Mass shooting in the middle school Vladislav Ribnikar in Belgrade

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

As Nudger said, I never claimed that the social sciences are pseudoscience. I’m simply criticizing Kleck’s paper as poorly done social science.

As awty said, take a hint.

Boru

You are criticizing the Kleck's paper... with arguments that can be used to reject the entire fields of social sciences.

Not at all. My objections to Kleck’s paper include things like poor methodology and improper sampling. Social science papers that don’t commit these errors would not fall under that criticism.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

You don't agree with the way the United States defines terrorism, so I'm asking you for your personal definition since it is obviously different. You want to kill all militia men, and perhaps even just lone people who say they don't like immigration. The United States does not define terrorism that way.

I'm perfectly fine with how the us defines terrorism.  I'm disappointed in it's lack of response to domestic terrorism, which our own government has admitted it fucked the pooch on for decades.  To our eternal shame, our law enforcement agencies have always been chummy with domestic terrorism.  IDK what it's like up there in canadia, obvs. Hopefully we won't have to kill all the militiamen.  The ones that resist disarmament and disbandment are probably going to die though, sure. I know, it will be a change. It's going to be difficult for the us to watch as law enforcement guns down militants in armed standoffs. It's not like they were selling loose smokes, amiright?

Is immigration your thing now? Would you be at risk of getting black bagged by us forces on a cross border raid because you have thoughts about immigration? They'd have to be some pretty fucked up thoughts.....

[FlatAssembler]

You are criticizing the Kleck's paper... with arguments that can be used to reject the entire fields of social sciences.

Not at all. My objections to Kleck’s paper include things like poor methodology and improper sampling. Social science papers that don’t commit these errors would not fall under that criticism.

Boru

And the methodology of comparative linguistics papers isn't even poorer? Virtually all comparative linguistics papers assume in their methodology that sound changes are regular, which is an assumption that's impossible to prove, and it's not obvious that it's true. As for the improper sampling... Well, like I've said, I think you could reject the entire linguistic typology with such rhetorics. Perhaps the pattern that most of the languages have a subject-first word-order (SVO or SOV) has to do with almost all languages coming from some unreconstructed proto-language with such a word order. So, that pattern could be an illusion, rather than a cross-linguistic tendency. Perhaps the fact that in most languages around the world the first-person and the second-person pronoun tend to start either with 'm' and 't', respectively, or with 'n' and 'm', respectively, has to do with nearly all languages around the world descending from two proto-languages with such pronouns, and we therefore have a biased sample and that pattern is an illusion. You can reject most of the facts from linguistic typology with "Perhaps we have a biased sample.".

[The Architect Of Fate]

You can repeat this rubbish till your dying breath it won't make it less rubbish 

[Silver]

  I'm disappointed in it's lack of response to domestic terrorism,

My latest novel tackles this. Shows how 'Murica's intelligence agencies' lack of adequately recognizing domestic terrorism led to a political and social dystopia.

[The Architect Of Fate]

You don't agree with the way the United States defines terrorism, so I'm asking you for your personal definition since it is obviously different. You want to kill all militia men, and perhaps even just lone people who say they don't like immigration. The United States does not define terrorism that way.

I'm perfectly fine with how the us defines terrorism.  I'm disappointed in it's lack of response to domestic terrorism, which our own government has admitted it fucked the pooch on for decades.  To our eternal shame, our law enforcement agencies have always been chummy with domestic terrorism.  IDK what it's like up there in canadia, obvs.  Hopefully we won't have to kill all the militiamen.  The ones that resist disarmament and disbandment are probably going to die though, sure.  I know, it will be a change.  It's going to be difficult for the us to watch as law enforcement guns down militants in armed standoffs.  It's not like they were selling loose smokes, amiright?

Is immigration your thing now?  Would you be at risk of getting black bagged by us forces on a cross border raid because you have thoughts about immigration?  They'd have to be some pretty fucked up thoughts.....

You forget that IA thinks unhinged heavily armed partisan wackos should be bent over too and that we simply have to "live with terrorism" As for your question about Canada we are in some ways stricter on terrorism and some regards looser though militia groups overall are rare and no were near as heavily armed as down in the states so it's less of an issue.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Not at all. My objections to Kleck’s paper include things like poor methodology and improper sampling. Social science papers that don’t commit these errors would not fall under that criticism.

