Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
One thing that bothers me is when ppl critique my data as "unscientific" due to sampling bias. First, y'all better not look into a lot of what you think are "scientific" studies Second, there's nothing wrong with sampling bias if you acknowledge limitations and don't extrapolate.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Yes, I know most of my responders are white cis men between 25-40 who are associated with STEM, vaguely liberal/centrist/libertarian. There's nothing about collecting data from a particular demographic that's unscientific as long as you're upfront about the demographic.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
This comes from an understanding of "science" I find a bit weird; science is not a mystical thing that descends upon your work once you've achieved perfectly random distribution of your sample. Science is just a process of figuring things out! There's lots of ways to do it!
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Just make sure you're upfront about your methodology, where you got your data from, the limitations of what can be directly extrapolated from that data, and try to get familiar with the easy ways you can accidentally misinterpret data despite good intent.
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Chris Ward
@MasterWambo
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
You're asking too much. Many people view science with a distinct religiosity, despite ironically believing the opposite. This is probably due to a lack of general understanding of what "science" actually is.
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TK-421 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁮󠁭󠁿
@tk42132
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
So I would say thinking about it as "Finding things out" is the pop science way of thinking about what science is - what you are doing is trying to explain your data with a model and you are trying to see if you can falsify that model with a 95 percent confidence interval.