- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
Like you, one of my on paper credentials is a social science that loves pretending it's true and honest science. All the trappings are there, people love saying "null hypothesis", everyone talks about what regressions and models they chose as if they know what any of this means (to powerlevel, I actually used to struggle with this because I went past algebra and through calculus (I'm speaking from a criminological sociology context, since that's closer to what I study, but in my experience, there's really no way to prove a negative in these types of situations. In disciplines like statistics, you can replace a null hypothesis with an alternative hypothesis because math is objective and we can calculate the confidence we can have that a certain event will occur deterministically, so different people using the same equation will all come to the same conclusion if they did everything right. In sociology, it doesn't really work like that. You can't prove that a group of peoples' actions are NOT being caused by something, you can only fail to prove that their actions ARE being caused by something. When Tony says a (fundamentally flawed and biased) study proves kids are not taking part in a social contagion, he means to say that the study did not find enough evidence to prove that they are. But given that 40% of school kids today identify as some flavor of gay when in previous generations it was only about 5% at most, we can obviously draw our own conclusions.

Tony and the rest of troon Twitter doesn't even care about this. (To be fair, apparently medical science doesn't either considering Jack Turban keeps doing it.) To Tony it's Science and therefore it's proven. Tony thinks it's smart to simply repeat the Science despite wanting to be a doctor->PhD->drug dealer->trans activist while never being skeptical at any level no matter how basic about anything he reads on Twitter that supports his worldview. Is Tony too dumb to be skeptical, too smart by knowing he's too dumb to even question anything, or simply too afraid to be skeptical? It never even enters Tony's mind that Science is a LIAR Sometimes especially when it says something Tony wants it to say or Tony can think it says. "Why would I be skeptical most of all when someone tells me exactly what I want to hear always while promoting the idea that I should only doubt those who say otherwise or who point out that the person saying what I want to hear is an obvious liar?"