An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

Post by leereeves » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

Scapeghost wrote: post #49

I am from a third-world religious country and I'd just like to take this chance to say that religion should be classified as a mental disorder. I see the effects of it first hand, severely crippling the potential of individuals and entire cultures. There's nothing it offers that can't be taught by basic morals which don't require you to appease an imaginary entity or repress the human spirit. Even the leaders of reli…

Post by shriphani » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

avs733 wrote: post #39

shriphani wrote: post #10

From the article: Although Decety’s paper had reported that they had controlled for country, they had accidentally not controlled for each country, but just treated it as a single continuous variable so that, for example “Canada” (coded as 2) was twice the “United States” (coded as 1). I mean I don't even understand how this seemed like a normal thing to do?

Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning. I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represented as numbers or other short indicators for storage purposes. Typically I fmultiple choice the encoding is by the order of the choice options. I not infrequently see average of gender because male = 0 and female = 1 or vice versa and someone generates a table wi…

Post by learnstats2 » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

Post by Scapeghost » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #51

Scapeghost wrote: post #49

I am from a third-world religious country and I'd just like to take this chance to say that religion should be classified as a mental disorder. I see the effects of it first hand, severely crippling the potential of individuals and entire cultures. There's nothing it offers that can't be taught by basic morals which don't require you to appease an imaginary entity or repress the human spirit. Even the leaders of reli…

While I'm an atheist and agree with you in part, I don't see how that's related to this story.

Post by LorenPechtel » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #50

_edo wrote: post #34

Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident. On topic, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764 It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the…

> If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. One interesting thing you can do though, is sort by zipcode. This sorts your mail from East to West in the US. You can use that as a rough estimate of shipping time.