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E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Discussion in 'Serious' started by TheBlackSwordsMan, 22 Feb 2016.

  1. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

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    He looks like he should be the host of a Running Man style of distopian game show
     
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  2. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    I'm no academic - but posit such studies, or even general prevailing sentiment that boils down to "people that think this way are stupid" just reinforces and emboldens them.

    The demographics of the vote were already well understood, and entirely unsurprising.

    This research seems purely self-serving for the authors designed for notoriety alone, to just give news publications clickbait headlines that further divide opinions.
     
  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Having rea... well, skipped to the conclusion of the study, if I'm being honest, and knowing PLOS One, I can't agree it's that simple; rather than "people that think this way are stupid," it's more "people with lower cognitive abilities are more susceptible to the sort of manipulation which can make them think this way, and which was extremely prevalent during the run-up to the vote as a matter of historical record, coupled with a lower understanding of the issues at hand and a tendency to distrust experts and vote in a contrarian manner."
     
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  4. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    You're right, when news outlets pick this up they will definitely give it a balanced assessment and ensure that is represented in the headline :lol:

    The suggestion that people with lower cognitive abilities are more susceptible to manipulation is in no way groundbreaking - I stand by my assertion that the paper was purely self-serving.

    And this is exactly what I was referring to - "the media reported that these experts think I'm stupid, well I'll show them" - distancing themselves from the media and the experts in the process. And they're certainly not reading the paper, because they're dumdums remember.
     
    Last edited: 23 Nov 2023
  5. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    That's a valid point, but should scientists refrain from publishing if their findings could be taken out of context by the media? Every journal'd go bust in a week.
    But that's not what the paper was addressing. It was a study specifically into the Brexit vote, and it found - and was the first to do so - the purported (and, now, peer-reviewed and published in PLOS One) correlation between voting intention and cognitive ability.

    Gravity is not a new concept either, but we still study it.
    If they distance themselves from the media which misrepresented the findings of the study... is that a bad thing?
     
  6. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    All good points, and ones I'm not looking to argue with either.
    My comments mainly stem from a general "ick" of what's effectively the gamification of research in the UK courtesy of REF, and how that's influencing said research... there's probably a few good papers in there somewhere.
     
  7. Byron C

    Byron C I was told there would be cheesecake…?

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    In general, I don't think I doubt the intentions of the study's authors - according to their introduction, they claim it was novel research, which is something that most researchers are going to strive for. There are plenty of debates to be had about whether constantly striving for novel research is a Good Thing(TM) or whether we should give equal importance to replication studies, and those debates are already well underway. But it's somewhat of a tangent to the subject at hand.

    The bigger problem is how the science is communicated to the public. By the researchers themselves, by the university/institution press release (which often doesn't involve the researchers at all), and the media in general. This study certainly has the potential to be thoroughly exploited by the media because... well... when it's such a divisive subject the headlines practically write themselves: "New study says that people who voted for Brexit are stupid". But again, that's not a situation that's unique to this study alone - how many times have we seen "Scientists say X causes cancer" in the Daily Mail or similar, and when you actually go off and read the study that was published it rarely says anything of the sort*.

    Rarely is science communication done well.

    *In fact in the case of cancer research, the study often does say that. But the part that's left out is that it's a slight increase in the instance of cancer in mice or rats which have been specifically bred to be susceptible to certain types of cancer.
     
  8. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Stoopid is international. Many people in the Netherlands are already going:

    [​IMG]
     
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  9. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    So a little bit brexit then? carried over the line by people who wanted to give the govt a kicking but didn't think it'd win...
     
  10. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    ...and same appears to have happened in France...

    Round 1 - Lets kick Macron in Les Prunes
    Round 2 - Oh **** Le Pen/RN might actually win... nopenopenopenopenopenopenopenope...
     
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