Data analysis: Difference between Male/Female ratings

Well, yes, but that's more like a statement about people, e.g., people want to make everything into a number. Want to, that doesn't mean they always do it very well. Of course someone would want to quantify intelligence, because that sounds fun and would make things a lot simpler. Doesn't mean they wholly succeed in such a difficult task.

What alternative would you apply? And who gets to decide where science applies and where it doesn't? You? The village shaman? Some "holy book"? Whose?

"Areas [science] can be applied" consists of everything with a physical basis, which so far has proven to be every verifiable thing we have ever examined in the universe throughout history. All philosophical attempts to support some kind of dualism have utterly failed. Everything we've learned that has any real-world applications can be boiled down to scientific examination. It is the single best tool we've ever developed for expanding our knowledge since the development of language.

Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 2000 centuries. For the first 1,995, we managed to stumble upon a few scientific discoveries, almost by accident... mostly in agricultural and large-scale mechanical fields. We learned to grow stuff and build stuff during that time, and that was just about the whole of human progress for the first 99+% of our existence. It is only after the scientific method was codified that our knowledge base started growing exponentially, and our last five centuries have seen more progress than all the rest combined.

Behaviorial study is a fairly young field. Like many nascent sciences, it is still little understood, so early efforts will necessarily involve qualitative data. Our knowledge of something as vital to modern society as electricity underwent a number of false starts before it was understood. If your attitude had prevailed then, we would have never gained enough base data to turn it from a mere curiosity into the useful tool that it is now. You would have said, "Electrical fluid? Pfft, you're trying to quantify something that is qualitative and redefine 'electricity' away from our intuitive understanding!" We'd still be burning candles for light and performing the majority of menial tasks by hand. (That model turned out to be wrong of course, but it inspired a lot of the work that pointed us in the right direction.)

I challenge you to list even one field with real world application where significant progress was made without science. You are right about one thing; there is a lot of absurdity in this thread. But none of it stems from "scientism." It originates from a Luddite viewpoint that incuriously wants to artificially constrain what science can and can't examine.

It's a board game, who cares? seriously, why does it matter soooooo much to some people?

Dead can Dance, read the intro to the paper and you'll begin to see why it might matter even to those who don't play chess.

Jurisprudence, taxation, political organization, banking, finance, money.

I'd like to see scientists do their science in a society with no laws and no monetary system. It would also be kinda hard to finance research if money didn't exist.

"All philosophical attempts to support some kind of dualism have utterly failed"

There are philosophers who go their whole life without knowing enough about this to say so. I think you're pretty ignorant to the difficulties surrounding an issue like this if you think you can summarize an entire issue with a sentence like that. For one thing, why is it that we have to describe how something is for an individual? It isn't just, a bunch of protons do this over here, and then over there, there is also the question of what is going on for person A, for person B, and when we do that sort of thing, when we talk about mental states, we are potentially talking about a completely different type of thing that science doesn't refer to. Sure, science might be able to make a cause and effect relationship between mental states and scientific processes, but that doesn't actually describe what mental states are.

A dualism would generally imply that one kind of existence is not available for scientific testing. Well, that might happen, lol. When we create a system of science, we can't expect the whole world to comply with it just because we made it and we like it and find it useful.

The issue of dualism is way too complex for a human to write it off after relatively brief thought. Way too complex. As are many philosophical issues, really. Once you realize the difficulties and paradoxes in them, that is.

How that could be applied into the real world, there is no guarantee we really could. But one has to call things as they see them, and be intellectually honest about what's there. In fact it might be that we simply can't describe certain concepts (like aggressiveness) in a sufficiently robust way; still better to be honest about it than to pretend something works.

""Areas [science] can be applied" consists of everything with a physical basis, which so far has proven to be every verifiable thing we have ever examined in the universe throughout history."

Everything that is physical is physical. I agree but am not impressed?

I do hope this topic doesn't go off the rails. 

Those aren't fields of knowledge, though. They are fields of arbitrarily agreed upon rules that allow a society to exist. While such rules enable progress, they don't represent progress in and of themselves. The fact that we are still rehashing ideas in all of those fields from centuries ago is one indicator that they don't progress per se; they simply bend with the wind over the course of generations.

I think it's far too late for that hope. I probably should have started a dedicated thread yesterday, when it became evident that the off-topic discussion was overpowering the OP's intent.

"And who gets to decide where science applies and where it doesn't? You? The village shaman? Some "holy book"? Whose?"

Logic? It's all a matter of figuring out, do the results logically imply the conclusion you want to make. You have something that happens, and there might be a number of causes/explanations for that. How good a science is would rely on to what extent a scientific process could allow one to zero in on one particular conclusion about what they see, to the exclusion of other alternative conclusions. In the case of this study, you'd have to start by at least being able to know, to what extent does their use of the term "aggressiveness" coincide with how it's used in general, to even understand what it is you're looking at.

