Just like an idea can be wrong, so can be criticism. It is bad to give up the idea, just because..
someone rounded it up to the nearest cliche, and provided the standard cached answer;
someone mentioned a scientific article (that failed to replicate) that disproves your idea (or something different, containing the same keywords);
someone got angry because it seems to oppose their political beliefs;
etc.
My “favorite” version of wrong criticism is when someone experimentally disproves a strawman version of your hypothesis. Suppose your hypothesis is “eating vegetables is good for health”, and someone makes an experiment where people are only allowed to eat carrots, nothing more. After a few months they get sick, and the author of the experiment publishes a study saying “science proves that vegetables are actually harmful for your health”. (Suppose, optimistically, that the author used sufficiently large N, and did the statistics properly, so there is nothing to attack from the methodological angle.) From now on, whenever you mention that perhaps a diet containing more vegetables could benefit someone, someone will send you a link to the article that “debunks the myth” and will consider the debate closed.
So, when I hear about research proving that parenting / education / exercise / whatever doesn’t cause this or that, my first reaction is to wonder how specifically did the researchers operationalize such a general word, and whether the thing they studied even resembles my case.
(And yes, I am aware that the same strategy could be used to refute any inconvenient statement, such as “astrology doesn’t work”—“well, I do astrology a bit differently than the people studied in that experiment, therefore the conclusion doesn’t apply to me”.)
Just like an idea can be wrong, so can be criticism. It is bad to give up the idea, just because..
someone rounded it up to the nearest cliche, and provided the standard cached answer;
someone mentioned a scientific article (that failed to replicate) that disproves your idea (or something different, containing the same keywords);
someone got angry because it seems to oppose their political beliefs;
etc.
My “favorite” version of wrong criticism is when someone experimentally disproves a strawman version of your hypothesis. Suppose your hypothesis is “eating vegetables is good for health”, and someone makes an experiment where people are only allowed to eat carrots, nothing more. After a few months they get sick, and the author of the experiment publishes a study saying “science proves that vegetables are actually harmful for your health”. (Suppose, optimistically, that the author used sufficiently large N, and did the statistics properly, so there is nothing to attack from the methodological angle.) From now on, whenever you mention that perhaps a diet containing more vegetables could benefit someone, someone will send you a link to the article that “debunks the myth” and will consider the debate closed.
So, when I hear about research proving that parenting / education / exercise / whatever doesn’t cause this or that, my first reaction is to wonder how specifically did the researchers operationalize such a general word, and whether the thing they studied even resembles my case.
(And yes, I am aware that the same strategy could be used to refute any inconvenient statement, such as “astrology doesn’t work”—“well, I do astrology a bit differently than the people studied in that experiment, therefore the conclusion doesn’t apply to me”.)