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ChristianKl comments on My new rationality/futurism podcast - Less Wrong Discussion
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It seems to me that the woman with whom you were speaking likely wasn't well versed in the research. Why do you think the conversation to her tells you much about whether the people doing the reserach take methodology seriously?
I may be influenced too much by Who Stole Feminism?. By the way, the lady was a university professor, and is considered a local expert on the topic (that's why she was giving the lecture), so even if she merely doesn't know the research in the area she specializes on, that's disappointing.
EDIT: I recommend reading the book. It is an attempt to trace back to the origins of some famous research, and the results are quite sad. :(
Be careful to not confuse the quest about seeking truth with beliefs about the capabilites of individual people.
Another interesting counterquestion would be: Do you really mean that there is no country that ever started a policy that reduced the amount women are victims of domestic violence? What does that say about the job that feminist activists do, when they don't have any effects on the problem?
Why do you consider it to be a good investment of time?
I think the book gives some insight into how popular myths are created in feminism. If you are interested in the topics feminists talk about, this could make you update probabilities of their statements. Otherwise, it can be interesting in general how easily a completely fabricated stuff or misinterpreted research can become "common knowledge".
If you are against feminism, it gives you some argument-soldiers.
If you support feminism, then it's like reading about scientific fraud, and realizing that it includes a few things you believe.
As I said above, my general heuristic is to post questions that are clear enough that one can think about probabilities to skeptic.stackexchange.
How would reading that book improve on that heuristic?
I have no idea how good results you get from the skeptic.stackexchange; whether people there track the citations to their original sources, and whether all questions get answered. If that works okay, then I guess the book can only point you towards some questions you wouldn't ask otherwise.
Unlike "Rational"Wiki, skeptics.stackexchange doesn't promote "snarky point of view", so the personality type that enjoys making fun online of their political opponents wouldn't be attracted there. (I'd go even further and say that unlike Wikipedia it doesn't try to recruit people with specific political opinions, so it should be more balanced.) It probably isn't perfect, but nothing is.
My concern would be simply too many questiong and not enough contributors, so there is a high risk of the specific question failing to attract any answer, or only getting one or two answers, in which case the opinion of the random person who posted the answer could be unrepresentative.
(I only had experience with the programmers' stackexchange, and there many upvoted answers are great, and I also got some karma for answering other people's question. But when I asked questions, they were often unanswered, or only received one wrong answer. My hypothesis is that the difficulty of question correlates negatively with the number of answers. Also the gamification aspect of getting karma for good answers is good at encouraging people to answer questions, but if people get into too competitive mindset, it may discourage them from answering more complex questions, because that gets them less karma per unit of time: both because answering a complex question takes more time, and because there will be less people voting on the complex question.)
There appears to be some reason to doubt the intellectual honesty of the book (e.g., CHS complains that feminists say X was in favour of wife-beating and quotes something X said that points the other way ... but it turns out she cut X off in mid-sentence and actually the full sentence is advocating wife-beating).
That doesn't stop it being a useful source of things that might be wrong with contemporary feminism, but I think I'd want to check anything she said before believing it. That's not a bad idea for any book on an inflammatory topic, but it does mean that reading it mightn't be a very efficient way of acquiring correct knowledge about contemporary feminism.
Well, her meta-point is that no one checks sources anymore. So someone makes up a fact, or quotes a fictional research proving the fact, someone else quotes that in their book, yet another person quotes the previous book... and soon "everyone knows" it.
And if someone checks the sources, they usually don't go beyond "the book A cited book B, and the book B really contains it, so everything is okay" (while the problem is that the book B quotes an organization that denies ever making that kind of research, or the book B makes the opposite conclusion than the original research).
Sure. But making that point by falsifying your own sources doesn't seem to me like good practice. Though I guess it does then enable you to say with complete confidence that at least one book purporting to be feminist doesn't treat its sources well.
There no golden point in history where people used to carefully check their sources. If anything the people I discuss with are more likely to check their sources because the internet makes it much easier than it used to be.
In this case you seem to advocate an approach of being against the feminist tribe because there are people in that community who believe in myths. I on the other hand advocate to simply be in the pro-primary-source-checking-in-a-collaborative-way tribe. That's why I have a skeptics.stackexchange T-shirt.
Only if you also consider telling people about bad or fake scientific research "being against the scientist tribe". Under that definition, many people on LW would be against the scientist tribe.
And it's not just random people in that community who believe in myths. It often includes people teaching the topic at universities. I wouldn't expect an average person to have correct beliefs about things, but I expect better from people who pretend doing science. (Unless it is a pseudoscience or "sacred science".)
If skeptics.stackexchange works for you, okay. (To verify that, I would have to read the book again, list the specific claims, and then either look at what stackexchange already said about them, or ask the question if it wasn't asked before.)
It's not like that's different in a science like proper biology. You have always some issues that people care deeply enough to read the primary sources and some issues that are just fun to talk about and where myths get passed around.
There are scientistis like Feymann who don't simply believe others that they should brush their teeth but few people care about primary sources on that level.
The main problem with just reading the book is that it simply presents the viewpoint of one person and as gjm suggests a person with an agenda. A book has no dynamic mechanism for checking-and-balancing itself.
Skeptics has a mechanism where multiple people look at answers and vote on them. It's not perfect but it's a better to form my opinion than reading an opinionated book by one side of a conflict.