yes. except the argument here isn't "you can't be sure there isn't something else", it's "dude there are hundreds of other obvious candidates, why would you ever pick *this* one?"
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Replying to @talyarkoni @beausievers and
I would have zero objection to a paper saying "look, there's a cross-national correlation between these variables. here are a whole bunch of plausible explanations, and we have no good evidence for any in particular." how many papers like that do you see published in Science?
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Replying to @samuelmehr @beausievers and
not sure what you mean. are you suggesting it's okay to publish a paper framed as support for an extremely non-intuitive theory so long as the correlation is real, even if there are lots of obvious confounds and the pattern is well-recognized in the literature?
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Replying to @samuelmehr @beausievers and
well, for example: if they control for GDP, the effect in the global analysis goes away. this is only reported deep in the supplement. but instead of concluding "maybe this means there are simpler explanations for what we're seeing", they conclude that this is a poor control...
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Replying to @talyarkoni @samuelmehr and
...because, conditional on their theory being right, it wouldn't make sense to include contemporary variables in a historical model. well, sure—but you don't get to condition on your counter-intuitive theory being right, and an obvious alternative being wrong!
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Replying to @talyarkoni @samuelmehr and
if you say "at a global level, differences in variables like individualism seem to be explained reasonably well by even just a single crude GDP variable", that's somehow not so interesting—even though it's surely far more plausible.
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Again, using GDP but comparing that with medieval elites...like, the problem is even just the sheer numbers. We cannot use medieval elites as a microcosm for medieval Europe. It also doesn't account for variation in medieval marriages even after Church reforms etc.
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Replying to @beausievers @AdmiralHip and
we don't get to rule out alternative explanations by observing that if our story is correct, the alternative wouldn't make sense—otherwise one could always just say "we think our critics are motivated by a personal vendetta, so there's no point in considering their criticisms."
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End of conversation
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