Not that it's utterly useless. Abductive reasoning is commonly where we get our hypotheses in the first place, but perhaps the book is concentrating on the reasoning we use to try to affirm our hypotheses. Just a guess from someone who did not even RTFA.
Respectfully, I think you're missing my point. Humans can do all of the things you described to out of group humans by first dehumanizing them. We do have a universal compassion for other humans, we're just very good at overriding that with other mechanisms.
But that's all beside the point. My point is that it's not primarily the intelligence of humans that makes us feel compassion for them. As you pointed out, humans are quite capable of feeling compassion for their dogs, and this is because the dogs themselves exhibit many human-like emotional and social traits.
And if the answer is yes? You then, I suppose, move on to asking the same question but with regard to mentally deficient humans who are still awarded human rights despite not having the baseline human capacity for thought, reason, and creativity. And at that point the answer is simply that we have greater compassion for our own species than for others.
To put it another way, it's not legal to kill the mentally retarded or to enslave them for your amusement. This is not because of their self-awareness, creativity, cognitive ability, etc. This is because they are human, specifically, and we are hard-wired to feel compassion for them. The notion of whether a species is human-like enough to warrant human-like treatment is distinct from the notion of whether or not any individual human deserves such treatment. Humans feel compassion for things that are like humans, ultimately. If you could create a computer that was every bit as intelligent and creative as a person, we still wouldn't think twice about disposing of it unless it could also make an entreaty to our sense of compassion, perhaps by expressing some semblance of human-like emotion.
Who only noticed a *diminished* sense of the colors changing? I could still see the colors changing, it just didn't seem to be nearly as much as before the dots started moving. My experience was as follows: 1) Ok, colors changing 2) dots moving and wow the changes stopped! 3) oh wait, no I'm seeing a few changes still....
Except he didn't use the word rate. Also, did he shit in your cereal or something? Presumably there's some reason why you're insulting him, I just can't figure out what it is.
Errr.... if your digestive system was not really really good at getting things into your bloodstream, you'd be dead. Your argument makes about as much sense as if I said that I dipped my hand in rubbing alcohol and didn't get hammered, so I don't understand all the fuss about alcoholic beverages.
Wait... that sounds speculative. Have you not played it? Are you saying that you don't like something you haven't personally tried?
but playing something that most everyone else plays does NOT appeal to me. I am not like everyone else, nor do I enjoy the things that apparently everyone else (or the media) thinks is cool.
That is so cool. I bet you don't play by anybody's rules but your own.
I like challenges in my MMO's, I like to play in a world that seems sort of real, without having a bunch of little kids running around saying everything's gay, when they do NOT understand the meaning of the word gay.
Well.... I can't speak to all of the content, but some of the content in WoW *is* challenging.
I play MMO to have fun, to get away from RL, and please, playing the same game most everyone else is, is not getting away from shit.
Wait.... so the problem with WoW is that everyone is playing it, so you're not getting away from anyone, but you would still rather play an MMO to get away than, say, a singleplayer game, despite the fact that having lots of other people around is the defining feature of MMOs....
Actually, there is probably 1 game that could take on WoW for popularity, and that would be a Pokemon MMORPG. But no, they are too stupid to make a new pokemon game (so far, all the releases are reworked earlier games), let along capitalize on something that could actually be fun and work.
Given your criticisms of WoW and your paper-thin reasoning for disliking it, I find it very odd that you think Pokemon would be fun. Nothing against Pokemon, but I thought you disliked things that are popular, particularly with kids....
So this is an accusation of lying essentially, yes? I mean, GP, who did not *have* to admit to being an EA employee, claimed to have played the game and liked it. I'm inclined to believe this was a genuine opinion. And since when is not living up to hype the same as sucking? It really doesn't matter if it's as good as you wanted it to be. It matters if it's better than its competitors.
Call of Duty and Halo are different in more than presentation. Likening them to each other on the basis of guns, grenades, etc. would be like likening two RPGs on the basis of swords and crossbows. The key difference is that Halo and CoD play differently *despite* the skin deep similarities, and the criticism here is that SWTOR and WoW play the *same* despite skin deep differences. Whether or not I agree with that is another matter, but Halo and Call of Duty are massively different.
