@tzenes Aaaaah. I was just talking about SC II with someone in my WOW guild whose in Australia last night, and he was saying how it's nothing but koreans.
Either he plays on the Korean server, or he plays on SEA and SEA is full of Chinese people and he doesn't know the difference between Korean and Chinese
I know Doom 3 and Doom 2 and Doom 1 and Quake 4 and Quake 3 and Quake 2 and Quake 1 and Quake Live and Return to Castle Wolfenstain etc. didn't make me a serial killer
@tzenes I would call into question the validity of such studies. The number of confounding factors are enormous and poorly understood and our measures of violence imprecise.
but you can track the children over time, and you can see that a larger exposure to violence does tend to correlate with the children having violent social interactions
@tzenes You're right, I don't have a stack of papers, but I'd be highly surprised if you couldn't find a volume of studies on the effects of abusive parents on child's behavioral development that are far less controversial than those concerning exposure to violent media.
@tzenes Well thank you for circling back on my point and agreeing with me: reliable data is very hard to obtain, so any claims about statistics are pretty worthless.
People are much more willing to report on the amount of time they (or their children) spend watching TV than they are on the amount of time they spend abusing their partners (or children) in front of their children
@tzenes Don't be obtuse. You can't have a traditional double-blind trial with control experiment in sociological studies. You simply look at case studies and statistics of what is and try to draw conclusions. But you can't isolate one single variable like media exposure when you're looking at a national population. There are just far too many confounding variables which we simply do not understand.
Just because you can't do double blind studies like in medicine doesn't mean the entire field of sociology is incapable of producing scientific data. There are a number of other tools that can be used for statistical accuracy
But isolating one single variable out of the billions that affect our lives is insanely difficult. I think sociologists are being naive when they claim they can.
And even if you can show a correlation, explaining the correlation is exponentially more difficult.
If you were studying bacterial growth and all you could do was wander around until you found some bacteria, watch it for a while, and try to make claims about how the exposure to salt in the rocks affected growth... well your claims wouldn't be very good, would they?
I'm drawing an analogy, yes, but I think it's valid.
I suppose that depends on your definition of a "good" claim. If you mean a true claim, then yes you could stumble onto one. But if you mean a claim well-supported by evidence, then no, it wouldn't be.
I don't think you're going to get me to agree that sociology is incapable of linking actions with developmental factors
I could list a whole large number of trivial examples where the claim would be well-supported by evidence but that's largely unrelated
Our ability to determine bacterial growth based on its circumstances without good controls is not really related to the ontological discussion of sociology as a science
Fair enough. I suppose I've exhausted my ability to try to persuade you. But my position remains that a sociological study attempting to draw conclusions about the affect on the entire span of our lives of one minor factor is fraught with imprecision and thus should all be taken with a grain of salt.
I don't disagree that many studies need to be examined carefully, but I think applying that to sociology as a categorical imperative is really a bit of a leap
tzenes has the only SE 2.0 silver tag badge. We're also one of the only 2 sites that has more than one bronze, and one of about 6 or 7 that even have tag badges