example: http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18595&Itemid=86
news like this is not widely popular, but happens nonetheless.

The problem is that, so much of the time, we don’t care about learning what we should do. We want to find ways to rationalize doing what we desire to do instead.

Most people intuitively recognize this, which is why people think they can determine what a person’s secret goals are by looking at the social consequences of the things they point out. When that model is applied to a person whose work focuses on trying to determine objective realities instead of producing a rhetorical justification, you get absurdities like the one razib points out above.

Scientists are supposed to stand outside, dispassionately observing, devising tests. But we can’t do that very well when the subject is other human beings. We are all insiders, and our very act of observation skews the results.

How often have we heard of some interesting social science, say, a survey, and upon reading the questions we realize that the scientists, by the bias of the questions they devised, have created the results, rather than merely objectively measuring a phenomenon?

I recall my genetics professor demonstrating ‘the rule of thumb’ of fruit-fly geneticists. Squash the fly that skews you results away from what you are supposed/expect to find. Scientists are not above fudging data if it conflicts with their beliefs and values.

Unconscious or conscious bias affects all social science research.

Far too many people, including scientists, mistake normative for objective positions (stem cells, global warming, abortion, etc.). Science can tell us what is; it cannot tell us what we should, if anything, to do about it.

The same is true for philosophical principles and religious principles.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read Bourdieu, but in “The Logic of Practice” he says something like: the particular local geographical-historical social form is the reality. It’s not an imperfect instance of some ideal, or a manifestation of some underlying form. Abstract structures and forms and religious principles and ideas and moral principles so on can help you figure out what’s going on in a given case, as tools to untangle the complexities, but the concrete particular society is the basic unit. “Fundamentals” are transformed in the particular case, and the fundamentals will not tell you everything you need to know about the particular.