Show me one example of an actual person anywhere in this country who would have gotten a loan but didn't because the federal government of the United States of America tapped out the bank first. The government acquires money by selling government bonds, largely to the central bank or to other countries (China, for instance). In short, I call bullshit.
But even if your analogy was correct and there was some hypothetical next guy who could have gotten that money, how on earth do you know what he would have used it for? Furthermore, it sounds like your hypothetical guy is running a failed business. Why should he get a loan to stay afloat? Is he too big to fail? Honestly, your example doesn't even appear to meet your own standard for being the best possible use of that money. Better to invest it in a new business that doesn't need new injections of cash from an outside source to stay afloat.
So in effect, your standard is that the money have the best possible positive impact, and anything less than that is a negative impact. Then the proper analogy would be that I borrowed money from the bank, started a business, hired some people who did not previously have jobs and thus created jobs, but it wasn't the best possible business for job creation and hence I lost hypothetical jobs that never existed but we speculate might have existed had my choice been more optimal. My but that is a stretch, and does not meet any reasonable definition of loss.....
Am I being trolled? If not, I apologize for the condescension, but I have a hard time imagining that this is a good faith argument. Argue the stimulus was inefficient if you like, and you could theoretically even be right, but this is not a reasonable argument in support of the idea that the stimulus could have lost jobs.
Yes, my analogy is that the government does not produce wealth, it can only take money from one part of the economy and spend it in a different part of the economy. Money that the government spends is money that cannot be spent on something else, even if they borrowed the money.
Well, they don't exactly take money from the economy in any form other than taxation, and they didn't increase taxes.... So are you suggesting that the stimulus package came at the expense of some other government spending that was doing a better job of creating or maintaining jobs? Which program or programs, specifically, were cut to pay for the stimulus package?
If you're not speaking to any particular program that was cut and rather just suggesting that the money could have been spent on something better, that doesn't fit your analogy and it isn't a line of reasoning that explains job loss. Your analogy requires that the money be taken from a successful enterprise and that existing jobs are consequently lost. They can't be imaginary projected jobs from some speculated alternative spending.
No, it's like you had an established business and took money from the most profitable part of your business and used it to hire people in the least profitable part of your business, gave a bonus to the managers of that division and were then surprised when the manager of the profitable part told you that they had to lay off more of their staff than the number that the unprofitable part hired.
Ok, so my analogy was based on the idea that the government borrowed money to pay for the stimulus (as it always does with deficit spending), and then injected that money into the economy (a move which, on its face, will nearly *always* create some jobs). Hence it is roughly analogous to me borrowing some money and then founding a business (though it would be more like if I borrowed some money and then engaged in venture capitalism, but that's a nitpick, I think). So now that I've explained the reasoning behind my analogy, would you be so kind as to explain yours?
The very first one they list is the large number of Fox News viewers who think that the stimulus legislation lost jobs. Well, the U.S. economy has lost quite a few jobs since the stimulus legislation was passed, so it is perfectly legitimate to blame the stimulus legislation. However, that is an opinion.
Not the way it was framed in the study. The study asked what the respondent thought the consensus was among economists, which is verifiable.
Furthermore, how is that a valid opinion? The argument you gave is post hoc ergo propter hoc, a logical fallacy and not a valid basis for an informed opinion. Do you have another line of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the stimulus could have lost jobs? It certainly doesn't *seem* possible to me that borrowing a ton of money that you haven't yet paid back and then injecting it into the economy could do anything, in the short term, but *create* jobs, but I don't discount the possibility that there's something I'm missing.
Seriously, it's like if I took out a loan, started a business, hired some people, and then someone at the bank looked at job figures for the entire town I live in, saw that the number of jobs had decreased, and then concluded that the loan they gave me was to blame. Absurd.
Although to address the case you mention, what would probably happen in that case is that you'd get treated, but then the government would refuse payment and you'd get the whole bill yourself.
True enough, and if you could pay it, everything would work out. And if you couldn't... well that's partly what's running up costs in the first place today, right?
Ok, so there's some clear bias *in which questions you chose to highlight* as well. For example, you point out questions 36 and 37, which are subjective, but you ignore question 38, which is the objective measure they *actually used* to evaluate the impressions people have of healthcare reform. The other questions are framing questions. In their conclusions regarding misinformation, they only used the questions with verifiable answers to determine if people were well informed or not. They used the subjective questions to get the context to use in framing those facts. In principle, I don't understand what your problem is with the subjective questions. Read the conclusions. They were not used to determine factual correctness.
