Posted: Apr 17, 2012 2:47 am
Shrunk wrote:Thomas Eshuis wrote:
I am. There seems to be no other explanation for his publishing and endorsing of such a pseudo-scientific piece of crap.
But if I'm wrong I'll apologize.
My understanding is that he ran the study, these were the results that he got, and he published them. He's one of the biggest names in psychiatry, and there is little in his history to suggest an ideological bias. In fact, he was one of the key figures in having homosexuality as a diagnosis removed from the DSM.
Wiki biography
The issue, to my mind, is that the far right cited and promoted this study to a degree far out of proportion to its, at best modest, scientific merit. To be honest, I think this "retraction" is being puffed up to a bigger degree than it warrants, as well. This was an otherwise very minor paper that only vaguely hinted at findings that were not corroborated by any more rigorous study, and within the field has had negligible influence. As I said, its importance has only been as a political tool misused by extremist social conservatives.
According to Thomas' ideas on how a good scientist should behave (i.e. valuing evidence and reality over ideology), then Spitzer should be recognised as a good scientist as he followed the evidence regardless of the fact that it took him against his personal opinions. The problem was, of course, that his methodology was sub-standard but this happens to even the best of scientists, and very few have the integrity to publicly retract their study when faced with corrections. There was nothing pseudoscientific about Spitzer's study, there wasn't even anything particularly wrong with the way he conducted it - his only fault was not realising that self-reported data can only be used as evidence for how the subjects felt, not as objective data that is an accurate reflection of the statements made.