Confirmed by science: our species is doomed.

[AverageJoe90]

67. I'm sorry, but this study was obviously terribly flawed.

BTW, I do realize that some people really do have this kind of problem. But this is hardly a "feature of human evolution", asthey claim, and highly flawed "studies" such as this really don't do anything useful and very often end up as nothing but exercises in rather extreme confirmation bias.

Here's one of the interesting responses:

ASterling Sep 18, 2013

Who went to the original "study"? (I realize I read the Nyhan "material" now and two "scientists" or more are being cited). I still can't find the graphs that people were shown to test whether or not they could do math if they watched Fox News.

Here's some "facts" ...

"Political Science" isn't science. A law school professor, a health science "policy researcher" and a government professor are not qualified to carry out neuroscience experiments. Nyhan, who I've seen quoted by the author of this article and others before, selects out any/all participants in any of his studies who might perform differently than his pre-desired expectations. That behavior fits the exact description of the lead of this article. Actual scientists refer to this as "experimenter's bias." It actually goes beyond "experimenter's bias" because the group is pre-selected and so-called "experiment" designed to produce the result envisioned in advance. The so-called "experimenter" continued to eliminate groups of individuals participating until he (I am deliberately using the male pronoun) got down to groups that fit his pre-selected criteria (in Nystrom's case, "strong Republicans&quot

As to the "math" - these people were using graphs. A graph is automatically removed from primary data and can easily be manipulated to present deceptive visual data.

http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/stats/display.html

Nearly all of the discussion I find on the internet about "lying with graphs" comes from political science disciplines. I found an entire article seeking to rectify disparate charts, some of which showed trends about which the author was concerned (income disparity) with others showing information conflicting with that.

http://faculty.atu.edu/mfinan/2043/section31.pdf

Since the universe of people does not equal "strong Republicans," and there's considerably more knowledge about proper experiment design, chart and graph presentation, and data analysis in, oh, just about any discipline other than poly sci, I'm thinking this article is more evidence that Salon is like Vanity Fair, only without the good gossip, good writers like Hitch and no sexy pictures. It's a fapping fest for people to hate on "strong Republicans."

Of course, I don't find myself 100% agreeing with this person but he does seem to have a point. It definitely seems like these results were skewed to produce a specific result.