I will grant that Q34 could be more precise, but it isn't useless. They permit "evenly divided" as an option, and if I thought it was close, I'd pick that one. But if you believe anything less than that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes that climate change is occurring, then you are simply wrong. If the actual consensus was a fairly close split that sits ambiguously between "evenly divided" and "most", I'd say you have a point. But that's just not the case.
The study was more specific in the questions above. The article sort of glibly summarized them. In the study, the questions were about whether or not you believed that a majority of economists thought that the stimulus legislation lost jobs or that the economy was getting worse, and then the facts were where the consensus among independent economists actually is, which is that the stimulus package created millions of jobs and that the economy started recovering from the recession in Q4 2009.
Even if they did sign up for it, it'd be impractical to implement. You could still be hit by a bus, not have your "do not provide me with medical care" card on your person and subsequently be given emergency care, for example.
At the end of the day FOX is still watched by 4 times as many viewers as MSNBC - why? Because it is close to where most Middle Americans lie in their views.
You sure do like to leap to conclusions. I can think of some alternatives. Perhaps Fox News is more readily available on cable networks (which could be due to popularity on some level, but that creates a reinforcement feedback loop). Perhaps it's partially due to Fox's head start. They were doing this highly theatrical enraged shouting thing long before MSNBC jumped on the bandwagon. And perhaps the vast hordes of people who would watch MSNBC instead of Fox also happen to be aware that there are more than two sources of news, and that neither of those are terribly good ones. And maybe there's something to your guess as well. If I had a stock response to almost everything you say, it would be "I think there's more to it than that"
Also, what's so special about Middle America anyway? I say this as someone who has lived his whole life in the midwest. We're not any more American than anybody else in this country. Except tourists and illegal immigrants, but that sorta goes without saying:)
So I read the article on the researcher's web page (I didn't go deeper than that), and I noticed a strong bias in the questions. There were a few where the incorrect answer was the democratically biased answer, but in most cases the incorrect answer was the one with republican bias.
I see two competing explanations for this:
The first and most obvious is that the authors of the study had a political agenda and tended to ask questions where the incorrect answer would be the one with republican bias, enabling them to unfairly paint anyone with republican bias as misinformed.
The second and, to me, equally compelling, explanation is that most of the important political questions of today (i.e. Is the economy improving? Are the policy initiatives of the party in power having positive or negative effects on the economy, jobs, etc? Who is to blame for unpopular legislation?) have correct answers that favor democratic bias.
Personally, I suspect it's the latter mostly, but I can't discount the former entirely. Either way, it looks like the only real reason that people who watch Fox News are misinformed is that Fox News's agenda is not currently in line with reality. But maybe some time in the future when the Republicans are in power and their policies are enjoying some success, you'll see democratic bias being on the wrong side of the truth, and it'll look like people who watch MSNBC are extremely ill-informed.
My research shows World Public Opinion is sponsored by the Liberal-leaning, Socialist-loving University of Maryland (the state where 70% of the government is Democrat). So the survey bashing FOX viewers is as unsurprising as a Microsoft-funded survey showing Google Chrome is insecure.
When you say "your research" would you be referring to the second sentence in TFA?
"World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, conducted a survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources."
It's not like they do anything to hide their funding. Also, you're going to dismiss a study because it is funded by a public research institution in a state that has a lot of democrats in it? Seriously? It's a pretty serious charge against an academic to claim that his research is garbage because of a political agenda. If you want to level such a charge, you'll have to offer more than just some vague statistic about there being a lot of democrats in the government.
Besides, it's unnecessary. The study is available. It says what questions they asked, what the answers were, and who gave the answers. If you have a problem with the results, then just point out the flaws in the study. Shouldn't be too hard. Without looking deeply into the methods and results myself, I don't discount the possibility that the study has flaws, but it's absurd to dismiss it purely on the grounds you list.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that it's utterly useless. Abductive reasoning is commonly where we get our hypotheses in the first place, but perhaps the book is concentrating on the reasoning we use to try to affirm our hypotheses. Just a guess from someone who did not even RTFA.
