in reports. It reflected well on us, but we fully understood that it was a bit of a self-selecting farce. Still, we wanted to know what exactly gay men were doing in real-life sexual situations.
What was our alternative? Focus groups? 1 on 1 interviews? Hidden cameras and microphones? Participant observation? I was willing to use hidden cameras and mics, but my employer was decidedly not willing (cue the dithering over privacy rights, etc).
My bailiwick was outreach in high risk settings. I decided I would try a behavioral test in a high risk setting (an adult book store's basement cruising and video area). The idea was that I would propose oral sex first, and then see if they were willing to use a condom. Whether they were or not willing, was beside the point, because I didn't plan on giving a blow job in either case. As it happened, the first guy I tried this out on didn't appreciate the bait and switch, and forced me to carry through. He was bigger than me, so... In other settings--like the gay bathhouse--the participant observer approached worked better. The upshot was pretty much what we expected. A significant number of men were not willing to use condoms consistently.
OK, let's go back to invalid surveys.
If a survey for pay was actually studying something other than the stated topic under the guise of asking questions about canned food preferences, like how do people respond to certain words in the various questions, or what word order leads to more or less inconsistencies in responses, the survey could theoretically produce useful information. Usually surveyors want subjects to move right along, and not second guess their answers. So your speedy approach was probably not a problem.
The replication problem falls as much on the nature of the subjects as it does on the experimenters or surveyors. We are a shifty lot.
There's a lot to say about the bible verse you quoted, 1 Corinthians 13:2. My understanding of that verse is that love is central to christianity. All of the other virtues are empty if they're not enlivened by love. Love is a translation of 'agape' which is theologically complex. As I noted above, it is also sometimes translated as 'charity.' Agape/love/charity has a lot to do with the way we treat those we live with. We should love our neighbor as ourselves, & a big part of that is judging not, lest we be judged & casting the beam out of our own eye before casting the mote out of our brother's. We should be charitable in understanding others. It would be a bad application of Agape to react to bad goings-on in town by showing that others aren't saintlike.
In general I think it's good practice on the one hand to minimize any blame of a situation when focusing on our own mistakes (because this takes power away from us, and reinforces learned helplessness) but, on the other hand, to maximize the role situational factors play when approaching the mistakes of others. Doing this first - another word for this is compassion, or empathy - will better allow that person to then, hopefully, cultivate their own ascension out of learned helplessness - that is, empower them. This is not hard-and-fast, its a loose rule that itself changes dependent on the situation. I think this is what Christianity at its best helps with - its very concerned with the understanding that we and others will fail, and developing ways to heal those ruptures.
In other parts of 1 Corinthians 13 we are told that Love is not proud, boastful, self-seeking, easily angered, seeking to dishonor others and so forth. But any close - or even unclose - reading of Paul's letters shows that Paul is very much all of these things. That could mean, as in certain atheist readings, that the bible is contradictory and should be tossed out. We might also say that Paul is a brilliant, but flawed interpreter of the gospels, and the Jesus event, and let that inflect our understanding of the new testament, so that we are less likely to see it as perfect whole . We could also apply both the gospels and Paul's own insights to our relationship with Paul's letters, and scripture in general. There are a lot of different approaches.
For these reasons, and others, I was frustrated with your post responding with that single verse, because while you meant it as a proof that my claim that you were taking a narrow of christianity was wrong, the post itself seemed to be another example of that narrow view of Christianity. And it also felt like that verse, particularly, suggested a very different approach to the problem in the OP than the one I took you to be taking.
I think that character, like any virtue, is not something one either has or doesn't, but is something cultivated with many zigs and zags. It can create problems, ifwe say that someone who allows themselves to be manipulated lacks character full stop. For instance, is a woman in an unpleasant situation who gives in to sexual requests in order to escape that situation, allowing herself to be manipulated, demonstrating a lack of character? Is this the same situation as the one in the OP? Of course not, but that's the point - applications of moral judgments require a lot of finesse.
