05-20-2016, 10:04 PM
(05-20-2016, 09:25 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(05-20-2016, 04:23 PM)Odin Wrote:(05-20-2016, 08:53 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: A sample size of 196 is not indicative of anything. The size of the sample is far too small. They may have only found a couple dozen extremely stupid people. This needs to be replicated with a much larger sample size.
Are you implying it won't? Often a smaller study is done to see if a full study is worth doing.
Not at all. There seems to be no limit to what universities will waste money on these days. I'm just saying that it doesn't mean a thing unless they have a relatively diverse sample size that is at least 10 times larger. One has to account for drawing a couple dozen incredibly stupid people in survey style 'experiments' of this nature. Surely you can see that having just 10 such persons can swing the findings in a wrong direction far more than a standard deviation.
Professors operate under the dictum "Publish or perish". They have good cause to do research, and just about anything that has some plausibility will be studied.
So you don't like the consequences of successful research? So long as the research doesn't have amoral methods it is OK.
Universities aren't solely places of teaching. Research is part of the teaching, at the least for graduate students.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.