Yes Skin walker I know nothing of statistics nor sociology. That is why when I went through college the math department always made fun of socilogists and their attempts to use statistics.
It called the problem of induction, sociologists have too many confounding factors and its impossible to know if there are any interaction effects. Plus you have to work with variables you know, hidden variables cannot be included. We face the same problem in epidemiological studies, which is why they rarely translate to clinical benefits. Also why I consider these to be soft sciences. ie they may highlight a problem, but correlation is not causation. It would be interesting to know how many of the athiests in this thread also believe in the Bell Curve, which is the same as the study in the OP, except that, instead of theism, it focuses on race.
Precisely SAM, sociologists are well know for using statistics incorrectly and using statistics to draw incorrect conclusions. Skinwalker I think you prove my point, you cannot tell the difference between a typo and spelling problems. Frankly I think sociology belongs in the pseudoscience section. And I would have to be really bored to start a thread on sociology.
Are these the posts you've been crying about being deleted? You suggested a topic on the alleged pseudoscience of sociology and here they are. You've made the comment several time that your posts were "deleted" when I was "losing and argument." Please. Feel free to discuss. The topic was set aside just for you but you chose to bitch and cry about how the big-bad mod did you wrong instead.
You do lack ethics and your ego and personality is fragile. But you are not nearly as big as you would like to think you are. You need to restore these posts to the original thread and in the original context. Your post just shows how you continue to invent stuff to feed your ego to the detriment of the forum.
"Yes Skin walker I know nothing of statistics nor sociology. That is why when I went through college the math department always made fun of socilogists and their attempts to use statistics." 1. It is probably not good epistemological practice to judge entire fields of study based on the professional derision of mathematicians. 2. Several sociologists have published studies of statistical methods in statistics journals. Heck, some can even write Bayesian statistics programs in C. Deriding entire fields of study I usually find to be evidence of intellectual maturity. Sociologists also use methods besides survey data and regression analysis to collect data. The beauty of the discipline is that its methods can range from mathematical statistics to critiquing the judgment of taste.
Sociology is based on abstract constructs. It doesn't matter how many statistics you apply to them. I did one year of it in undergrad. Marriage, family, norms, values, culture. These are constructs. You really cannot make predictions based on them, but they are useful for understanding patterns of human living. e.g. Effects of divorce on children, effects of media on violence, effects of television on eating patterns, differences between social patterns of iteraction, getting along with inlaws, peer pressure marriage and family relations. In practice, sociological predictions are usually trial and error. They are not consistent in any social milieu.
Btw, just to be clear, I am not dissing sociology, I happen to believe that reductionism does not provide all the answers. A healthy doubt is necessary in all cases. As sociology shows us the individual is not the same as the group.
