Comment by harrisi
2 years ago
Your link doesn't say "this whole dichotomy has been debunked." From one of the sources:
But the fact that contexting has not been empirically validated should not necessarily be construed as a failure of the theory. ... Nonetheless, the contexting model simply cannot be described as an empirically validated model.
Which explicitly does not debunk it, but states that it's not empirically validated. That doesn't mean it's incorrect, although it could be.
Good point on nuance on a technical level, i.e., debunked != failure to support relationship.
However, on a practical level, people throw this around as if it were empirically supported (which doesn't seem to be the case). If there have been hundreds of studies failing to make the connection, I won't take the bet that it will eventually get validated.
On a meta-level, that's also a weird quote.
> But the fact that contexting has not been empirically validated should not necessarily be construed as a failure of the theory
Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, and plenty of people have tried to validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right?
> Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right?
Definitely not. There are a ton of theories that are very difficult to validate because you simply can't run the experiment due to practical or ethical reasons. That doesn't mean they are invalid.
For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to ever run a real UBI experiment.
Or the theory that eugenics would decrease genetic illnesses. Good luck testing that!
Even a lot of basic and fairly self evident stuff is difficult to actually prove when it involves people. Are the gender biases of children (toy preferences etc) innate? They definitely are but it's very difficult to actually test.
> There are a ton of theories that are very difficult to validate because you simply can't run the experiment due to practical or ethical reasons.
But they HAVE run high/low context experiments.
> For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to ever run a real UBI experiment.
Are you referring to Universal Basic Income? If so, countless experiments have been run. [0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots#...
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