Should corporal punishment in schools stay legal?

[leo9]

Bad Science ... are you using that to prove a point? I'm not sure ...

It's a real book, and I really do recommend it. Though if you believe in homeopathy, you should keep a homeopathic remedy for high blood pressure to hand

To be honest, I haven't really understood the point of the first two paragraphs, leo: if I were asked to try to come up with a way of protecting the population from the harmful effects of moonrays, I might try to do so, even though I am not sure that reflected sunlight is harmful. Perhaps an umbrealla made of Bacofoil?

There - I've come up with a proposal! I think it might have merit.

But I do understand the last paragraph, and I have to ask, isn't research based entirely on experience, the researcher's or the experiences he looks into?

No, it isn't, if by "experience" you mean people's intuitive impression of what works. The whole point of scientific research is to replace "experience" with hard facts, preferably quantitative so that they can be mathematically tested for significance: and the experiment I quoted showed in a beautifully elegant way why this is necessary if you want to know what really works.

I tried to describe it in a way that separated the two findings, the one the researchers were after, and the other one they serendipitously came up with: and I can see that in doing so I made the first part incomprehensibly vague, so I'll put them back together.

The subjects were told they were taking part in an experiment to find the best way to improve children's behaviour. They were presented every day with a figure supposedly showing the time their experimental subject arrived at school - early, late or on time - and asked to recommend a result, reward or punishment, to see what would make them do better. By the end of the experiment, most of them believed they had found a way to improve the child's timekeeping... even though the figures were random and unaffected by anything they proposed.

The conclusion is that left to "experience," people see patterns that aren't there, based on what they expect and want to see and their instinctive belief that everything has patterns. To escape this trap you have to test the data objectively, not rely on intuition.

"The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know." - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[Thorne]

It's a real book, and I really do recommend it. Though if you believe in homeopathy, you should keep a homeopathic remedy for high blood pressure to hand

Sounds like my kind of book. I'll have to check into it, thanks.

And I keep a ready supply of HHBPM (Homeopathic High Blood Pressure Medication) to hand all the time. A dispenser at the kitchen sink, one in each bathroom, two outside the house. Why, there's even one connected to my refrigerator!