“I felt like the polls weren’t telling the whole story,” said Skinner, a researcher in the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
This "study" found this alleged bias because the researcher started with a feeling and then designed very specific, subjective tests in order to prove that their feeling was correct.
I get where you are going, but that's how science works. Form a hypothesis (gut feeling), construct a test to falsify that hypothesis, if they hypothesis cannot be falsified, take it as a given (for now.)
Science has become goal seeking. Some group decides on a goal, then hires people who are credentialed scientists. The scientists understand the goal, they concoct tests to confirm the goal. Later, the sponsor goes on state controlled media, reports the study and then tells people to trust the science.
(Ps) I'll tell you mixed race couples disgust me because it shows how feeble minded these people are. They are the same people who trust the science.
Ehh, I don't think that disgust works that way -- not the disgust that the brain scientists are talking about. That's a front-brain pity, not disgust. Disgust is a visceral, hind-brain thing. Your conscious mind is barely consulted about it -- it happens in the mostly autonomic section. It's not something people have much control over. You can do your tasks in spite of your disgust reaction, but you still have the reaction.
FWIW, you can reliably tell whether someone has conservative or leftist politics by showing someone disgusting pictures (shit, open lesions, dead animals, etc) on an fMRI. Conservatives' brains light up brightly in the disgust area, and leftists' brains hardly react at all. Liberals really are broken, incomplete people in that they don't experience the full range of emotions and human reactions.
get where you are going, but that's how science works. Form a hypothesis (gut feeling), construct a test to falsify that hypothesis, if they hypothesis cannot be falsified, take it as a given (for now.)
The Scientific Method requires you to formulate an hypothesis by interpreting observed data, and then attempt your very best at trying to DISPROVE your own hypothesis. If you are unable to disprove your own hypothesis, then you have a working theory, and you release your results and data and let others try to disprove your working theory. Even a well-tested theory is usually still a theory, like the Theory of Special Relativity, but some theories have been so thoroughly tested that we can use them to statistically predict outcomes with virtually 100% certainty, and have been grudgingly accepted a physical laws, such as the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
Three Laws of Thermodynamics
Fascinating stuff, for example:
Entropy may also be viewed as a physical measure concerning the microscopic details of the motion and configuration of a system, when only the macroscopic states are known. Such details are often referred to as disorder on a microscopic or molecular scale, and less often as dispersal of energy. For two given macroscopically specified states of a system, there is a mathematically defined quantity called the 'difference of information entropy between them'. This defines how much additional microscopic physical information is needed to specify one of the macroscopically specified states, given the macroscopic specification of the other – often a conveniently chosen reference state which may be presupposed to exist rather than explicitly stated. A final condition of a natural process always contains microscopically specifiable effects which are not fully and exactly predictable from the macroscopic specification of the initial condition of the process. This is why entropy increases in natural processes – the increase tells how much extra microscopic information is needed to distinguish the initial macroscopically specified state from the final macroscopically specified state. Equivalently, in a thermodynamic process, energy spreads.
That's why I said that you create tests to falsify your hypothesis. I didn't say that the tests proved it.
They based it on how quickly a subject responds, then interpreted that as level of disgust. That's not how science works - there are a number of reasons that a subject may respond more quickly or slowly, and they didn't explore any of that - they just assumed it meant their feeling was correct.
That wasn't the only part that they used to falsify it. I know that the implicit bias shit is false. This also included fMRI imaging, though, and the disgust center of the brain lit up like a lamp when the subjects were shown mudsharks and coal drillers.
Agreed.
(post is archived)