open challenge: can anyone debunk this homophobic rhetoric?

Xurtio · 06-02-2015, 12:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

alright.. so i'll ask this way.. is there a statistical result that you would say doesn't fit with the idea that homophobia causes the increased amount of mental illness in homosexuals?

one where just based on the statistics, it would seem to contradict this idea?

I"m confused. I thought your thought experiment was to presume that it was the case and ask if you could get at it at all. The tools are probably available, and the data might be too (depending on how sophisticated of a meta-analysis you could come up with). The real bottleneck is likely funding. There's probably not enough people that care to fund or work on it.

My negative point about statistics is that taking two observables and correlating them isn't enough (pirates and global warming anybody?). On the positive side, there are lots of advanced statistical methods (Bayesian methods, reverse inference) that would greatly supplement a simple correlation. Most psychologists and sociologists don't use them and have a poor understanding of how to interpret the null hypothesis in the first place. And no one of these methods would be enough alone, you'd need to synthesize positive results from several methods in a meaningful way.