Posted: May 17, 2018 2:31 am
Xerographica wrote:
Every time you try something different it's an experiment. These experiments are rarely formal... but this doesn't mean that they can't be useful. I'm pretty sure that there's correlation between experiments and learning.
That's a fact, but it's also where your understanding of experimental research is falling down. You are welcome to propose experiments whose outcomes you think may be useful and/or from which we might learn something. As you point out, any experiment you propose may feature such outcomes, but you have to sell the specific outcome rather than the notion that an experiment hasn't been tried yet and for that reason or others might overturn someone's cherished beliefs. Normally, experimentalists do their work as employment and they ask funding agencies for money so they can live while they are employed as experimentalists. You don't have to take my word for it, but this part is difficult, since there are only limited resources devoted to keeping experimentalists in shoe leather.
Look at the differences and similarities with what you are proposing. You're asking people to give up not merely their own resources, but their own time, to perform an experiment that just looks like a guess you're making, one that looks like a hope on your part as much as a guess. People aren't going to waste their time on something you guess (or wish!) might be useful, and useful only in the event that it confirms some general hypothesis. Yours is a somewhat childish approach to conducting experimental science. Your curry macaroni and cheese is a childish culinary experiment. I'm glad you found that it confirmed your intuitions, but we didn't really need the experiment to realize that it was not a very costly one to perform. The experiment you are proposing for voting vs. spending is much more costly to the experimental subjects whom you are begging to volunteer. Asking for resources to perform an experiment is often at least a little like begging since all you have to offer is the possibility of learning. There's begging, and then there is abject begging, and your motivation would be clearer if you were trying to do something more in line with employing yourself and less like trying to show how clever you might be. If you want to do the latter, apply for a place in university.
It just doesn't cost you enough to continue to nag people single-mindedly, or even obsessively, especially if you're not devoting significant hours in your life to your own employment in the marketplace or your own formal education. Even if you could persuade a few people to perform a pilot study, the results would not convince most people in the field, because it's only social research and even if it confirmed your hypothesis, it would only be a demonstration that it worked once in very particular circumstances. Don't waste your time or ours as you dream of achieving fame shooting in the dark.
Xerographica wrote:
The only reason that anybody would oppose this experiment is because it could potentially falsify their cherished beliefs....
My sacred cow is the market. I naturally don't want for it to be slaughtered... but neither do I want to worship a false "God". If the market is the true "God"... then it will defeat the democracy "God" in a battle.
Get this straight: I am neither opposing your experiment nor am I proposing to volunteer for it, and this has nothing to do with my cherished beliefs, which are few and far between. If you keep on with this rather narcissistic either/or pitch to your audience, you're just going to get treated like another obsessive voice crying in the wilderness. You're projecting onto others the fact that you have cherished beliefs that you're obsessing over. Nobody here really cares about the fact that you hold a set of beliefs and can quote Nietzsche as much as they will care about the fact that your attitude is all broadcast, and no reception.