D
Deleted member 619
Guest
No, I'm not leaving you, I just thought of an approach that might help and, given that some of your recent responses have showed at least some willingness to explore, and given that you post a single comment we should be able to build on, I'm willing to offer the olive branch and explore a bit. I don't promise to be able to do anything, but I want to see if I can find a route from what you've said that opens a door to better understanding.
How far did you take this? Did you do much study of the scientific method? Anything at all on forensics? Trying to get a grasp on how well you understand how science actually operates on the working side of a laboratory door. Most people have that school mnemonic as their understanding of how science works, but that doesn't bear much resemblance to the real logical process underpinning science.
I think that, operating on your understanding of science, and teasing out the difference between the view that this is "just a story we tell ourselves and are trying to prove" and how we really arrived at the conclusions we tentatively accept as the best models on the currently available data.
It's a really elegant process that, once fully understood, especially in terms of the underlying logic of how we go about finding things out about the world, gives really good confidence in the conclusions of science. I can read a paper in a field I know exactly nothing about but, because I understand the logic of scientific discovery, I can look at the experimental design, calculate the degree of statistical significance of the sample size against the extant phase space of the theory in question, check the math, and see if the paper fails the basics. Anybody can do this, even non-scientists. It's a learned skill. Once that's out of the way, we have methods of assessing the quality and robustness of the paper itself by various means such as the impact factor of the journal in which the paper was published, the number of times it was cited in the research of others.
I think that, given even a tiny bit of study of the scientific aspects of criminology (by which I mean the hard science, not the indirect stuff like psychology), we should be able to firm up your understand of the scientific method enough to give us a better in.
So this is me accepting your invitation to start another thread.
I don't need a lot of detail in what you know about the method, just a quick précis of how you think we go about getting from observation to conclusion would do.
John Heintz wrote: When I went to college I studied criminology.
How far did you take this? Did you do much study of the scientific method? Anything at all on forensics? Trying to get a grasp on how well you understand how science actually operates on the working side of a laboratory door. Most people have that school mnemonic as their understanding of how science works, but that doesn't bear much resemblance to the real logical process underpinning science.
I think that, operating on your understanding of science, and teasing out the difference between the view that this is "just a story we tell ourselves and are trying to prove" and how we really arrived at the conclusions we tentatively accept as the best models on the currently available data.
It's a really elegant process that, once fully understood, especially in terms of the underlying logic of how we go about finding things out about the world, gives really good confidence in the conclusions of science. I can read a paper in a field I know exactly nothing about but, because I understand the logic of scientific discovery, I can look at the experimental design, calculate the degree of statistical significance of the sample size against the extant phase space of the theory in question, check the math, and see if the paper fails the basics. Anybody can do this, even non-scientists. It's a learned skill. Once that's out of the way, we have methods of assessing the quality and robustness of the paper itself by various means such as the impact factor of the journal in which the paper was published, the number of times it was cited in the research of others.
I think that, given even a tiny bit of study of the scientific aspects of criminology (by which I mean the hard science, not the indirect stuff like psychology), we should be able to firm up your understand of the scientific method enough to give us a better in.
So this is me accepting your invitation to start another thread.
I don't need a lot of detail in what you know about the method, just a quick précis of how you think we go about getting from observation to conclusion would do.