An Excellent Though Not Immediately Obvious Example of How Natural Selection ("Adaptation") Is Useful For Producing Bull Shit Science

RMJ has a very good post up about some soc-sci claims about a recent one of those soc-sci things that they write a paper about, maybe it gets picked up by some other allied soc-sci guys but most likely not many and not for long before the next new thing comes by and it is cast onto the enormous pile which is the boneyard of discontinued science, the largest part of it, the soc-sci side.

I read through the paper the Salon-Raw article by Paul Rosenberg RMJ references is based in, "A “Need for Chaos” and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies" or, rather the pre-print pdf available through the link and it's a mix of references (almost all the ones by authors I recognize in that major section in the boneyard, evo-psych),  some pretty obvious truisms, some of which, like the fact that dictators and genocidalists such as the ones in Rwanda use the mass media to instigate and promote mass murders.

I will stop to note that dictators have had no problem understanding that going back into classical times and they have been far better than so-called scientists in understanding the fact that advances in communications technology has the effect of entirely enhancing the usefulness of such things as electronic mass media to lie and gull those prone to doing their will into doing it.  I doubt that a single dictator who got and used a radio station or TV network to propagandize through sensational lies needed science to tell them it worked. That is so obvious and widely known that science can hardly lay claim to the idea.  I doubt that Félicien Kabuga needed social science to bankroll Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the major instigator of the genocide in Rwanda.

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I will stop here to note that when I went to Raw Story to read the interview with one of the paper's author, there was a Zergnet hook to a story "JFK Files Reveal A Potentially Disturbing Concern About Hitler" the usual one, that he didn't die in the Fuhrerbunker but survived the war.   That even as they decried the effect that rumors have on politics.  Just an amusing point of interest.  I will forego the temptation to point out that ad-votainment appearing at Raw Story is what comes of depending on computer based algorithms instead of human judgement, as mentioned below.

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Reading over the methodology of the cited research (from the bottom of page 8), it was so baroque, so complex, so prone to make absurd claims such as the Danish and U.S. "rights" and "lefts" being comparable and their adherents were comparable  and that their motivations in spreading diverse rumors could be rationally considered to even be the same.

They announce their purpose as universal,  "The goal of the present manuscript is to identify the psychological underpinnings that motivates citizens to share hostile political rumors within advanced democracies."  so, their methodologies and their subject sample is supposed to tell us that about anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of people who live in different societies and different cultural milieus with different political systems and contexts.  Their own research was done on 1006 subjects, asked to respond to 6 different rumors. Since it is a virtual certainty that any one of them responding in exactly the same way as even one other of the 1006 is much, much less than fifty-fifty, their actual sample sizes in determining different "identities" are far, far smaller than 1006.  Considering  what they are claiming to be able to do,  I'd say for it to mean anything, you have to calculate the odds based on the fraction of identical responses among the fractions of those placed in each country and political identity within those national contexts.  As is almost always the case with these kinds of supposedly scientific studies, the conclusions are based on tiny, tiny percentages of the universal set of all people they are making those claims about and the more complex and varied the vectors they are claiming constitutes their "data" the more far-fetched the entire thing becomes*.  Often the claims stated, especially in the media, in black and white terms are based on extremely small differences in percentages which are as able to be wrong as not.  Their usefulness in telling you anything in practical terms is swamped by the kind of folk lore that is what is actually used to decide to spread a lie you like. 

And if you think that last paragraph is complex, read the methodology and claims made in the paper.  If one person in the audience of political scientists this paper was presented to had the same understand as the man presenting the paper is doubtful. I doubt more than one in 10,000 of them could have understood the numbers included in the paper or what their alleged significance is.  I doubt 10,000 people will ever read the paper, I wonder if its reviewers actually did.  I doubt that any two of the authors actually has the same understanding of what they're claiming.  I am almost certain that the Salon-Raw Story journalist doesn't.

I conclude nothing new about the use of rumors and sensational gossip and lies about politics from having spent more time on the bogus paper than I suspect the political scientists spent with it at its presentation.   What I do conclude is that a lot of this stuff consists of nothing more than them having software they can plug numbers into, pressing enter and getting it to chug out other numbers which they peddle as evidence supporting a "new syndrome" which is a truism that, as I noted, people have known from time immemorial.

The potential for such software-based "science" to create a conventional consensus view of the world as "science" when it tells you not much if anything about reality is far more in need of being named as a "syndrome" than what these people have published as science.  The institute where the research is was done. "The Politics And Evolution Lab" is just another example of the generally bad effect that Darwinism, natural selection, has had on science. Their motto is, "The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab) is a research unit dedicated to investigating how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics."  If you scoffed, rightly, at the claim that ancient Rome and China could produce "data" of knowable usefulness in doing that, the idea that you could get it from our ancient hominid, vertebrate or even the ancestors we share with ants could give you data points is even more ridiculous.

The use of the words "evolution" "natural selection" "adaptive" etc. to peddle bull shit as science would seem to be one of the most wide spread of delusional phenomena among the college-credentialed set, today.  It always seems to work no matter how big a load it is, no matter how blatantly they violate scientific method to make those claims.  I do think the ultimate just-so story of natural selection played a large role in that, though it began farther back than that, Darwin was the one who set all hell loose in that regard.

*  Consider the use of the word "data" in this sentence from Paul Rosenberg's Raw Story-Salon article:

Turchin describes and presents data for several contributing factors and processes, which he identifies in societies from ancient Rome and China to the present.

I'd like to know exactly what "data" from ancient Rome and China means and who, exactly collected that data and what their sample size was.  And, a question almost as ridiculous in today's social-science as it would be to ask about then, was theirs a valid random sample of the population?   Did they rank their feelings on a scale of one to six, or ten?  Would their answers have been the same six moths after if tested again?