4980

Serioysly man, you can pretend like she said something else, but we all see what she said.

Ultimately, if you think what she said it’s correct, that’s you.

I will argue about almost anything, but an argument about whether objectivity is good or bad? Nah man. That’s dumb.

Like I said, I honestly didn’t think we were gonna get here on this one, but damn if we don’t always.

4981

Will you argue about whether distance is good or bad? Because ultimately that paragraph is about distance.

It really sounds like you’re reflexively defending “objectivity” without bothering to consider the definition.

4982

True objectivity doesn’t exist and pretending that it does can lead to erroneous outcomes. It is a goal, not a state of being.

4983

Yeah, I said as much… But that ain’t what the dumb lady said. The dumb lady said that objectivity itself was actually bad.

4984

And how did she define the bad thing?

Your arguments come down to either “nobody but Timex gets to define objectivity” or “I refuse to consider that anthropologists might interact with their subjects”

Both are strange hills to die on.

4985

Seriously magnet, I don’t care to argue this with you. If you agree with what she said, you do you.

I feel like you don’t really, and are just pretending she said something less dumb… But honestly, I don’t care. I’m not going to learn anything from that argument with you, so I’m not going to waste my time on it

4986

I’m not pretending.

I do think she is using an academic definition of the word “objectivity”, which is jarring at first. Once I grant her particular definition, the rest is common sense. And since scientists love to come up with esoteric definitions for common words (e.g. “work” in physics, “vector” in biology), I’ll let her do the same for “objectivity” in the social sciences.

4987

The idea that she’s making up some mystical alternate definition of the word “objectivity” doesn’t really play with the fact that she’s citing other articles which are using a totally standard definiton of the word. She just didn’t understand what they were saying.

Because she’s a fucking imbecile.

Honestly though, this really is the ideal way for this example to play out, reinforcing the status quo that literally anything in this thread will be defended.

4988

Just for information, CA’s and most licensing schemes for trades have a lower limit. A guy with a small landscaping business that does basic yard work, or a gig worker doing lawn work on thumbtack, etc. may never hit the limits that would require a license. The limited harm someone can do at small scales, the fact they are unlikely to have employees, etc. and believe it or not the effect it has on people trying start a business that will eventually grow big enough to need a license, are the kinds of things that can be considered when setting these limits. If the goal were just big government regulation there would be no lower limits.

Now one can argue the $500 per job rate is a bit low for a uniform statewide lower limit in CA, and I’d agree. Still, even in a city like San Francisco (the only place I can speak from experience on) there are plenty of sub $500 basic lawn jobs. Though mainly because the houses have so little land to scape.

A guy doing solo small scale lawn work like cleanups and weekly mows, etc. may never encounter the need for a license. In the past at my first house which was in SF I’ve spent $250 to have the overgrowth and pine needles removed from a tiny patch of land. Took the guy maybe two hours. It was the cheapest bid and it allegedly was the “Introductory rate”. He was not licensed and didn’t need to be, and I didn’t care if he was due to the small scale low damage potential of the job. The guy was booked a week and a half out. I get the impression from that experience it’s not impossible to be a legally unlicensed landscaper in CA without falling into homelessness.

Now the guy at my current house in Reno that I paid $2500 to come with large industrial forestry mulching equipment to enact my vengeance on the invading sagebrush and make a nice large firebreak around the property, that guy I made sure as insured and bonded and licensed and everything. Not just in Nevada, but in California too as CA has better standards for these kinds of things. Because if they screw up bad enough it can result in a brushfire that would likely consume my house and who knows what else.

4989

It’s not a mystical definition. It’s an operational definition for something that is hard to define, unless you are forced to do it for research purposes.

For example, I have a vague notion of what “productivity” means. But my corporate masters have a very specific idea of what “productivity” means, because they like to quantify it. Abstract discussions about changes in American “productivity” over the last 200 years are pointless when they are referring to a spreadsheet that calculated my “productivity” for Q1 2021 to two decimal places.

Her definition of “objectivity” is similar. She is using a definition that meets her organization’s research needs, and argues that “objectivity” may be self-defeating. Surprise, surprise, because that’s what my colleagues might say about our corporate incentives for “productivity”. But arguing that “management puts way too much emphasis on ‘productivity’” doesn’t mean that they think that productivity, in the abstract, is bad for America.

Now, don’t get me started about how my corporate masters want to define “wellness”. Is it bad to incentivize “wellness”? No it isn’t. And yes it really, really, is. One day I’ll write a blog post titled “Wellness is terrible.” No doubt that you’ll hate it.

Those articles argue that objectivity is impossible, because scientists are forever hopelessly biased.

Citing an article doesn’t mean agreeing with everything in the article. In this case, those articles do not make the same argument she is making, but they do generally support her point that objectivity may not always be worth pursuing. And researchers generally like to cite articles that reach the same conclusion using completely different arguments.

Finally, equating objectivity with distance is not novel. It is very common for biomedical researchers to be accused of lack of objectivity because they are too close to pharmaceutical companies. And I don’t think this author would disagree that those researchers should keep their distance. But what’s appropriate for some researchers is not necessarily appropriate for all.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from both liberal and conservative versions of these threads, it’s that people are generally not as stupid as their opponents want to believe.

