This blog post, from internet-social-research person danah boyd, probably won’t interest you, in and of itself. She’s talking about a study she co-authored on the ‘dangers of the internet’ to children:
For the our Task Force Report, I helped create a Research Advisory Board Literature Review where, along with the tremendous help of Andrew Schrock, we aggregated research to highlight the known issues around online safety. The patterns are brutally clear. The same issues continue to emerge with each new technology. The kids who are in trouble offline are more likely to be in trouble online and offline psychosocial factors contribute to online risks. Many more youth experience bullying than sexual contact and the realities of “predation” look very different than most people imagine and, thus, require vastly different solutions than most people propose.
The report was released while I was away and I came home to a storm. I’m used to folks dismissing qualitative work because they don’t understand it, but I’ve never before witnessed so many people reject solid quantitative studies done by reputable organizations that are replicated with different sampling techniques across different studies. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect someone to say to me, “Go find other data.” More frequently, as if in a refrain, folks are trying to reject the studies in this report as “old” and “outdated” even though the report makes it clear that the findings paint a consistent portrait and unreleased data show similar patterns. It’s as if nothing would satiate critics who can’t imagine that the real dangers are different than have been portrayed over the years.
I bring it up because this aspect of human character is so funnysad – give people data, hard data, peer-reviewed data, that does not say what they want it to say, and they ignore it. And the people who ignore it the most ferociously are the choadsmokers whose job is to make decisions, ostensibly using the best evidence possible to make those decisions.
Really, though, we’re all idiots, not just the policy makers. Unless you make a particular effort to be rational – and it _does_ take an effort, even for smart people – you’re just not going to hear what you don’t want to hear. Which is why I am so _highly_ amused, and disgusted, by the global warming people, who always demand “more research” when what thet really want is for people to “keep doing research until somebody gets results that we find palatable.”
Ah, the human condition. Doesn’t it just make you want to puke.