Strollen
4920
I’ll praise the author for her (or appropriate gender pronoun) brevity and clarity that she spews her liberal shit. Most academics when making silly arguments, spend many pages of turgid prose, and a heavy use of the vocabulary of intersectionality, socialist, liberal, and 3rd world feminist theory. Making their work pretty much incomprehensible to those of not thoroughly versed in the theory (propaganda).
Lauren manages to make her case in a mere page and even uses bullets points.
I also appreciate the fidelity to her arguments. Most people when making a case against the status quo, would be tempted to use data or muster up arguments, but when you argue against “rigor” in research, to do so would be hypocritical. Far better to simple state your opinions as facts, rather than use old fashion devices such as rhetoric. After all rhetoric traces its origins back to the Greeks, which were slave-owning patriarchal society
Researchers should compensate people with lived experience as experts and hire them as project staff and consultants.
I’m sure this particular bit of advice will be embraced by the American public, after all who doesn’t think that providing murders, rapist, drug lords, pedophiles,and the severely mentally with alternate sources of income as consultants is a splendid idea.
I’m also anxiously awaiting applying these new research techniques to things like Covid vaccines.
Look at the speed and creative treatment, Trump and associates came up with for Covid, by dropping the need for objectivity and rigor.
The real question is should be there state licensing requirements for people who call themselves researchers?
I mean, this is the citation page of that Mercatus ‘paper’
8 of ten footnoted allegations in the paper refer to…other Mercatus papers.
If you bother to read any of it, among the people who Mercatus calls out as people requiring some kind of unnecessary, repressive state licensing are:
Bus drivers
Truck drivers
Nurse practitioners
Exterminators
Dental assistants and dental hygienists
Daycare providers
Veterinary technologists
Midwives
Home inspectors
Preschool teachers
HVAC contractors
Emergency Medical Technicians
Mercatus example of the right way to approach licensing?
Uber drivers. I shit you not.
The ride-sharing network Uber provides a good case study for many of these issues. Taxis are normally regulated at the municipal level, with most jurisdic- tions (a) authorizing specific firms to provide such services and (b) regulating the ways in which they do so, from fares through driver certification. Uber offers an alternative to traditional taxis, and it skirts these regulations by serv- ing as a connection between people who are willing to offer rides for a fee and individuals who need rides.
Oh, and the other citation, the Goldwater Institute? What’s the matter, couldn’t find a paper from the Fuck All Y’All Liberals Institute?
You are rather shifting the goalposts here, I didn’t see any mention of criminality in her essay.
That being said, she writes like a college sophomore who just finished her first women’s study class.
Umm. This comment seems bad.
Not sure what you mean. I mean that she is naive and filled with righteous indignation at the unfairness of it all.
Hell, I did a lot of women’s study coursework. Had a professor that stood up at a campus faculty meeting and announced that “she was going to act as the voice of political correctness for this meeting.”
I mean that dismissing the argument of a woman by saying that she seems like a naive women’s studies student doesn’t look good.
Aceris
4928
This thread should certainly discuss that burning question at length.
ShivaX
4929
Complex problems like “black people are braiding their hair” and “Latinos are painting people’s houses”?
Yes. The solution to every problem is not the full force of the State.
I have at least flammable and/or toxic chemicals in my house. I’m betting you do too.
Yet somehow the world hasn’t ended and no cops have had to bust down my door and handcuff me for daring to operate Drano or gasoline (an explosive!) without approval of the State.
However if I use say gasoline to start the trees outside on fire, the police will arrive and probably handcuff me. Because setting random shit on fire is illegal. Likewise if I pour Drano on the neighbor’s lawn or dog, again, the police will appear and likely enforce the laws that say destroying other people’s property is illegal.
I’m not sure why you align “having a license” with any sort of behavioral standard or change in behavior.
I have yet to hear a compelling reason why barbers need a license. Or painters.
Ultimately any law you pass has to be one worth killing or imprisoning someone over. Should we arrest someone for painting my house? Cutting my hair? Should we kill them over it? Maybe rough em up a bit?
Or maybe the solution to the problems is to regulate the problems. If you use toxic chemicals improperly, then we send the police. If you want to get a license to prove you have a skill, great. If the State says you need a license to enter into a willing exchange with another willing person that doesn’t hurt anyone? That’s silly.
You’re already seeing it in a way with stuff like journalism. Indie Press isn’t “real” press. So the cops can beat the shit out of them at will. Should’ve gotten approval from the mayor’s office or, more likely, the police department. Same shit, only used primarily against poor people, minorities and ex-cons.
Strollen
4930
I’m just taking her suggestion to their logical conclusion. It is fine to pay research subjects for their time, kids, college students, smokers, twins, folks with bipolar disease, or whatever. We were all 7-year olds once, but our lived experience doesn’t qualify us to be consultants or experts.