4990

It is perfectly fine to say the consumer reports weighting of their score is subjective. My question is how could you improve consumer report by making it more subjective?. I can agree that nothing is truly objective. Do you decide that because a Leaf is a greener car than corvette, you should, throw away the stop watch and compare the feel of the acceleration the Leaf feels as quicks as the Vette. Or do you compare the fit and finish of Hyundai built in Vietnam and say because the workers are paid so much more in Germany than in Vietnam you should give more points to the Hyundai? Or perhaps you take the exact opposite approach and penalize Hyundai for exploit the Vietnamese workers?

On other hand it is easy to see how to improve CR but making the researc more objective. So for example polling the CR members and having them rank the importance of various categories. Or even better making their reports interactives so Craig can define his on weighting.

I really am curious for both CraigM and Magnet, how increasing subjective or to use Magnets rather convoluted substitution decreasing distance between the research and subject improves research.

I suppose anyone is allowed to call themself an expert but you do not get NSF funding as Middle East expert if you never spent time in the Middle East. Same thing is true of the urban institute. they wouldn’t hire a White guy who’s lived his entire life in Maine to do research on urban problems.
But they also shouldn’t hire a researcher whos primary qualifications are being black and spending 30 years in south side Chicago or Mississippi A lived experience only makes you an expert on your life, no one elses.

4991

I sense a theme.

Yes.

4992

Not really what I’m going for.

What I am for is better recognition and acknowledgement on the limits and nature of claims to objectivity. Hence the CR mention, it is a fairly quantifiable way to show how an objective measure is really far more subjective than it is presented as, and understood to be. It isn’t that any of the choices are wrong, per se, but that how they present it as some unbiased measure of a car, when in reality there are biases built into the very assumptions about what to measure.

The same can be, and often is, true all over the place. So trying to be objective is perfectly fine. Claiming absolute objectivity and using appeals to objectivity to lock out other perspectives or discount confounding factors in a study is not. And I think that is where a lot of the push back on objectivity comes from. There is this implication in many aspects of American life, and research studies, that a white man is able to be objective in any case, in a way that minorities and women are not, and so there is an under representation in academic studies from these groups even as the topics may be directly relevant to them.

To turn it in a slightly different direction, here is a recent Freakonomics episode about a variety of things, but one is how much of the studies about group behaviors are fundamentally more limited than presented.

One topic brought up is how a bulk of all studies on group behaviors are done using a non representative sample of people. And as a result many are of limited, and occasionally even produce results the opposite of what the study showed when applied to other cultures. That is because most of the studies are done in W(hite)E(ducated)I(ndustrialized)R(ich)D(emocratic) populations. As such with almost all studies on group behaviors done in WEIRD countries, and a majority still in the US, there are gaps in understanding. How an experiment called ‘the ultimatum game’ where two individuals are involved, one is given $100 and told to offer some amount to the other. If the other person accepts the offer, they both get the money. If they reject it both get neither. So if you offer $2 they will probably reject it out of spite. But when they applied the same research to different cultures, they got vastly different results than the original study, depending on where it was done.

That’s the flaw in believing you fully objective. It is not that the experiment design was wrong, or that the observations incorrect. At a fundamental level the experiment seemed well designed to measure. what they were trying to measure. It was, as much as possible, objective.

But it is also wrong when trying to expand the conclusions beyond the limited scope. Because of the inherent biases built into the system that produced the result. Things that need to be honestly answered and reflected on. Because to simply state ‘we have done XYZ therefore are being objective’ would be to miss the many ways subjectivity comes into play. Not always maliciously, not always with intent. But the simple act of being within a certain culture and context can influence what is viewed as important in ways that drive outcomes.

So I am not advocating for more subjectivity. That would be a false inference. I am merely stipulating that subjectivity is already there, even in supposedly neutral objective measures, and that it is best to acknowledge that and have a broader spectrum of voices present to help tease out the ways that subjectivity presents itself and how best to address it.

In my own day to day there is small ways that personal experience can influence software design. One area of note is names. For cultural reasons women frequently take on their spouses last names. This may be a small thing, but one that pops up in unusual ways. My system will display user names for logs. It gets this from an enterprise system that houses all global corporate data. If you change this name in the source system for us, you would think this would cause our system to update the name.

But it doesn’t. Our system retains their prior last name in the display. It is an extremely minor point in the grand scheme of things, but is evidence of how during the design phase this was not fully considered due to it being implemented by a room full of men. More women in the room may have noticed this sooner and escalated this accordingly. It is a small way in which perception biases due to lived experience can change priorities even without ill intent.

4993
4994

I think people might have said similar stuff up-thread, but for new entries in this series could the OP tell us:

  • Who is the liberal saying or doing stupid shit?
  • Why should we care about that liberal? E.g. are they are a liberal politician, or just a random twitter account?
  • What are they saying or doing that is stupid?

I think it would save time and confusion.

4995
4996

If your view is that companies are taking record profits / enjoying record valuations while paying little or nothing in taxes, it’s not absurd or silly to believe those companies could pay more in taxes without raising prices to consumers.

4997

Maybe it’s not absurd, but it is silly. Companies aren’t going to willingly reduce their profits just because some Democrats think they’re making too much money.

They will only reduce profits if they can’t raise prices enough to cover the new taxes.

4998

This is a statement about what companies could do, or will do, not about what they must do. I think it’s a basic tenet of liberalism to believe that corporations — which benefit from the special treatment liberal societies grant them — ought to be responsible members of that society, and pay their fair share to contribute to society, without passing all of that cost on to consumers in their prices. And it isn’t any sort of liberal stupidity to voice that view.

4999

It certainly depends on the product, but there is a limit to how much a company can raise prices before consumers decide to do without said product or use substantially less.