Great question. Unrelatedly, mind if I correlate your medical history and a genetic profile of you with your purchase history at three major retail chains and the contents of your inbox?
Bad point. Violating the privacy of individuals is worlds different from studying gender differences on average.
(... everything has a political dimension, including data accumulation. Because ultimately, humans use the data, and what humans do is politics).
But from that, it can't follow that we should alter the results to avoid hurt feelings. That would render the "data" no better than mythical just-so stories. Politics should be subservient to empirical data and science. We've seen what doing it the other way results in historically.
Wow how interesting. Seems to drive out of a mindset of despair and blind hope. This seems like a pretty appropriate category for Modern Monetary Theory as well.
One of the first times I mentioned it on HN, the reaction was basically, "Thank you for showing me this right-wing talking point, now I can counteract it." No curiosity about the history. No valuing of knowledge and truth.
How is it a right-wing talking point? It's basically pro-science (and to be fair, the right has their anti-global-warmacists and the left has their antivax and antinuclear baseless beliefs)
Because that's how wacko some of the Far Left have become. Because some of the Far Left would like for there to be something like Lysenkoism forwarding a version of science which explicitly fits their narratives, and for this to be taught to young people. (If you look into it, they basically have a "good start.")
Bad point. Violating the privacy of individuals is worlds different from studying gender differences on average.
(... everything has a political dimension, including data accumulation. Because ultimately, humans use the data, and what humans do is politics).
But from that, it can't follow that we should alter the results to avoid hurt feelings. That would render the "data" no better than mythical just-so stories. Politics should be subservient to empirical data and science. We've seen what doing it the other way results in historically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism