Interview with Scott Aaronson
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Interview with Scott Aaronson
1–10 of 84 posts
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#2I want to congratulate the person who invited Scott Aaronson to speak (New York university, about integrated information theory) and didn't record and publish it on youtube. /sarcasm
Seriously guys, we only have that many people like Scott. Please don't take their smarts, wisdom and time for granted.
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#3Listen to Donald Trump robocall urging California's 'no party preference' voters to register as Republicans. see more here http://sh.st/IS9mr
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#4In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf.
Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be evidence against the consensus, if less than a third of researchers with against-consensus results have dared to publish their results.
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#5> [I]f you want me to rush to the Singularity community’s defense, the way to do it is to tell me that they’re a weirdo nerd cult that worships a high-school dropout and his Harry Potter fanfiction, so how could anyone possibly take their ideas seriously?
Ha, good one! I really love his long rambling answers, very interesting.
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#6In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf. Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be…
How does meta-analysis in a highly opinion based field like the social sciences, where there are different, mutually exclusive schools of thought even make sense in the first place?
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#7In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf. Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be…
With all due respect to Aaronson (with whom I find myself agreeing on many things), I wouldn't take his evaluation on the state of social science and his analysis of its core problems as correct. He's not a social scientist, and I don't think he'd appreciate an anthropologist evaluating the state of affairs in quantum computing research.
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#8In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf. Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be…
How does meta-analysis in a highly opinion based field like the social sciences, where there are different, mutually exclusive schools of thought even make sense in the first place?
And how does a lack of even rudimentary knowledge of a specific field of study qualify one to reject it wholesale?
The difficulties in meta-analysis in the social sciences vary from field to field -- psychology is qualitatively different from anthropology or history -- but if we had to generalize, they have more to do with the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise measurement (and sometimes obtaining a large-enough sample), than with the field being "opinion based" or the existence of "mutually exclusive schools of thought" (I don't know how this differs from many other, more tractable research areas, and I don't see how this can be reconciled with saying that there's too much consensus).
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#9In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf. Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be…
With all due respect to Aaronson (with whom I find myself agreeing on many things), I wouldn't take his evaluation on the state of social science and his analysis of its core problems as correct. He's not a social scientist, and I don't think he'd appreciate an anthropologist evaluating the state of affairs in quantum computing research.
> He's not a social scientist, and I don't think he'd appreciate an anthropologist evaluating the state of affairs in quantum computing research.
But, from things I have read elsewhere, there does seem to be a reasonably convincing body of evidence that there are systematic biases in social sciences. Some of this perhaps stems from discrimination (e.g., in hiring practices) based on political allegiance. Jonathan Haidt (a social scientist) has spoken out on this topic[0], including specifically on sociology[1]. While that issue likely affects academics in general, political leaning likely has a much smaller influence on one's research in physics and chemistry, compared to one's research in sociology. It's true that Aaronson is not a social scientist, but I don't think that means he is wrong.
[0] http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html
[1] http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/a-conversation-with-...
Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson
#10In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf. Isn't that a massive problem for meta-analyses? If there are 15 studies supporting the consensus/politically-correct position and 5 against it, that might be…
With all due respect to Aaronson (with whom I find myself agreeing on many things), I wouldn't take his evaluation on the state of social science and his analysis of its core problems as correct. He's not a social scientist, and I don't think he'd appreciate an anthropologist evaluating the state of affairs in quantum computing research.
So from now on, do we present our credentials and cvs before commenting to any extent in public? No. The whole point about science is that anyone at all should be able to criticize any piece of work on the basis of the facts.
Let's suppose the criticism is rubbish. All to the good. That will emerge and so will salient criticism, if it exists, that may have escaped the 'credentialized' scientists.
Only my impression of course but reading a few entries in Shtetl-Optimized, I would have thought that Aaronson would certainly appreciate and argue for or against any pertinent comments that some unknown Joe Doe might offer.