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Conservapedia talk:Are atheists productive (view source)
Revision as of 02:39, February 27, 2008
, 02:39, February 27, 2008→A research proposal: Comparitive groups, problems, and biases. And who will pay?
: I'm fine with including all religions. However, the control does not have to be [[atheistic]] children of [[atheists]]. Other control groups are possible, or perhaps simply use the general population (of comparable privilege) as a rough control.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 17:08, 26 February 2008 (EST)
: I'm fine with including all religions. However, the control does not have to be [[atheistic]] children of [[atheists]]. Other control groups are possible, or perhaps simply use the general population (of comparable privilege) as a rough control.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 17:08, 26 February 2008 (EST)
:: He suggested the control group as atheist children of theists, not of atheists. Atheist children of theists are the appropriate control if you are comparing ''second-generation'' atheists with ''first-generation'' atheists. But it would also be interesting to compare both groups to first-generation Christians and second-generation Christians.
:: And although you could add as separate groups other religions, lumping all theistic religions into one group vs. atheists is making a huge, and invalid, assumption about how similar various theistic religions are. So after atheists, the first group you would compare against would be Christians, and preferably Christians from a reformed background.
:: All proper studies have to grapple with problems of definitions, avoiding hidden biases, etc., and the same applies here, but I don't see any exceptionally difficult problems with a study like this. Religion, at least, is already determined by many other studies. It can be done. Achievement would not be a particular problem, although one thing to be wary of is to avoid a reliance on academic achievement, as people who have achieved academically have, for the most part, gone through a system (i.e. university and the like) that is predominantly atheistic, and which would therefore cause a bias in the results.
:: But such a study is the sort of thing that you get a grant of tens of thousands of dollars for, and takes many months of work. I very much doubt that it would be within the capabilities of anyone here.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:39, 26 February 2008 (EST)
== A quick check ==
== A quick check ==