But abduction is an inherently *illogical* argument:
p -> q
q
Therefore p
Respectfully, I think you're missing my point. Humans can do all of the things you described to out of group humans by first dehumanizing them. We do have a universal compassion for other humans, we're just very good at overriding that with other mechanisms.
But that's all beside the point. My point is that it's not primarily the intelligence of humans that makes us feel compassion for them. As you pointed out, humans are quite capable of feeling compassion for their dogs, and this is because the dogs themselves exhibit many human-like emotional and social traits.
And if the answer is yes? You then, I suppose, move on to asking the same question but with regard to mentally deficient humans who are still awarded human rights despite not having the baseline human capacity for thought, reason, and creativity. And at that point the answer is simply that we have greater compassion for our own species than for others.
To put it another way, it's not legal to kill the mentally retarded or to enslave them for your amusement. This is not because of their self-awareness, creativity, cognitive ability, etc. This is because they are human, specifically, and we are hard-wired to feel compassion for them. The notion of whether a species is human-like enough to warrant human-like treatment is distinct from the notion of whether or not any individual human deserves such treatment. Humans feel compassion for things that are like humans, ultimately. If you could create a computer that was every bit as intelligent and creative as a person, we still wouldn't think twice about disposing of it unless it could also make an entreaty to our sense of compassion, perhaps by expressing some semblance of human-like emotion.
Who only noticed a *diminished* sense of the colors changing? I could still see the colors changing, it just didn't seem to be nearly as much as before the dots started moving. My experience was as follows: 1) Ok, colors changing 2) dots moving and wow the changes stopped! 3) oh wait, no I'm seeing a few changes still....
Except he didn't use the word rate. Also, did he shit in your cereal or something? Presumably there's some reason why you're insulting him, I just can't figure out what it is.
Errr.... if your digestive system was not really really good at getting things into your bloodstream, you'd be dead. Your argument makes about as much sense as if I said that I dipped my hand in rubbing alcohol and didn't get hammered, so I don't understand all the fuss about alcoholic beverages.
I do NOT like WoW. I'm sure the game is fine,
Wait... that sounds speculative. Have you not played it? Are you saying that you don't like something you haven't personally tried?
but playing something that most everyone else plays does NOT appeal to me. I am not like everyone else, nor do I enjoy the things that apparently everyone else (or the media) thinks is cool.
That is so cool. I bet you don't play by anybody's rules but your own.
I like challenges in my MMO's, I like to play in a world that seems sort of real, without having a bunch of little kids running around saying everything's gay, when they do NOT understand the meaning of the word gay.
Well.... I can't speak to all of the content, but some of the content in WoW *is* challenging.
I play MMO to have fun, to get away from RL, and please, playing the same game most everyone else is, is not getting away from shit.
Wait.... so the problem with WoW is that everyone is playing it, so you're not getting away from anyone, but you would still rather play an MMO to get away than, say, a singleplayer game, despite the fact that having lots of other people around is the defining feature of MMOs....
Actually, there is probably 1 game that could take on WoW for popularity, and that would be a Pokemon MMORPG. But no, they are too stupid to make a new pokemon game (so far, all the releases are reworked earlier games), let along capitalize on something that could actually be fun and work.
Given your criticisms of WoW and your paper-thin reasoning for disliking it, I find it very odd that you think Pokemon would be fun. Nothing against Pokemon, but I thought you disliked things that are popular, particularly with kids....
Game is probably going to suck and you know it.
So this is an accusation of lying essentially, yes? I mean, GP, who did not *have* to admit to being an EA employee, claimed to have played the game and liked it. I'm inclined to believe this was a genuine opinion. And since when is not living up to hype the same as sucking? It really doesn't matter if it's as good as you wanted it to be. It matters if it's better than its competitors.
So like a BDSMMO? (Yeah, I'm missing an 'M', but it reads better this way :) )
Call of Duty and Halo are different in more than presentation. Likening them to each other on the basis of guns, grenades, etc. would be like likening two RPGs on the basis of swords and crossbows. The key difference is that Halo and CoD play differently *despite* the skin deep similarities, and the criticism here is that SWTOR and WoW play the *same* despite skin deep differences. Whether or not I agree with that is another matter, but Halo and Call of Duty are massively different.
