kawuli:
ineptshieldmaid:
The weirdest thing by far about the “Why didn’t they just ask a [person who experiences that type of marginalization/trauma/adverse situation]” response is that, well, they did. That’s literally what they’re doing when they conduct research on that topic. Sure, research is a more formal and systematic way of asking people about their experiences, but it’s still a way.
And while researchers do tend to have all kinds of privilege relative to the people who participate in their studies, many researchers are also pushed to study certain kinds of oppression and marginalization because they’ve experienced it themselves. While I never did end up applying to a doctoral program, I did have a whole list of topics I wanted to study if I ever got there and many of them were informed directly by my own life. The reason researchers study “obvious” questions like “does fat-shaming hurt people” isn’t necessarily because they truly don’t know, but because 1) their personal anecdotal opinion isn’t exactly going to sway the scientific establishment and 2) establishing these basic facts in research allows them to build a foundation for future work and receive grant funding for that work. In my experience, researchers often strongly suspect that their hypothesis is true before they even begin conducting the study; if they didn’t, they might not even conduct it.
That’s why studies that investigate “obvious” social science questions are a good sign, not a bad one. They’re not a sign that clueless researchers have no idea about these basic things and can’t be bothered to ask a Real Marginalized Person; they’re a sign that researchers strongly suspect that these effects are happening but want to be able to make an even stronger case by including as many Real Marginalized People in the study as financially/logistically possible.
At Brute Reason
See also: “well of course [traditional medicine thing] works, why didn’t you listen to people who said it does?”
Well, for starters, the placebo effect is a real thing, and also where do you think the idea came from in the first place?
People don’t do studies because they have no idea what’s going to happen. They do studies because they think they know how something works and they want to confirm that.
And then on top of it, we conduct “obvious” research because sometimes what everyone knows is still wrong.
Fifty years ago everyone knew, and would swear to you by their personal experience, that paddling kids with a wooden spoon never did them any harm and, in fact, was absolutely necessary if you wanted to raise kids that had any respect for authority.
Right now there are hundreds of people out there training horses who know, from their extensive personal experience, that aversive (aka punishment-style) discipline is absolutely central to horsemanship. Of course, repeated actual studies show they’re wrong. But they still know it from their own experience.
We KNEW that dieting worked! As a society, we KNEW it was calories in calories out, one to one ratio, dead simple, you could see it all the time why would you need to test it? Except it turned out that when we did, it turned out to be a WHOLE LOT MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT.
Out there right now are all kinds of cops who know, from their own experience, that aggressive, tough-on-crime, jail-sentences-for-all methods are the only ones that work. They know it. This is their whole lives, they’ve lived it! … They also appear to be dead wrong, by the data.
We KNEW, at one point, that cigarettes were GOOD for asthma. They cleared the tubes! We KNEW that the human uterine lining is meant to make a warm, nurturing nest for the fertilized ovum to settle into! We knew all kinds of damn things.
For that matter, it’s common-sense obvious to any kid on the playground that things that are heavier will fall faster than things that are lighter. We knew that once too. And everyone with the slightest common sense (many people say) can TELL that the world is more violent and dangerous now than it was in the 1950s.
Except it turns out absolutely none of this is true. We were wrong. In all of those cases the common sense, obvious, “anyone who has any experience with these things knows that” answers were absolutely wrong. But we didn’t find that out until we did the work.
So yes a lot – a LOT – of the time these things really totally are “I’m pretty damn sure what the outcome is, so I’m going to study it for those reasons.” But we also do this work so that when we turn out to be wrong, we find out.
(My field works a lot with child-development stuff. The current big mess is “screen-time”. Everyone – including such bodies as the American Association of Pediatricians, and so on – KNOWS that screen-time for kids under a certain age is bad for them!
So it’s becoming increasingly awkward when the well-controlled, rigorous studies keep showing that this is not the case. Same happened with TV. Always look.)
In 1909 Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher measured the charge on the electron in what’s know as “the Millikan oil drop experiment” (sorry, Harvey). They got it wrong. As Feynman told it:
It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.
Good studies of things we “already know” are important, because sometimes what we already know is wrong.
