maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but why would you test to "ensure that"? the randomization guarantees it (assuming that it is done correctly, of course); poking around after-the-fact can only undo the blind, which is why good experiments take some measures to make it difficult.

and why is it "guaranteed to happen 5% of the time"? is that independent of sample size and distribution of the factor? quite remarkable indeed!

you sound quite confused about certain things.

i am a statistician and i've worked closely with a sociologist (one of the few who uses math correctly, if a bit pedantically). you are correct, it is not intrinsically impossible to do sociology correctly. however, the mathematical literacy standards for the field are woefully lacking even in the ivy league.

this song by Tom Lehrer holds true today, just replace "sigma and chi-square" by "social network analysis".

yes, you are correct: social psychology done rigorously becomes economics. as for the rest, however...

yes, i am.

true randomization allows you to control for everything (intuitively: since it's randomized, there is no way for you to introduce bias), at the cost of increased variance. however, you can make up for increased variance by increasing the sample size, which is what they did here. i forget the exact numbers, but they sent out hundreds of letters.

far from what you assert, randomization is fundamental to experimental control, and randomness is quite easily generated in a controlled manner. here's a general hint for you and everyone else: don't say things like "randomness cannot be controlled because then it wouldn't be 'true' randomness". it just makes you seem like an idiot.

Dammit, I meant the letters were written anonymously and then labeled with names later. I guess "pseudonymous" would have been a better word. Oh well.

Yes they can, in some cases. There was a very well-controlled study where two sets of anonymous letters of application were sent to various positions at a large number of companies from a large number of applicants. The letters included similar random credentials from random institutions, random cosmetic variations of the same cover letter, and so on, to avoid tipping the hand of the researchers. The only difference between the two groups of letters was that one were given names sampled uniformly from African-Americans, and the other given names sampled uniformly from everyone else. The names were assigned in a blind way, literally a random form insertion, to avoid introducing bias.

I'm sure you can guess where this is going. The response and offer rate to the blacks was significantly lower, both statistically and practically. It's rather hard to explain that away, though I'm sure someone here will try without having even read the study.

those two examples are from economics. whatever your opinion of that discipline may be, it is, at least, in a different class of bullshit from sociology or "social psychology".

I have multiple masters in business and social science and worked on a Ph.D. in social science (Being vague here for a reason).

And what reason is that? You're not even close to identifiable from this information, you know...

speak for yourself. i've never tried using a Springer book as a nipple weight, though; i'll give it a try sometime. thanks.

eh, you are right about the origin of the phrase, but really it works either way. in this case, i like the imagery of a small yoked vehicle having to pull a lot of dead weight; it's an apt description of math/stats as it relates to the social sciences right now.

It's the opposite really. You can publish any fucking thing by mining for a low p-value (through multiple comparisons, outright biased sampling techniques, etc., etc.) and then turning your brain off.

Of course, just getting rid of the p-value outright won't solve this, but at the very least, the problem isn't what you're saying it is. Blind math fetishism isn't solving anything.

there's plenty of demand for a strong quantitative education. those jokes about mathematicians not being able to feed their families sound incomprehensibly alien, yet were common just ~15 years ago. according to the bureau of labor statistics, ``the median annual wage for mathematicians was $101,360 in may 2012," followed by an explanation of what a median is, which is perhaps telling.

s/internet/tumblr/

PROTIP: if you ignore it, it goes away.

funny, those things all make my life much better.

so what are you doing wrong?

I must have missed when Valve open-sourced their game engines and started pressuring the same as a preference for games on Steam.

Oh wait, they haven't. Why should Valve give a shit about open-source drivers? If it's cheaper or easier or better for them to push NVidia/AMD to open their drivers in order to spur quality-parity with Microsoft Windows, they'll do that. If it's easier for Valve to just pay NVidia/AMD to improve their proprietary Linux drivers, they'll do that. I suspect they'll go for the latter, unless NVidia/AMD have some deep collusionary hijinks going on with Microsoft, in which case Valve will reluctantly push the issue, assuming they can. It's even quite likely that they just won't have that clout, and would shutter their Linux initiative rather than get into a brawl.

Linux is just a strategy for NVidia and, frankly, a precarious one. They'd rather not have the Windows Troll around, but it wouldn't be an easy battle, and NVidia has many other avenues for staying in the game. Either way, It's not about ideology for them, so arguments based on that are silly.