{"id":8325,"date":"2016-09-19T14:38:44","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T21:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=8325"},"modified":"2016-09-25T15:56:04","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T22:56:04","slug":"international-reason-like-a-pirate-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=8325","title":{"rendered":"International Reason like a Pirate Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Tom Smith wrote the official\u00a0<em>Talk like a Pirate Day<\/em> anthem:<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"620\" height=\"349\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vC_xmsItkH8?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The closest attitudes I&#8217;ve seen in education research <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>ARRRRRRRRRR<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0from econometric specialists, such as\u00a0those trained by MIT&#8217;s Joshua Angrist. If you have\u00a0Angrist and J\u00f6rn-Steffen Pischke&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/titles\/8769.html\">Mostly Harmless Econometrics<\/a>, like me, <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>matey<\/strong><\/span>, you may have read\u00a0a certain swashbuckling tone between the lines: Let&#8217;s grab that data, make bold assumptions that are pretty reasonable, and look at <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong><del>our booty<\/del><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0the conclusions we can draw!<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->As at least one colleague has pointed out to me, <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>thar be a certain boldness in &#8217;tis style &#8216;o reasonin&#8217;, &#8216;n them &#8216;o us trained in skepticism can find it bleeding uncomfortable<\/strong><\/span>. ((Translations courtesy of <a href=\"http:\/\/postlikeapirate.com\/\">Post Like a Pirate<\/a>.)) In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/9662\/9662-h\/9662-h.htm\">An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding<\/a> (1777\/1902), David Hume gave the skeptic&#8217;s view of empirical induction: It works, but <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>thar be<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0no reason why it works. The paragraph below is pretty typical of Hume&#8217;s style:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we have found to follow from such objects. <strong>And though none but a fool or madman will ever pretend to dispute the authority of experience, or to reject that great guide of human life, it may surely be allowed a philosopher to have so much curiosity at least as to examine the principle of human nature, which gives this mighty authority to experience, and makes us draw advantage from that similarity which nature has placed among different objects<\/strong>. From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions. Now it seems evident that, if this conclusion were formed by reason, it would be as perfect at first, and upon one instance, as after ever so long a course of experience. But the case is far otherwise. Nothing so like as eggs; yet no one, on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them. It is only after a long course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event. Now where is that process of reasoning which, from one instance, draws a conclusion, so different from that which it infers from a hundred instances that are nowise different from that single one? This question I propose as much for the sake of information, as with an intention of raising difficulties. I cannot find, I cannot imagine any such reasoning. But I keep my mind still open to instruction, if any one will vouchsafe to bestow it on me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Those of us trained in disciplines that encouraged caution and suspension of judgment can end up\u00a0feeling <del><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>stabbed\u00a0by the<\/strong> <\/span><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>cutlass<\/strong><\/span><\/del>\u00a0taken aback by the swashbuckling style and confident (<span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>ay<\/strong><\/span>, what some call the <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>bloody<\/strong><\/span>) tone of econometricians, political scientists, and some others &#8220;of that ilk&#8221; (to steal from Tom Lehrer). ((I have a masters in demography, so my\u00a0graduate degrees allow me to pick and choose what offends me.))<\/p>\n<p>How much of that is style? ((I think lawyers try to exercise that &#8220;voice of God&#8221; trick more than social scientists, but that may be my idiosyncratic experience.)) In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/1163146\">a now-classic article on historical reasoning<\/a>, Sam Wineburg summarizes how the professional historian&#8217;s &#8220;talk-aloud&#8221; through a primary source contains both shrewd awareness of subtext and a great deal of uncertainty:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Texts come not to convey information, to tell stories, or even to set the record straight. Instead, they are slippery, cagey, and protean, and reflect the uncertainty and disingenuity of the real world. (p. 500)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A number of fields value\u00a0this suspension of judgment\u00a0from history to\u00a0cultural anthropology, in practices such as ethnography and more general qualitative research and\u00a0even <a href=\"http:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/160407\/every-patient-tells-a-story-by-lisa-sanders-md\/9780767922470\/\">the medical practice of diagnosis<\/a>. So there is a substantial difference in the\u00a0rhetorical aesthetics between\u00a0econometrics and my training as an historian. But\u00a0I think this goes beyond rhetoric, and we can learn a great deal about disciplinary assumptions from looking at disciplinary attitudes in a subtly different way.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the gist of the argument: all fields have at least one Necessary Fallacy. A Necessary Fallacy is a slippery assumption that the field requires to do its work. Sorry, forgot to translate: <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>A Necessary Fallacy be a slippery dog\u00a0that th&#8217; field requires to set the sails<\/strong><\/span>. Much like the empirical inferences that Hume attacks, these are unjustifiable if you dig far enough down, and they are engines of both the social process and the substantive warrants in a field. An example of a whole subfield devoted to Necessary Fallacy Studies is critical legal studies: judges have to make decisions, and the bases on which they do so is not justifiable from any abstract, absolute sense.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>Do not assume that ye\u00a0field has no Necessary Fallacy: o&#8217; course it does<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>As far as I can tell, econometrics has two Necessary Fallacies:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>What is measurable is often meaningful<\/strong>. This is where I have seen people in other fields tilt\u00a0most vigorously\u00a0at econometric studies, and it often\u00a0<em>is<\/em> where economists without much background knowledge in an area can make massive category errors. But working economists know this criticism, focus in a limited set of\u00a0areas if smart, and generally address things on the front end. ((The most (in)famous such category error that I learned in grad school was the analysis of recorded beatings in a plantation owner&#8217;s diary in Fogel and Engerman&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Time on the Cross<\/em> (1974). As Herbert Gutmann pointed out, the relevant social measure for the lives of those held as slaves on a plantation was not just how often you felt a whip but how vulnerable you felt from\u00a0the general frequency<em>\u00a0<\/em>of violence. The latter was of course more common and the relevant issue for a community of people held as slaves.))<\/li>\n<li><strong>What is allocable is attributable<\/strong>. Because econometrics focuses on careful methods of allocating measurements, they are generally criticized on this point less frequently than on N.F.#1. ((<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/CgmPr99gsE\">Andrew Gelman<\/a> is an exception, and that&#8217;s on technical grounds.)) This is the warrant slippage that is the deeper Necessary Fallacy: there is no way to have an econometric analysis without this assumption,. Yet it is just an assumption: what we can quantitatively allocate to a hypothetical cause is the attributable effect. As with everything David Hume discussed, there is no provable link. It just is.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>What we learn from a field&#8217;s Necessary Fallacy (or Fallacies) is the type of academic values that can only be spread by personal connections, commonly in graduate school, often accompanied by good (or bad) <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>grog<\/strong><\/span>. This is not abstract, nor is it just culture. <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>&#8217;tis th&#8217; often-weird intersection between how human bein&#8217;s construct academic fields &#8216;o study &#8216;n th&#8217; reasonin&#8217; that be presented in publications&#8211;or be\u00a0absent<\/strong><\/span>. \u00a0It is inevitable. Like International Talk Like a Pirate Day. <span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>Avast, ye readers!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Tom Smith wrote the official\u00a0Talk like a Pirate Day anthem: The closest attitudes I&#8217;ve seen in education research ARRRRRRRRRR\u00a0from econometric specialists, such as\u00a0those trained by MIT&#8217;s Joshua Angrist. If you have\u00a0Angrist and J\u00f6rn-Steffen Pischke&#8217;s\u00a0Mostly Harmless Econometrics, like me, matey, you may have read\u00a0a certain swashbuckling tone between the lines: Let&#8217;s grab that data, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-research"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-2ah","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8325"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8345,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8325\/revisions\/8345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}