Another figure who comes to mind when I think of stark, absolute approaches to Christianity is Kierkegaard. A key fact about Kierkegaard is that he was independently wealthy, he was removed from the thorniest, existential aspect of the more fundamental incentive-structures.
Now, look, certainly character does play some role in this whole thing. When I say I'm not looking to impugn character, I'm signalling what I think is the bigger factor at play. Certainly, a scientist may not play ball, and not get published - and that is good for him! But then the rest of us are still getting the stuff that is published. So while we might esteem him for his resistance, it's not changing the system that determines what sort of stuff gets published - and the OP was about that problem, not about the souls of individual scientists. I think soul-stuff is very important, don't get me wrong, but this thread isn't focused on that.
I hope that clarifies what I'm trying to say a bit.
Ha, love it. Well the idea of the gonzo approach anyway (that experience sounds brutal, man)
And I do take your point that all surveys have substantial 'baked-in' problems that are probably unavoidable. Your examples are good. I think more than anything, my uneasiness with the phenomenon in the OP is the factory-approach, and the fact that many people are taking hundreds, if not thousands surveys a year. I think that once you have a population of professional survey takers, churning them out, you're messing with something fundamental, but its harder to nail what that is precisely.
The problem of unreproducible results occurs in structured situations, too, I gather. Subjects come into a lab; they are identified; they complete some sort of experimental task, and leave. Maybe they return for several sessions. The conditions are controlled. The experiment is approved by institutional review boards and faculty advisors. It's all on the up and up--and the results still unreproducible,
Some kinds of labs do produce good results: tests of color perception, hearing, visual processing, response time, taste and olfactory sensitivity, skin-response, learning, memory, and so forth. Those sorts of experiments should produce reliable, valid, and reproducible results. It's basically bio-measurement.
It's much dicier when researchers are out to find the motivational factors in product purchases, for instance. Maybe an fMRI would be a better research method than surveying 1000 car owners as to why they bought a Ford instead of a Toyota, or pink-23 instead of red-45 lipstick.
Take a look at the art market if you think the social sciences are something of a racket. Art has aspects of major league racketeering about it. I'm not talking about the Louvre, or the Guggenheim. It's the up-and-coming go-getters in the art-biz who are the racketeers.
If you liked my brief episode, you will absolutely adore Tearoom Trade by Laud Humphreys. Humprheys was a PhD candidate at a university in St. Louis and wanted to investigate the demographics and roles involved in the gay sex taking place in park-restrooms in the St Louis area--the "tearoom trade". Humphreys didn't engage in sex; he served as "the lookout queen" -- the guy who stood by the door to keep a lookout for park police, and warn the guys who were having sex. He observed sex taking place for quite a few weeks; he also kept track of who drove which cars, and who did what kind of sex. As part of his regular job, he looked up car licenses, obtained identities of the drivers (and tearoom participants). Later in the study, he went to the homes of the identified men and did a market survey of some sort to obtain the demographics he needed.
He put all this together into a great piece of research writing (it's really interesting to read) AND he destroyed all o the raw-identifying data, so at no point could the police or university track down participants.
Tearoom Trade -- 1970 -- (the popular title of his PhD dissertation) is the way sex research of this sort should be done (IMHO). Humphreys was, at the time, a priest (Episcopal) and continued working in the area of sexuality research and counseling. He died in 1988.
I thought it was a great piece of work -- the academic social scientists exploded in outrage. They probably objected to his raising the standards of research above the level most of them cared to achieve.
I largely agree with you so I will ignore everything but this , which is palpable nonsense. To put it simply, one participates in corruption or one refuses to participate. Refusing to participate reduces corruption and participating not only increases it but further normalises it. I cannot change anything by posting on this forum, and it costs me nothing to fulminate, so it is unlikely to convince anyone. but at the very small risk of sounding like a rabid religious conservative, this is how the moral world works: you have freedom and responsibility over what you do, even when it is difficult, but you are not responsible for what others choose. 'In the world, but no of it'.
Scientists have to tell the truth. There is no compromise available; there is no science without honesty.