Show me one example of an actual person anywhere in this country who would have gotten a loan but didn't because the federal government of the United States of America tapped out the bank first. The government acquires money by selling government bonds, largely to the central bank or to other countries (China, for instance). In short, I call bullshit.
But even if your analogy was correct and there was some hypothetical next guy who could have gotten that money, how on earth do you know what he would have used it for? Furthermore, it sounds like your hypothetical guy is running a failed business. Why should he get a loan to stay afloat? Is he too big to fail? Honestly, your example doesn't even appear to meet your own standard for being the best possible use of that money. Better to invest it in a new business that doesn't need new injections of cash from an outside source to stay afloat.
So in effect, your standard is that the money have the best possible positive impact, and anything less than that is a negative impact. Then the proper analogy would be that I borrowed money from the bank, started a business, hired some people who did not previously have jobs and thus created jobs, but it wasn't the best possible business for job creation and hence I lost hypothetical jobs that never existed but we speculate might have existed had my choice been more optimal. My but that is a stretch, and does not meet any reasonable definition of loss.....
Am I being trolled? If not, I apologize for the condescension, but I have a hard time imagining that this is a good faith argument. Argue the stimulus was inefficient if you like, and you could theoretically even be right, but this is not a reasonable argument in support of the idea that the stimulus could have lost jobs.
Yes, my analogy is that the government does not produce wealth, it can only take money from one part of the economy and spend it in a different part of the economy. Money that the government spends is money that cannot be spent on something else, even if they borrowed the money.
Well, they don't exactly take money from the economy in any form other than taxation, and they didn't increase taxes.... So are you suggesting that the stimulus package came at the expense of some other government spending that was doing a better job of creating or maintaining jobs? Which program or programs, specifically, were cut to pay for the stimulus package?
If you're not speaking to any particular program that was cut and rather just suggesting that the money could have been spent on something better, that doesn't fit your analogy and it isn't a line of reasoning that explains job loss. Your analogy requires that the money be taken from a successful enterprise and that existing jobs are consequently lost. They can't be imaginary projected jobs from some speculated alternative spending.
No, it's like you had an established business and took money from the most profitable part of your business and used it to hire people in the least profitable part of your business, gave a bonus to the managers of that division and were then surprised when the manager of the profitable part told you that they had to lay off more of their staff than the number that the unprofitable part hired.
Ok, so my analogy was based on the idea that the government borrowed money to pay for the stimulus (as it always does with deficit spending), and then injected that money into the economy (a move which, on its face, will nearly *always* create some jobs). Hence it is roughly analogous to me borrowing some money and then founding a business (though it would be more like if I borrowed some money and then engaged in venture capitalism, but that's a nitpick, I think). So now that I've explained the reasoning behind my analogy, would you be so kind as to explain yours?
The very first one they list is the large number of Fox News viewers who think that the stimulus legislation lost jobs. Well, the U.S. economy has lost quite a few jobs since the stimulus legislation was passed, so it is perfectly legitimate to blame the stimulus legislation. However, that is an opinion.
Not the way it was framed in the study. The study asked what the respondent thought the consensus was among economists, which is verifiable.
Furthermore, how is that a valid opinion? The argument you gave is post hoc ergo propter hoc, a logical fallacy and not a valid basis for an informed opinion. Do you have another line of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the stimulus could have lost jobs? It certainly doesn't *seem* possible to me that borrowing a ton of money that you haven't yet paid back and then injecting it into the economy could do anything, in the short term, but *create* jobs, but I don't discount the possibility that there's something I'm missing.
Seriously, it's like if I took out a loan, started a business, hired some people, and then someone at the bank looked at job figures for the entire town I live in, saw that the number of jobs had decreased, and then concluded that the loan they gave me was to blame. Absurd.
Although to address the case you mention, what would probably happen in that case is that you'd get treated, but then the government would refuse payment and you'd get the whole bill yourself.
True enough, and if you could pay it, everything would work out. And if you couldn't... well that's partly what's running up costs in the first place today, right?
Ok, so there's some clear bias *in which questions you chose to highlight* as well. For example, you point out questions 36 and 37, which are subjective, but you ignore question 38, which is the objective measure they *actually used* to evaluate the impressions people have of healthcare reform. The other questions are framing questions. In their conclusions regarding misinformation, they only used the questions with verifiable answers to determine if people were well informed or not. They used the subjective questions to get the context to use in framing those facts. In principle, I don't understand what your problem is with the subjective questions. Read the conclusions. They were not used to determine factual correctness.
