This conversation reminds about the Measurement Theory. I didn’t take it yet, I heard it is an abstract course and applicable to social science. It started from measuring dimensions, and expanded to probability. but for a quick whole picture, it looks very mathematics and no clue how to measure bias, haha.
Crackatook
Karma: 28
The Marshmallow test is observational study, thus we can’t conclude anything from here. This is very important to pin point out, but I don’t know why nobody is doing it. In observational study, participants are not randomly assigned to treatment, and have a space for confounding variables. We can just bring up wealth, former experience, parenting, personality, etc to try to explain the test, while no one is sure which one is the most influential factor. We can only tell “there is an association between A and B” in the observational study.
But in experiment, drawing conclusion and generalization to bigger population are possible with random assignment, which balances out confounding variables and leave only 2 variables in the influence. If researchers run experiment for the marshmallow test, researchers would randomly divide participants into two groups, so that each group has same wealth, parenting, personality, etc, removing the influence of confounding variables. Then, the researchers assign one group to eat marshmallow before time, and another to wait (Yeah, this will not work in reality and main reason why observational study exists). At the end, the researchers can tell if letting participants wait marshmallow caused them to be more successful than not-waiting.
This happens probably because I assumed he is certain about the topic and I didn’t doubt. His message was clear: “Cardiologists are bad.” Later I could break this statement because he didn’t believe it at first place, as well as the bad reasoning. Notice he pulled the anecdotal evidence again, this time to defend the cardiologist side. We can refute him again, that “You can’t convince me by just examples,” however, I didn’t do it last time I read this.
Should we doubt writers every time we read something? Yes, to avoid bias. Yes, when you detect bad reasoning. But my default is “read and assume they are right.” I feel the necessity to doubt, but I am not certain if that is the right, correct path.