Well, That's Not a Very High Bar, Is It?

See the bolded text in the quote box. Stacy McCain is still on the #FreeKate beat...

She blinded me with Pseudo-science

...This attitude — expressed in many variations by the “Free Kate” fanatics who celebrate Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for her jailbait romance with a 14-year-old — is really nothing new to those who have paid attention long enough. How strange is it, then, that more than three decades after that zenith (or rather, nadir) of the Sexual Revolution, people like Canadian economist Marina Adshade thinks we’re in need of a social-science lecture on this topic?

The basis of the age-of-consent laws, like the ones invoked in this case, is that young adolescents are less capable of making healthy sexual decisions than are older adolescents because do not fully comprehend the risks. . . .

So there must be pretty good evidence that younger teens are less capable of making healthily sexual decisions than are slightly older teens who are free to choose the nature of their own sexual relationships, right?

Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually active when they were 16 to 17 years old.

Damn you, damn your “research” and damn Canada, while we’re at it.

I wouldn't blame Canada for either the psuedo-science that is social sciences since it was largely an American invention, or for the behavior of their teens, which is not likely to be signficantly different than our own, considering that Canada is merely the scum that floats to the top of the American mixing pot.

As a general rule, the more you know about social science, the more skeptical you are about its findings, especially when confronted with studies that seem to contradict common sense. The media appetite for “counter-intuitive” research findings (as practiced by the fraudulent Jonah Lerner, for example) and the generally liberal leanings of academic researchers (we are not surprised to find the eminent professor of perversion Theo Sandfort on the Columbia University faculty) tend to generate a lot of studies (and publicity for those studies) that tell us sexual hedonism is essentially harmless, even for “younger teens.”

I wish we had a different word to use instead of "science" for the "social sciences" as they hardly operate by the same rules as the "hard sciences", although evolutionary and population biology tend to use the same format.  1) Decide what you want to prove, 2) look for the ideal system where it might operate with less interference from all the other "laws" you've already discovered, 3) collect massive amounts of data, 4) statistically analyze them in a favorable way, and if you're lucky, 5) find statistical significance and declare a new rule.  If not, apply for another grant to go back to step 2 and try again.

And I can't believe that he passed up the opportunity to post this:




Thomas Dolby-She Blinded Me With Science by adiis

Though to be honest, my choice would have been:



Wombat-Socho's world famous (not that that's a high bar these days) weekly Rule 5 post "Rule 5 Sunday: Father's Day" came in on time this week at The Other McCain.