I will grant that Q34 could be more precise, but it isn't useless. They permit "evenly divided" as an option, and if I thought it was close, I'd pick that one. But if you believe anything less than that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes that climate change is occurring, then you are simply wrong. If the actual consensus was a fairly close split that sits ambiguously between "evenly divided" and "most", I'd say you have a point. But that's just not the case.
The study was more specific in the questions above. The article sort of glibly summarized them. In the study, the questions were about whether or not you believed that a majority of economists thought that the stimulus legislation lost jobs or that the economy was getting worse, and then the facts were where the consensus among independent economists actually is, which is that the stimulus package created millions of jobs and that the economy started recovering from the recession in Q4 2009.
An Engineer or Programmer who doesn't have $20,000 cash (or available credit from a card, or bank loan) is a person who can't handle money.
So the list of people who deserve to die in your ideal society includes:
Even if they did sign up for it, it'd be impractical to implement. You could still be hit by a bus, not have your "do not provide me with medical care" card on your person and subsequently be given emergency care, for example.
At the end of the day FOX is still watched by 4 times as many viewers as MSNBC - why? Because it is close to where most Middle Americans lie in their views.
You sure do like to leap to conclusions. I can think of some alternatives. Perhaps Fox News is more readily available on cable networks (which could be due to popularity on some level, but that creates a reinforcement feedback loop). Perhaps it's partially due to Fox's head start. They were doing this highly theatrical enraged shouting thing long before MSNBC jumped on the bandwagon. And perhaps the vast hordes of people who would watch MSNBC instead of Fox also happen to be aware that there are more than two sources of news, and that neither of those are terribly good ones. And maybe there's something to your guess as well. If I had a stock response to almost everything you say, it would be "I think there's more to it than that"
Also, what's so special about Middle America anyway? I say this as someone who has lived his whole life in the midwest. We're not any more American than anybody else in this country. Except tourists and illegal immigrants, but that sorta goes without saying :)
So I read the article on the researcher's web page (I didn't go deeper than that), and I noticed a strong bias in the questions. There were a few where the incorrect answer was the democratically biased answer, but in most cases the incorrect answer was the one with republican bias.
I see two competing explanations for this:
The first and most obvious is that the authors of the study had a political agenda and tended to ask questions where the incorrect answer would be the one with republican bias, enabling them to unfairly paint anyone with republican bias as misinformed.
The second and, to me, equally compelling, explanation is that most of the important political questions of today (i.e. Is the economy improving? Are the policy initiatives of the party in power having positive or negative effects on the economy, jobs, etc? Who is to blame for unpopular legislation?) have correct answers that favor democratic bias.
Personally, I suspect it's the latter mostly, but I can't discount the former entirely. Either way, it looks like the only real reason that people who watch Fox News are misinformed is that Fox News's agenda is not currently in line with reality. But maybe some time in the future when the Republicans are in power and their policies are enjoying some success, you'll see democratic bias being on the wrong side of the truth, and it'll look like people who watch MSNBC are extremely ill-informed.
ASIDE:
My research shows World Public Opinion is sponsored by the Liberal-leaning, Socialist-loving University of Maryland (the state where 70% of the government is Democrat). So the survey bashing FOX viewers is as unsurprising as a Microsoft-funded survey showing Google Chrome is insecure.
When you say "your research" would you be referring to the second sentence in TFA?
It's not like they do anything to hide their funding. Also, you're going to dismiss a study because it is funded by a public research institution in a state that has a lot of democrats in it? Seriously? It's a pretty serious charge against an academic to claim that his research is garbage because of a political agenda. If you want to level such a charge, you'll have to offer more than just some vague statistic about there being a lot of democrats in the government.
Besides, it's unnecessary. The study is available. It says what questions they asked, what the answers were, and who gave the answers. If you have a problem with the results, then just point out the flaws in the study. Shouldn't be too hard. Without looking deeply into the methods and results myself, I don't discount the possibility that the study has flaws, but it's absurd to dismiss it purely on the grounds you list.
If so.... Mission Accomplished?