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Can't imagine how to structure the study
azstrummer — (archived)

How in the world would you go about making a study that definitely proved there was a murder deterrent because of capital punishment? It's not like you can isolate a portion of society and all of the other factors that could influence a person's decision and neatly categorize all that stuff. What, would you take a group of children and raise them to adulthood with weekly visits to the local gallows and another group that never gets to see or know about the executions? How patently absurd.

I don't care who did the study. I simply can't see a valid way of testing a hypothesis like that using accepted scientific methods. There would have to be way too many assumptions made. To me it's like a study saying that marijuana users are more likely to do harder drugs. Sure, you could create methodology and gather figures but you'd have to ignore one major flaw in the logic, that the same person that goes on to harder drugs would've done so if they'd never had pot in the first place. That's not a quantitative thing being able to predict a propensity in an individual without factoring in every other stimulus the person has had in their entire life.

Art

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