Quoting Bitter Crank
He was crucified, as might be expected. And here's another principled fool:
Quoting god must be atheist
Quoting god must be atheist
Sounds like someone acting according to principles whilst decrying such behaviour. But of course it is no real sacrifice to give up a corrupt education, and it is no real sacrifice not to publish corrupt science.
Edit: I'll butt out now, and retreat to ethics to continue to pontificate.
Wow. I made myself misunderstood.
I ran headlong against a brick wall because I did not know better. I THOUGHT I could change the system, I THOUGHT they just did not see the error of their ways. I WAS sacrificing (or rather: not sacrificing, not even risking, only the outcome came to be a sacrifice) something of value (my education) for something of value (their changing their ways). I was CONVINCED that my one outraged letter was going to change the policy of the department because I figured a good argument ought to convince philosophers.
I was STUPID. No foresight. No insight.
So I did not contradict myself; I did say in this thread that sacrificing something for nothing in return is something what, among other people, the stupid people do.
I was one of them.
Why did you leave out the right wing academic agenda? Is it any different? No, it is not any different. Not all scientists are left wing in the survey-creating social sciences, yet it is said in this thread that they are all forced to create non-repeatable experiments with consistent results.
Your singling out the left shows nothing else but that you are biassed. God only knows (figure of speech) how many others of your wrong ideas are sourced by your biasses.
What it shows me is that reality beats principles.
Show me one instance in history where standing steadfast for a principle which stand has not changed anything for the better, and has not produced any desired results, is worth doing.
I have political opinions, sure. I'm a capitalist - for example. I'm not a communist. If you want to call that bias - then I'm biased. I studied sociology and politics, and can assure you that the humanities are a wholly owned subsidiary of left wing, subjectivist, anti-capitalist, neo marxist, post modernist, politically correct bigots and bullies. There is no right wing political opinion informing the humanities because they are de-platformed at every level - up to and including policy, as my post about Russel Group universities shows. That's a far more pernicious form of bias, than selection bias, or having a political opinion. It's blatant. i.e. bias by policy, and it's a particular claim by the left - that they are justified in doing so. The right argue for academic freedom, and freedom of thought and expression. The left want their ideas to be dictatorial. Opposing academic dictatorship doesn't make me biased. It simply means I'm not utterly insane!
Man, I empathize with you! I've fought quite a few battles over principles--and 49 times out of 50 lost. Not just lost, but was crushed, flattened, and discarded. The problem (aside from the one of tilting at windmills) is that other people ALSO have principles, and more often than not their principles conform to prevailing moral code better than mine did.
Reality does play the game with a good hand (poker analogy) and has a full supply of face cards and aces up its sleeve.
There is also the matter of competence. One's principles have to be lived and defended competently. There were occasions when I just wasn't all that competent. Up against a shark what can a herring do? (quote from the Sound of Music, believe it or not)
So, my advice, which you have been waiting for with baited*** breath: Fight on. Choose your battles. Collect allies. Measure carefully: How much is this battle worth, relative to other battles one has fought and will fight?
***baited Irrelevant aside; it's 'bated', short for '[I]abated[/i]' not 'baited'. I've been using 'baited' for decades, rather than the correct 'bated'. We will now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast, in progress.
Quoting counterpunch
This was not true when I finished college in 1968. It wasn't obviously the case when I took some classics courses in the early 1980s at the U of Minnesota. But things were definitely changing in the 1980s. An academically oriented magazine, Lingua Franca, charted the changes. (the Sokol hoax was revealed in Lingua Franca by its author, for example.)
Now, 30 odd years later, Neo-marxist, postmodernist, politically correct lingo has slopped al over the place.
This was interesting read-- watching you debait with yourself on a topic of spelling.
What I call your bias is that you go against reason due to a conviction to an ideology. Your ideology is not communist, no problem, but you develop false opinions due to your strong conviction to your ideology.
A capitalist can see clearly too, and so can a communist. Denying this on either side (i.e. categorically denying that the other side can see clearly) would be an example of a biassed opinion.
