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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.

That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.

I'm not following here. I agree that an RCT would be better than a survey, but that doesn't mean the latter is useless. People didn't find out that smoking caused cancer because of some RCTs; all they needed were serious discrepancies in observational data (a survey, in other words). Because we lack RCTs on the subject, I suspect (but don't know for sure) that porn is probably bad for the consumer. However, if there was a survey that found serious discrepancies between the porn consumer and the porn non-consumer, I would certainly keep in mind selection bias etc, but I also would take the findings seriously. It's not conclusive, but that's not the same thing as having zero evidentiary value.

I don't understand what you mean when you say Murphy has a better intuition about causal inference? She's not presenting as an agnostic on this issue here.

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