On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 4:22 PM, David Carson <[email protected]> wrote: > Obviously, either some sound peer-reviewed research displaying that > "deletionists" suffer from deep-seated psychological problems that make > them clinically unfit to work on a collaborative project; or some sound > peer-reviewed research displaying that "inclusionists" suffer from some > other, similarly severe, deep-seated psychological problems.
I'm not 'hoping' to see anything. The absence of any correlations would be just as interesting because a lot of people seem to think the opposite. My basic observation here is that inclusionism/deletionism debates seem intractable, like religion and politics, which have long been correlated with a variety of mental and neurological observations and this deep-seated roots of those beliefs seems to explain why politics is so wasteful and damaging; hence the obvious question becomes, is inclusionism/deletionism another such case? But such findings would not tell us which side (or both) is the intractable party. Merely from a correlation you can't infer which side is right, since there's always two sides to a coin and you don't know whose beliefs are correct. (Suppose a survey found Republicans are more fearful of foreigners and foreign countries than Democrats; well, this is interesting but what does it actually show? Where can we get the ground truth on this question, what fact would we point to to prove that Republicans are wrong to fear foreigners/foreign-countries and allow us to draw a conclusion like 'Republican politics are driven by excessive fear'? If they were actually right to fear foreigners, then this finding would be better interpreted as 'Democrats pathologically optimistic / naive', and of course, both sides could be wrong on how dangerous foreigners were, in which case we might conclude both that Republicans are driven by excessive fear while those suffering from mindless optimism and naivete align with the Democrats. Just because two groups are arguing doesn't mean either one is right.) -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