If data from an experiment doesn't seem to logically necessitate some particular conclusion to a decent extent, then I would say that science didn't do a good job supporting it. I would judge science's ability to do that in the same way in which I would judge anything's ability to do that.

I wouldn't say this has been too off topic. The point of the thread was to have a scientific discussion about gender differences in chess. It's natural that we're going to discuss what is and isn't good science so that we can properly do so.

1: This is a completely arbitrary distinction you just made up between "progress enabling" things and "progress "in it itself."

Suppose a society has no laws or monetary system, people are on the brink of starvation. Then they get nice laws and stability and become economically properous.

On your distinction you would have to say that they haven't made any progress what so ever yet, nothing has improved in the time between war and famine and the time with prosperity and peace.

I don't think at all your denial of calling this change of affairs "progress" is normal use of the word. You can off course define it and use it the way you want to, but then again, what is the point of making arbitraty definitions making sure you are right? I can just define progress to mean "larger number of elephants" just as arbitrarily, and then claim the world is regressing because we have fewer elephants.

2: In your original question you asked for "one field with real world application" with progress without science."

Mathematics. Dunno how you define science, I guess you mean the empirical sciences? Mathematics isnt empirical, and it has real world implications, lots of them.

It's not completely arbitrary. Every one of those subjects you mentioned are subjective social constructs that must be upheld by force or the threat of force. They aren't objective. Painting them as absolute social necessities is presumptive. A simple google search for "moneyless society" returns 152,000 results, so a number of alternatives have been at least imagined if never put into practice. Perhaps I should have said "one area of objective knowledge that has significantly advanced without science." My question was poorly phrased.

I'll grant you mathematics, although one could argue that progress in that field is derivative of the sciences (especially physics), and is driven largely by the need to better model reality. For instance, Newton's work on the development of calculus was inspired in part by his desire to accurately describe motion under the influence of forces.

Maybe 5% of people long for an apocalypse to simplify things. Most people are comfortable. The news sells commercials by running stories about what an actress ate for lunch and people might make it a social media sensation.

And people may not be happier, although that's hard to guess. I think though that people are certainly more comfortable.

Saying there will be some huge change in the future sounds incorrect. Things usually happen slowly, and living through them isn't so dramatic.

Can't quite imagine what sort of future horrors will make the pursuit of knowledge unpopular on a societal level. I'm interested in hearing some ideas though.

Math(s) is not a derivative of physics... if anything the other way around.

And mathematicians sometimes solve things 100s of years before physics gets around to being interested in them. And of course some mathematics will never be useful to physics.

I think it's pathetic that people care about celebrities, but what can one do heh

Distracted may be a good word, but as I think about it, the frame of reference seems subjective. I.e. distracted from what exactly? The inevitability of death? The futility of life? Maybe distraction isn't such a bad way to live.

There are cities in southern California that should otherwise be a desert. I think before a billion people die of thirst there will be other changes like not having f***ing cities in the desert 

War is sudden, that could be bad.

An AI singularity, or whatever people call it, doesn't seem scary to me for two reasons.

First is motivation. Imagine a super intelligent being... ok, but people always assign human motivation to it. It's possible to have super intelligence without any personality or motivation. It could just be a super intelligent lump. There's no reason for it to be evil by our standards.

Secondly is engineers will not build a cyborg with a machine gun arm Ok, I'm being silly, but the point is there will be fool proof fail safes. People have a fundamental interest in maintaining our place as the dominant beings on the planet.

Genetics for a more obedient population? But ok, so you're born a brainwashed baby into a brainwashed society. Life, from your perspective, is pretty good 

Anyway, I think people are too fundamentally curious for any disaster like that to color all pursuit of knowledge as bad.

Although we already do consider some knowledge bad. For example anything that might suggest a gender or race or superior.

So ok, I can see where you're coming from. If technology (or research) is used to oppress people for 100 (or a few hundred) years, then it will be seen as taboo for a while.

Are spiders more intelligent than flies? Or are they opportunistic?

I'd call most predators opportunistic.

Also, not all intelligent animals are predators. Also I don't imagine AI being subject to Darwinian evolution. I don't even imagine it being adverse to death.

We have self preservation instincts, but that's necessarily true because our ancestors wouldn't have survived otherwise. But an AI doesn't have this restriction. It may not care either way about non existence.

forgive me for chiming in, but, you state that people will not allow disaster based on curiosity? i assume you know history?

i also disagree that any knowledge is bad. education, in my view, can rid us of prejudices.