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Oh, goody! Shake'n'bake pseudoscience.
Step 1. Come up with (ethically dodgy, perhaps?) pet premise. This should appeal to greed or prejudice. Preferably both.
Step 2. Construct experiment. You should do this so that if your premise is wrong, the result will be random thus giving you a 5% hit rate.
Tut, tut. You forgot one of the most important techniques- tailoring your experiment to fit your sample/desired outcome.
Remember those early IQ tests? The ones that had lots of problems involving playing-cards, thus intimately connecting culturally-specific knowledge with intelligence and "proving" that people from cultures without playing-cards were less intelligent? How great was that?
Then, of course, you can make sure that your sample population is very carefully selected so as to bear out your results. Say you want to prove that women will perform less well than men in spatial awareness- simply recruit your male test subjects from the local Outward Bound group and your female test subjects from the Royal National Society for the Blind. Then don't tell anyone.
Step 3. Do statistical analysis. With any luck (ie 5% luck) Step 2 has worked! Yipeee! If this fails, simply repeat step 2, but keep the repetition quiet. If you can't be bothered, find 1,000 "sympathetic colleagues" to do your experiment. 50 of those should come up with the right answer... if there are people who share your zeal then you can rely on the experiment being done and the failures not to be publicised. That way, you are able to collect "all available evidence".
And then, of course, you won't have to worry that your results might not be replicated. Someone, somewhere, will be able to construct a study that reproduces your result.
Step 4. Claim that (dodgy) premise has been scientifically proven. Anyone who disagrees is a luddite, is closed minded and is deliberately blind to the truth. There really is no limit to the invective you can use here.
Two words for ya? Government. Conspiracy. Oh, what fun we could have... |
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