Of course, researchers have to talk to their subjects, but I categorical reject the assertion, that you need to have done X or be X, in order to be a researcher on X. With X being everything from a sex worker to an Olympic athlete, poker player, Native American. (Lauren didn’t make that assertion, but others make a similar argument have.)
I’m sure it is beneficial if you are doing research on the health of a Native American tribe, to be a member of the tribe, but first and foremost you need to be a doctor trained in research. The lived experience of native American alone doesn’t quality them to be an expert. I think times have changed, and this research would be approved today. But not that many years ago, a Native American doctor doing research on Native American health, would have been frowned upon, because of concerns that the doctor lacked objectivity. I think those concerns are reasonable.
But the idea of hiring someone, solely because of their lived experienced almost guarantees they won’t be objective. The danger of not being objective is that you are going to have strong opinion, which will ignore the data. So for example, most sex workers believe that sex work should be legalized. So if you hire a sex worker to be a project manager, and the data doesn’t support her view. Will the research be reported accurately? I doubt it.
Thrag
4931
This is totally a good faith argument I should engage in.
I doubt she would agree that this is the logical conclusion of her suggestion. I think you probably doubt that, too.
Strollen
4933
It is conceivable, I might be exaggerating a tad to make a point.
Timex
4935
The problem the person has, is that they have taken a hopelessly naive, shallow perspective on legitimate issues, to the extent that she doesn’t even understand the real issues, and is essentially just regurgitating the cliff’s notes version.
For instance, we can reasonably acknowledge that actual human beings have a very difficult time being truly objective. Such is the nature of human existence.
However, that does not change the fact that objectivity should still be the ideal. It should still be a GOAL. We should acknowledge that goal, and in order to better meet it, perform introspection to recognize and acknowledge our own internal biases.
But she takes a shallow, and frankly, dumb, perspective. Rather than trying to summarize it, I’ll just present it in her own words:
Harmful values and practices include the following:
-
Objectivity. This is the distance between the “researcher” and “researched.” It is based on the belief that neutrality on a subject is the best way to determine its facts. Objectivity allows researchers, intentions aside, to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience. Objectivity also gives researchers grounds to claim they have no motives or biases in their work. Racism, sexism, classism, and ableism permeate US institutions and systems, which, in turn, allows for research that reproduces or creates racist stereotypes and reinforces societal power differences between who generates information (white cisgender people) and who is a subject (Black, Indigenous, and other people of color at the margins of class and gender). At best, objectivity curbs how impactful research can be, and, at worst, it irrevocably harms a community.
No, objectivity is not a harmful research practice. Her suggestion here is one where she took superficial understanding of things that other people said, and them misstated them in a dumb way.
ShivaX
4936
You can pretend it isn’t a thing, but it will remain a thing.
In 1997, [the cops] came to my salon — two undercover cops, and then when I looked around, five uniformed cops were standing before my client, and they basically just told me that I was going to jail. They carted me off to jail like a common criminal. The crime was braiding without a cosmetology license.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women have been starving and asking the government for help, on welfare and food stamps because they could not allow themselves or appear to be making money as a braider. So they would hide and do it in the kitchen or at home. And many, many women in Texas have had their doors kicked in by police, knocked on, beat on, and [the police have] come into those apartments in Dallas, Texas, and fined those young women because they heard that they were in the house braiding.
And on painting, while it’s illegal to hire me to paint your house, it’s perfectly legal for me to paint my house. I don’t even need a license or anything. Yet, I have all these toxic chemicals and stuff.
Is the real crime that I’m allowed to use these toxic chemicals without a license under the shoddy cover of “home improvement”? Or is the law wrong? Heck the cops can’t even check my worksite for violations without a search warrant (at least in theory).
Thrag
4937
You are severely strawmanning me here. Yes, licensing can be onerous, counterproductive, protectionist, etc. Supporting minimal training and testing of painting contractors so they don’t ignorantly contaminate someone’s veggie garden with lead does not imply support for any and all licensing schemes everywhere.
So are you arguing that she is not naive? That she is not (at least from her picture) female? That her arguments don’t sound like the superficial nonsense you would find in a low-level college class essay?
I could certainly be wrong about how she identifies in gender or sex, but all I have to go on is a picture. Her arguments are superficial and naive imo. Still not clear to me where I’ve gone wrong. Should I have avoided identifying her at all? Kinda hard while referring to her own essay. Is it off limits to critique the writing of a woman in case you get accused of sexism or something?
Her writing is pap. She needs to grow up some then come back and try again.
And by the way, I agree with much of the context of what she is saying, just not the text. I guess I could have just said “she’s a shitty writer.” Critiquing such writing was what I did for much of my career. I’d have graded that a C- and told her to give it some depth.
ShivaX
4939
Illegal lead paint?
Do they have a time machine? Because lead paint as been illegal about as long as I’ve been alive and I’m not a young man.
And I’m strawmanning you for citing the thing you accused me of strawmanning?
“This isn’t a good faith argument, it’s made up.”
cites the exact thing I mentioned
“This is strawmanning.”
