Nailz said:
" So I state again. Disprove it." ?
You know who else uses that argument? Religious fundamentalists.
Can I disprove God exists? No. Does it make it fruitful to posit that he does because I can't disprove it? No. Occam's Razor baby. Why make the stretch.
Cheers.
Religion is not scientific, it is based on a premise that can not be disproved to begin with. Therefore, I can not disprove it. I should not be expected to. The only reason I can't disprove it is because there's nothing to disprove in the first place.
The statement "Violence in video games is a cause of violent behavior in individuals" CAN be disproved. I notice how you guys have been screaming that science proves people like Baca wrong, but then fail to show any link to any actual evidence that points to disproving him.
As soon as the statement is made, it may be illogical for several other reasons, but if it is also disprovable then it stands to reason that you should disprove it. It strengthens the argument of your logic, otherwise you are merely claiming the victory without ever proving it.
Uriel-238 said:
Science is not based on experimentation but observation. Experiments are artificed circumstances in which to produce clean observations, but some experiments are impossible (creating a gravitational field strong enough to produce lensing) and others are unethical (giving human beings cancer so that we see if a treatment works).
Experiments are probably THE key tool to science though. Without one that is rigorously applied across multiple circumstances and locations you really can't effectively argue for a hypothesis. You need to fully try as hard as you can to disprove every statement you make, and that's only going to happen through experiments.
Uriel-238 said:
Secondly, Science never proves anything any more than can, say, a court of law, with the sole exception of the pure-thought sciences such as logic and mathematics, in which proof beyond doubt can occur. Gravity, despite its flawless observed consistency, will only ever be a theory, just a very, very strong one.
That kind of was my point. Science can never prove anything. Science can disprove something through. One verifiable observation (an observation, that I repeat, must be consistent across multiple repeated experiments, there are no flukes) disproves the statement "Video games cause violence in children".
My argument is that someone should disprove the statement "Video games cause violence in children" not demand that I show them proof of it, as it's physically impossible to prove anything, even gravity.
Uriel-238 said:
Sociology is a soft science, which, unlike physics or chemistry, can only map out tendencies and approximations, usually based on behavioral statistics within human society and not within the closed environment of a laboratory. The reason is simple: we cannot (and should not) clone one hundred children and raise them in an exact environment so that we can see the changes in behavior of those we expose to Manhunter 2 compared to the control group. With any less stringent conditions, we cannot be sure all the extraneous conditions are insignificant, hence we have to go by the laws of averages.
Nothing in Sociology is exact. One could easily correlate, for example, the descent of violent sex crimes with the rise in availability of the internet (and along with an increase in reporting vectors and victim sensitivity training among responding agencies). Does this indicate that the availability of porn (via the internet) reduces sex crimes? Possibly, but the internet also increased connection to support groups, common interest groups and education resources about how to relate to other people, and any of these may be part, all or none of the causation factor.
Completely understood. At the same time, there are certain experiments you can do, without going too far. While as a soft science it might not be exact, I stand by the fact that as a science it should be able at least to use the scientific method, and therefore it should be able to disprove something that is incorrect according to research. I know there has been research on this exact question multiple times, it is scientifically possible to disprove the argument "Video games cause violence" and it should have been done already (it has been, just nobody is linking me to it).
Uriel-238 said:
But more importantly, burden of proof, or rather sufficient evidence of harm is on those who would regulate the industry in order for a law be made that creates a restriction, otherwise there would be nothing to stop the orange growers of the US from pushing a law banning mandarins because they cause cancer. So it's not up to the game industry to prove that their product is harmless, but the lobbyists for the regulation to prove that harm exists.
Yes, and there have been studies that show a possible link. And all I'm asking is for someone to link to ONE STUDY to show there isn't a link. I know it's there, I can link to it myself, I'm trying to get the people arguing against this law to do more than scream hate and get out and do research. It annoys me when they claim science is on their side and they don't even bother to research any of the details.
Uriel-238 said:
It gets worse. During the new millennium, a lot of companies invested in the status quo invoked a lot of pseudoscience in order to obfuscate the details about global climate change, and this tactic has, thanks to its success, continued to propagate in any controversy in which the actual science backs one side and not the other (evolution & cosmology vs. biblical creationism, fetal person-hood vs. woman's rights, flood geology vs. academic geology, and so on). So there are a lot of scientific inquiries that are implemented with a specific outcome in mind, and a lot of other so-called studies that are fabricated out of whole cloth, and pass off as scientific inquiry. This is why, as Dr. Richard Dawkins noted, we need to return to the practice of having scientific results backed by multiple sources of review that confirm each other.
All so they can prove something is likely? Or all so they can try as hard as they can to disprove their own theories and fail? That's the nature of science. That's why I respect the Theory of Evolution, which hasn't managed to be disproved through all the rigorous attempts. That's why I respect academic and scientific theories in general, because if done properly they should have a ton of attempts at disproving them fail.
Baca does not have a theory. He has a hypothesis, and a bad one at that. One that can easily be disproved. So why haven't any of the people arguing with me about the fallacies of my argument tried playing the game and showing me those studies? They exist, I know they exist. You know the bias is bad when people literally ignore the evidence in their own favor to attack a position.
Uriel-238 said:
So, given this, it is not only necessary for Baca and his crew to provide studies that show violent video games consistently are a cause of harm to children, but also must then provide parallel review studies, preferably that use different methods, as well as different test groups.
EXACTLY MY POINT! Once they put forward the hypothesis (as has already been put forward multiple times this decade) it is their obligation to try and disprove it. It is likewise the obligation of others in the field to try and disprove it. If they can't disprove it then they have a point. If one of those many studies disproves it then you win the argument.
So I continue to state. DISPROVE IT! It's the job of every single scientific minded person within a field to do so. To everything. Disprove disprove disprove. That is the work of Science, which only advances when it disproves something, because it will never prove anything.
The people advocating this argument should be trying to disprove it as well. They obviously aren't. That's obviously their problem. Now disprove them and rub it in their non-scientific faces, instead of stooping to their level and making arguments without linking to research.
And the joke is. This very argument Baca is making has been disproved. By several studies. Nobody here wants to link me to them though, preferring to yell rather than to allow the evidence to actually speak for itself. I agree with you guys, this is a stupid law. One you can easily defeat if you stop being so emotional about your hobby.
