Category Archives: Pseudoscience

The Dismal Scientists Of Microeconomics Are ALSO Struggling To Do Science

Critique, Economy, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, Science

Almost every bit of research cited in support of some or another ridiculous claim in the popular press seems abysmally designed. At least to this former student of research methodology.

Samples are too minuscule to claim generalizeability of findings beyond the sample, to the broader, targeted population. Likewise, you just know sample selection is poor, too. Variables are not often operationalized in an intelligent way. The actual hypothesis frequently sounds wacky. On and on.

It transpires that the same methodological flaws that “bedevil most social sciences, and some hard sciences, too,” have infected the dismal scientists of microeconomics.

“Many results in microeconomics are shaky.” From the a series “on the shortcomings of the economics profession” in the Economist:

A recent examination in the Economic Journal, of almost 7,000 empirical economics studies, found that in half of the areas of research, nearly 90% of those studies were underpowered, ie, that they used samples too small to judge whether a particular effect was really there. Of the studies that avoided this pitfall, 80% were found to have exaggerated the reported results. Another study, published in Science, which attempted to replicate 18 economics experiments, failed for seven of them.

Harvey Sweinstein Is Evil, Not ILL

Feminism, Hollywood, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

For once and for all, conservatives will have to reject outright the illness model of misbehavior if they want to hold on to their delicious outrage over Harvey Weinstein’s exploits.

If you’ve sexually assaulted individuals, you’ve committed a crime. You’re not sick; you’re just a SOB.

Sexual compulsion, like drug addiction, is a misbehavior, not a disease. It certainly does not compel crime. Human beings as moral agents are expected to control their impulses. If they don’t, you punish them. If they can’t; you have them locked up (after due process) for the protection of others .

There is a price for using the therapeutic idiom for crimes or misdemeanors. The price is the medicalization of misconduct. Punishment, then, becomes problematic. For if the offender is seen as without an ability to form the intent to harm—how do you justify punishing him?

Punish evil, don’t exculpate it. The idea of rehab for Harvey is as laughable as the notion that Harvey Sweinstein is deprived, rather than depraved.

Practice: Is this red-carpet celebrity “sick,” in need of a group hug, or just an exhibitionist and a slut? (Feminists will tell you she has the right to walk around like this and expect the Harveys of the world to behave around her. But that’s for another day.) Ol’ Harvey’s was not exactly surrounded by upstanding women. Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them (“naive, innocent young things”).

UPDATE II (5/3): Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa

Africa, Crime, History, Pseudoscience, South-Africa

“Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa” is the current column, now on American Thinker. An excerpt:

Farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world. Farmers there suffer more murders per-capita than any other community on earth outside a war zone. Since the dawn of democracy in the country, farming South Africa has been slaughtered by black South Africans in ways that would do Shaka Zulu * proud.

The Transvaal Agricultural Union’s numbers (purported to be the most reliable) are bolstered by Genocide Watch. (I wrote about this here.) By this assessment, South African farmers were being exterminated at the annual rate of 313 per 100,000 inhabitants, 3,000 since the election of the sainted Nelson Mandela (1994), two a week, seven in March of 2010, “four times as high as is for the rest of the [South African] population,” in the words of Genocide Watch’s Dr. Gregory H. Stanton.

The number of farmers martyred on land many their families had farmed since the 1600s has since been revised downward by the African National Congress (ANC) government, its police and lickspittle social scientists. This is good if true; bad if doctored for the purpose of diminishing the facts.

The Democratic Alliance used to dispute any crime statistics issued by the South African Police Service (SAPS). The tiny, tokenistic, opposition to the “all-powerful black majority party” puts the ostensible drop in crime down to the fact that 51 percent of victims no longer bother to report crime, given that corruption is rife, arrests rare, and prosecutions and convictions still rarer. Findings suggest that the SAPS’s optimistic, homicide statistics are not to be believed. According to the Economist (citations in Into the Cannibal’s Pot), the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has confirmed the existence of a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of statistic.”

Every year, millions in taxpayers’ money are forked out to private security firms to protect … the new South Africa’s police stations. “South Africa’s protectors can’t protect themselves,” they can’t protect the country, and they probably can’t count. The orgy of crime in South Africa reflects the capabilities of this reconstructed police force. …

… READ THE REST. “Damned Lies And Statistics About Black-On-White Farm Murders In South Africa” is now on American Thinker.

UPDATE (5/1): Rhodesia, RIP

“A Handful of Hard Men: The SAS and the Battle for Rhodesia”: Once there were warriors, righteous men who fought for their homes–not to display their virtue and force their values on faraway primitives à la America. The men who built and fought for Rhodesia were great warriors and patriots, betrayed by the political clones of South Africa’s F. W. de Klerk and the same Anglo-American Axis of Evil, exposed in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot.”

UPDATE II (5/3): Tutu, tut-tut. 

Sainted Mandela.

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South African Patriot Steve Hofmeyr Is Closer to Truth Than ANC Propagandist. Naturally.

Crime, Critique, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, South-Africa

Do you believe apartheid-era number crunchers with their typical Western fidelity to record keeping, or the ANC records, crunched by a propagandist at Africa Check?

I’d go with Hofmeyr (or Mercer). For lies in science, no amount of hyperbole from Hofmeyr can match the African National Congress and its supporters in the social “sciences.”

The point of contention: “Are SA whites really being killed ‘like flies’? Why Steve Hofmeyr is wrong.”

Keith B. Richburg is the author of a remarkable journalistic tour de force, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa.” My own book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” recounts Richburg’s surprise at just what a western outpost South Africa was.

Before it reverted to the seething kraal it is today, a South African crime scene was thus processed. Excerpted from “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”:

Just before Afrikaners surrendered without defeat, Richburg, Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1991 to 1994, journeyed to South Africa from the killing fields to the north, on assignment. In the course of his duties, he filed a report from the scene of a tribally motivated killing near Johannesburg. Zulu and Xhosa were embroiled in pre-elections strife. Twelve people had been gunned down. A small massacre by African standards—at least, so thought Richburg, who has described Africa as a continent where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood. Imagine his astonishment when “the police, mostly officious-looking white officers with ruddy complexions—came and did what you might expect police to do in any Midwestern American city where a crime has occurred. They cordoned off the area with police tape. They marked the spots on the ground where the victims had fallen.” Topping this CSI-worthy protocol was a statement to the press “promising a ‘full investigation.’” This civilized routine Richburg characterized as utterly misplaced on a continent where nobody counts the bodies; and where chasing down and charging a man with murder is like “handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” (Pages 22-23)

State statisticians and record keepers were likewise rather good in the Old South.

So, Nechama Brodie critiquing Hofmeyr, or the latter quoting Apartheid-era numbers (likewise extrapolated in my 2011 book)? I’d go with Hofmeyr.

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