Quoting god must be atheist
Could you please provide examples - because without them, this is just an ad homniem attack, to which I say - pish!
I understand. I like to spell "bias" in the plural as a noun or in the third person singular or in past tense, with two s-es in the middle. This gives it a badass, anti-disestablishmentarialistic undertone of being open to bisexuality. Rub the nose of the politically correct into it. -- for the record, I am a strong supporter of allowing or letting or living along with people who fall in love and have sex with whichever consenting adult, in whatever way they prefer. Love is love is love by any other name.
I provide one example. I don't have the research inclination to search for more. I did not attack you, and my argument was not ad hominem.
Quoting counterpunch
I gave a reasoning to the opinion why the above is biassed: Because the right wing academic agenda is the same. I even called you out on this later, before I went into the bias thing.
And actually I don't even agree with the statement you made, "It's not enough that I succeed - everyone else must fail." But it is not at all a leftist statement, whether it is true or not. You specifically chose to call it a leftist agenda, due to your bias.
I really don't know how to explain this in greater detail.
Then you need some specs. Reality is totally subservient to principled imagination. New York is built on a grid system because someone decided it would be a good idea, and for no other reason.
Quoting god must be atheist
Oh dear!
I do not invite you to agree with the statement. It's a quote from a villain in a film, I described as one of the most evil things I've ever heard. Yet it describes the left wing ACADEMIC AGENDA perfectly. They left de-platform right wingers. i.e. What in effect they are saying is: "it's not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail."
You might make the effort to understand before dishing out ad homs willy nilly!
It's been around awhile, even as a New Yorker cartoon--"it's not enough that dogs win--cats must fail"
It probably goes back to Attila the Hun, at least.
???
Did the principled imagination contravene the events in reality? I don't think so. It's not even a principle to imagine a city built on a grid system. It's a planning system, much like the unplanned cities in mediaeval Europe, and the planned cities like Paris or Budapest, with the straight boulevards and the concentric circular roads.
The principles of accounting and the principles of a person are not even the same kind of thing. It is a fallacy to use them interchangeably, or to claim they mean the same thing. Aristotle called it equivocation.
Similarly, you are committing equivocation if you equate a principle in city planning to the principles that drive a person's moral behaviour patterns.
What does POMO stand for? Google search and Wikipedia both pointed at only one meaning, to ANLIC. What did you mean by POMO?
That won't cut the mustard. You used the expression within context in which your usage of it was rather very unambiguously meaningful. You can't negate that by saying that it's a quote I did not recognize.
And like I said, I did not dish out ad hominem. You only feel so because my argument was solid, and it defeated yours. (It was about bias, please remember where this was started by what.) You can call it an ad hominem in your effort to diminish the argument, but it won't work, because I also showed you how that was wrong of you to accuse me of uttering an ad hominem.
My apologies. I find it annoying when people use abbreviations which are far from obvious.
Yeah, sorry man, I just blanked last night. I went to bed shortly after, and was out like a light. But in the cool light of morning, thanks for pointing a spotlight at the unsubstantiated nature of my claim that:
Quoting counterpunch
Obviously, I don't know the political opinions of every academic in every university in the western world, but I have more than a casual acquaintance with the literature; and then there's things like Jordan Peterson - and the gender pronouns dictat, and Lindsay Shepard - subjected to an inquisition for referencing Peterson in her class. It chimes with my own "lived experience" (sic) of being downgraded for exploring objectivism in social and political theory after reading Atlas Shrugged.
The Sokal Affair is funny. Sokal Squared is even funnier, but what does it really illustrate? That people are lazy and don't like to admit when they don't understand (nonsensical post modernist jargon)? The problem, I think is that, Alan Sokal could just as easily have written a nonsense physics paper - and submitted it to a physics journal, and got it published. Would that demonstrate the vacuity of physics? No. Just the laziness of the editor.
I'm not trying to cut mustard. I'm trying to say something, that clearly, just went straight over your head. That's okay. Forget it!