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Notes -
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-ubc-covers-for-bad-science-in-homeless-cash-transfer-study
A major university (in Canada) published another one of those studies where they give homeless people money and see if they spend it on crack or job applications. Mostly this was met with admiration and joy by the journalist class. The more right-leaning publication I posted above is more skeptical, pointing out of some of the potential problems with the study:
...
This isn't that interesting, it's just a bad study done in Vancouver, what I found interesting was the writer starts with a brief summary of the replication crisis, to an audience that is presumably not intimately familiar with it:
There has been and is lots of discussion here about relaying rationalist concepts or ideas to outsiders or average random people in Mottizen's day-to-day lives. With the rise of culture war divisions, and especially the political rhetoric surrounding the Coronavirus Lockdowns and other policies, I'm wondering what approach if any you use when talking to acquaintances or friends who skew liberal, who broadly are happy to have the inertia of universities or the intelligentsia on their side, that you often reject social science research or findings unless personally having vetted them, without sounding to them like a low-IQ backwater hick redneck science denying flat-earther. I suspect that this is impossible.
This is super wrong. Overwhelming majority of the homeless have mobile phones, with surveys ranging between 80% and 95% penetration. This is because the Feds, local municipalities and charities have special programs to equip them with phones.
Given the above, why would I put any stock in your critique of the critique of scientific paper?
Is your response really “sure, the overwhelming majority of homeless might indeed have mobile phones, but large fraction of them just carry non-functional phones with no plan or data, for no useful purpose”? Is this really the point you are trying to make here?
Yes, only majority of homeless have on-demand internet access wherever they go, it is no longer overwhelming. That’s why many of them hang out around free wi-fi, yes. But so what? What does it have to do with the argument you were making? Here, let me helpfully quote you:
Observe that the quote from the study you just gave clearly and explicitly contradicts what you said earlier, and supports what I replied to you with.
As a bonus point, observe that out of the homeless who are interested in using internet at all (66%, I assume that the third which didn’t use internet at all within past 3 months simply does not want to do it), more than three quarters do have it on their phone on demand.
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