Inconclusive

i should have explained myself a little better.

My argument is not necessarily with the study itself, nor even those particular scientists. i do have a problem with the conclusion those particular scientists drew from the study itself.

From the evidence of "people who have sex 'too early' or 'too late' in life experience sexual dysfunction," their response is "ergo, abstinence-only education is harmful." This is precisely where i think the bias lies. They have stepped over the boundary of scientific investigation into a political, social, and moral arena. Non-sequitur, my friends.

It does not follow from the evidence presented that we can make such an over-generalization.

But in a much larger sense, what really does not follow is why we've given scientists the voice in society that we have.

And that's really what i was getting at in my first post on this.

I fully agree that to extrapolate from this one incident to generalize bias over all scientists would be wrong. In the same way, we cannot extrapolate from one suicide bomb attack that all Muslims are extremists. But we can use each attack as an indication of how some Muslims act. As my favorite professor always said, "stereotypes exist because there are 50,000 examples." So i didn't mean to use this for extrapolation, but rather indication. It's one example among countless others that scientists are not computers.

They have motives. They have biases. They have wallets that need filling. They are not unlike the priests of the middle ages who kept scriptural knowledge, and thus knowledge of God, to themselves. It was a mechanism of power. Today, science is being used as a mechanism of power (by some, not by all, of course) in the same way priests used the "mysteries of God" to wield power. Sound dark and pessimistic? So is human history.

What i was really after here was the ethos of epistemological superiority assumed by (some, maybe most) scientists, and willingly given them by an all too uncritical public.

When the argument moves from "the evidence suggests" to "scientists say," i get wary and suspicious. It does not follow that someone is right just because they are a scientist. They are as suspect as anyone else because they are a human with motives and biases.

i think that's all i wanted to say. i'm not anti-science, by any means. Science is great. Scientists are great. But they do not have exclusive claim on the truth.