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Republican Schoolmaster and the Narcissism of the Minor Differences

November 14, 2008 Science 6 Comments

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Now that we all know who the new President of the United States will be, people are preparing for a new type of government, with a new and markedly different agenda than the previous one. Most people are very contend with this new agenda, but some will be disappointed. How does this influence the people’s opinion, one might ask? Will conflict be the result, or can one expect that in general the new agenda will be accepted and that those who voted McCain will change their opinions to generally accept the new policy?

In their classic article, Franklin and Kosaki studied something similar, although they focused on the impact of a Supreme Court ruling regarding induced abortion. Remember though, how Obama and MaCain differed on this issue, with Obama stating to protect the Roe v. Wade Court Ruling, and McCain trying to overthrow it. It is exactly the effect on public opinion of this Roe v. Wade Court Ruling that Franklin and Kosaki studied.
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What is an explanation?

May 29, 2008 Science 4 Comments


Yesterday, I was discussing a book with an anthropologist. What could have been an interesting discussion, became, from my perspective, a futile one. We could not even agree on what constitutes an explanation and how such an explanation should be put to the test. This caused me to think: `What exactly is an explanation?’

To my opinion, the book we discussed is a very interesting and possibly inspiring one, but it does not yet offer an explanation ((NOTE: this is my first and preliminary reaction to a discussion I’ve had recently. It still fascinates me, so I’ll probably find myself writing about it more often in the near future. I will then give more details on the book I mentioned as well.)). Focused on the ‘narcissism of the minor differences‘, it states that conflicts arise especially when differences between groups are very small. I think this is an interesting thesis, but not yet an explanation. My main reason for this is that it does not explicate when a difference is small (as opposed to large) and what exactly is a conflict. According to my debating-partner, all can be interpreted as conflict and in every context it differs what is a ‘minor’ difference. Thereby, the supposed `explanation’ does not lead to new insights, for every ‘explained’ situation is described by even so much determinants. To me, that is not an explanation, but a label on a correlation.
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Welcome to Curving Normality

Curving Normality is an academic blog maintained by Rense Nieuwenhuis. He uses this blog to write about the social sciences in general, fascinating journal papers, useful data, interesting books, statistics using R. In addition, his personal academic activities are shared here, as well.