Boru

And the methodology of comparative linguistics papers isn't even poorer? Virtually all comparative linguistics papers assume in their methodology that sound changes are regular, which is an assumption that's impossible to prove, and it's not obvious that it's true. As for the improper sampling... Well, like I've said, I think you could reject the entire linguistic typology with such rhetorics. Perhaps the pattern that most of the languages have a subject-first word-order (SVO or SOV) has to do with almost all languages coming from some unreconstructed proto-language with such a word order. So, that pattern could be an illusion, rather than a cross-linguistic tendency. Perhaps the fact that in most languages around the world the first-person and the second-person pronoun tend to start either with 'm' and 't', respectively, or with 'n' and 'm', respectively, has to do with nearly all languages around the world descending from two proto-languages with such pronouns, and we therefore have a biased sample and that pattern is an illusion. You can reject most of the facts from linguistic typology with "Perhaps we have a biased sample.".

But that's in no way comparable to what Kleck did. Sometimes, unproven (even unprovable) assumptions are necessary in historical research - ya gotta start somewhere. 

But Kleck wasn't doing historical research or historical investigation. He wasn't constrained to make assumptions that may or may not be true. He deliberately chose parameters that would skew his research towards the results he wanted and relied primarily on subjective, pre-disposed witness statements to arrive at his conclusions. Any criminologist - except, apparently Gary Kleck - will tell you that witness statements are notoriously unreliable.

That's not pseudoscience - it's just bad science.

Boru

[Thumpalumpacus]

As we say here in Texas, "he needed killin'." Killing a terrorist to stop his terrorist act seems sensible to me. Arguing that this equates to wanting to kill anyone who "looks like they might be in a gang", not so much.

Define terrorist. If the government knows of terrorist plans to go on a shooting spree, they'll usually step in and stop it.

I go with the US government's definition. Look it up if you need to.

If they don't have that info in advance, how do you stop it without getting rid of due process and civil liberties? And if we just want the government to kill people spreading hate, why not just bomb every church and mosque while we're at it? A lot of anti-gay and anti-trans and anti-woman speech spread at those places. What are we talking about here? Nudge wants to randomly kill people with no due process? You're really co-signing that right now?

Where on god's green earth did you glean that? Christ, learn to read plain English already, there's a good lad.

Now go reread the post you quoted, this time for content and not polemics.

[The Grand Nudger]

The last resort of fearful white supremacist negotiation is to insist that even though they may be terrorists, killing them, would be worse. That stopping them must somehow hurt the normies, lol.

In a word, no.

[FlatAssembler]

And the methodology of comparative linguistics papers isn't even poorer? Virtually all comparative linguistics papers assume in their methodology that sound changes are regular, which is an assumption that's impossible to prove, and it's not obvious that it's true. As for the improper sampling... Well, like I've said, I think you could reject the entire linguistic typology with such rhetorics. Perhaps the pattern that most of the languages have a subject-first word-order (SVO or SOV) has to do with almost all languages coming from some unreconstructed proto-language with such a word order. So, that pattern could be an illusion, rather than a cross-linguistic tendency. Perhaps the fact that in most languages around the world the first-person and the second-person pronoun tend to start either with 'm' and 't', respectively, or with 'n' and 'm', respectively, has to do with nearly all languages around the world descending from two proto-languages with such pronouns, and we therefore have a biased sample and that pattern is an illusion. You can reject most of the facts from linguistic typology with "Perhaps we have a biased sample.".

But that's in no way comparable to what Kleck did. Sometimes, unproven (even unprovable) assumptions are necessary in historical research - ya gotta start somewhere. 

But Kleck wasn't doing historical research or historical investigation. He wasn't constrained to make assumptions that may or may not be true. He deliberately chose parameters that would skew his research towards the results he wanted and relied primarily on subjective, pre-disposed witness statements to arrive at his conclusions. Any criminologist - except, apparently Gary Kleck - will tell you that witness statements are notoriously unreliable.

That's not pseudoscience - it's just bad science.

Boru

Well, like I've explained, as far as I understand the methodology of social sciences (and I have published a few papers in social sciences, so I know something about how social sciences work), if something is the only study about something (like the Gary Kleck's study is the only study that tries to estimate how many people are saved by guns each year in the US), we should generally accept its conclusions. There are exceptions, like when the conclusions are highly scientifically implausible (like the Thai study concluding that Moderna vaccine causes myocarditis in adolescents more often than COVID itself does) or when the methodology contains a fatal flaw (such as incorrectly calculating the p-value or not calculating it at all). Generally, if the study is not such that it shouldn't have passed the peer-review, and it is the only one, you should accept it. Complaining how unreliable witness statements are and discarding them, even if there is no better evidence, is not very scientific, in fact, it has more to do with the methodology of The Mad Revisionist than with science.