I recently watched a response video to the widespread “2016 was the worst year ever” tantrum largely by people who’s view of history is shorter the time the iPhone has been in existence, where the content creator ended his video with the statement “No, 2016 is not the worst ever, your frame of reference is“. I had another post planned, but that statement is perhaps more profound than the creator intended when he recorded it.
Frame of reference can be argued as a synonym for “field of knowledge“, which is an expression that is used within academia and is of high importance when designing research projects. In order to avoid duplicating the research that has already been done within a field of knowledge (unless one is doing a verification of previous research), a literature search is conducted to build the foundation for the research. It also serves to anchor the research that is to be done within the field, and to support choices the researcher makes.
When the researcher then designs the methodology, the experiments, and the other parts of the full research project, the literature review acts both to inform and to control the research. In the same manner, a person who has a narrow frame of reference, will hold attitutes and make decisions different from someone with a wide frame of reference, a person with a deep frame will view the world different from a person with a shallow frame and so on.
In many ways this is the underlying principle of just about everything humans engage in, and a source of many conflicts. A researcher named Thomas Kuhn argued that as each person who evaluates evidence, brings their subjective field of knowledge and experience with them into the evaluation, science is somewhat of a relative discipline [6].
Some of this can be traced back to various forms of bias and incentives. A researcher who has invested his career into a theory will be reluctant to accept that it has been proven wrong and have clear incentives to interpret results in a manner that is positive to the theory. Likewise someone who is invested in an ideology will be reluctant to accept any evidence against the benefits he or she perceives that ideology as having.
This is where one gets the “Not real communism” from those who advocate communism when they are presented with the tragic history of the countries that have attempted to govern according to that ideology. Continue reading