We are all equal again, right?

[SunsetBengal]

(07-02-2023, 12:25 PM)Dill Wrote: In my words, I think we have to be careful with the word "trusted" here. 

Sources should never be trusted blindly. 

Lucidus is referring to a think tank, PRRI, which presents its self as non-profit and non-partisan. 
The claim is that it just gathers data and does research, and makes that available to the public.
It is "sponsored" by the Harvard Divinity school library, a part of the world's foremost research university.
And partnered with other thinktanks, like the Brookings Institution and the Transparency Initiative of the
American Association of Public Opinion research. That means (to me) they are heavily focused on
producing reliable data. They stop doing that and they lose these affiliates.

That's a lot of "checks" on what they do.

A good start, but then you still have to actually look at some of their research to see what's going on. 
E.g., they explain how their public opinion data is acquired and vetted. 

It is not produced because they got a call from the White House or the DNC wanting an opinion poll
on a recent SCOTUS ruling. It is "neutral" information organized into databases which the public
can use--meaning you, me, Lucidas, Biden's WH, or some NGO working with the state gov. in 
Texas or Florida. Their knowledge experts look at current dynamics in U.S. society and determine
what sort of knowledge vacuum needs to be filled. The data they produce will then serve
researchers for generations to come.

Even so, any time I used data from this organization I would satisfy myself, to the best of my 
ability, that they followed their stated methodology in gathering it. 


The opposite of a site like this would be something like Alex Jones Infowars, which amplifies conspiracies
and rumors, or generates them--e.g. unvetted photographic "proof" that a government swat team killed
the schoolchildren at Sandy Hook and the grieving parents are "crisis actors." 

The Jones site has the larger audience by far. If numbers were the test, it would be more trustworthy. 

Ok, thanks for the explanation, it was very helpful in allowing me to have a greater understanding of who they are and where they get their funding.  Naturally, I tend to question grant based research groups as so much of their work is (at least rumored and sometimes heavily suspected) of finding the results that the grantors want to see, in order to maintain a pipeline of funding. 

I fully understand that the process of securing grant funding is arduous and the folks performing the research are dedicated to their chosen fields, however with so much grant funding depending on which party is in political control of the tax disbursements there is a chance that some of the research is result oriented.  By result oriented I say that the group or persons holding the key to attaining the funding may want studies done in order to show points that they intend to base a re-election campaign upon, and personally I feel like it is much easier to conduct research when the desired outcome is known in advance.

Many folks in today's society are data driven, gotta trust and follow the data.  What is data?  It is a collection of information that is sorted, labeled and counted, and then turned into a statistic.  And everyone knows that statistics can be manipulated to mean whatever the presenter wants them to mean. This is not to say that I'm just some hillbilly who rejects the findings of research and data in their entirety, just that I think that findings should be viewed with some bigger picture perspective before trends are declared.