Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science being a social activity, I think you have to justify the presumption that we are talking about social trivialities here.
>Science being a social activity Hoo boy. Research might be a social activity, but science is the application of probabilistic reasoning to evidence collection. Science isn't a "social activity" any more than topology is. Any social complications are entirely incidental.
A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
111–120 of 221 posts
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#112Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I made a huge stink about it (and this was just one example of many comments of that type). This was at Penn in 2007.
Not to question you, but I can't find any evidence that Fiske was ever teaching at Penn. Her CV [1] is quite exhaustive, but only lists giving colloquia at Penn. [1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1605966/27061956/14652...
> September 21: The Self (Prentice) > September 28: Social Cognition (Fiske) > October 5: Attitudes (Cooper) > October 19: Social Inference (Pronin) > November 2: Prejudice & Stigma (Shelton) > November 16: Dissonance (Cooper) > November 30: Close Relationships (Fiske) > December 7: Social Influence (Prentice)
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took a class with Susan Fiske in grad school, and the following is a quote from one of her comments on a homework where I had called into question a paper that was clearly not just statistically incorrectly done but was based on urban-legend-level assumptions: "These results are from respected investigators, so it's inappropriate to question them."
Is that verbatim?
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Science being a social activity Hoo boy. Research might be a social activity, but science is the application of probabilistic reasoning to evidence collection. Science isn't a "social activity" any more than topology is. Any social complications are entirely incidental.
Yes, but that probabilistic reasoning is applied by humans with feelings which sometimes get in the way of their reason. Wanting to have those feelings simply go away is unrealistic.
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok. So this is semantics and in this science there is a different meaning for the word "fact." What is the utility of redefining a fact as a human construct of accepted information, rather than as data points corresponding to components of objective reality?
Because you're putting the cart before the horse. Science is building a picture of """objective reality""" from human subjectivity. Data points aren't reality, they have to be interpreted. No matter how you try to do it, at some point you have to accept that a human being is doing science and the way science is done is fundamentally an intersubjective phenomenon. Science isn't reality. Scientific knowledge isn't real…
I think most of us who would disagree with you do so from the assumption that there exists an objective reality, regardless of whether an observer is aware of it at all.
In other words, the general consensus asserts that the universe doesn't care whether you or I know, understand or agree how it works, it works that way regardless.
You, and your science/philosophy, assert that since we cannot determine any reality outside of our observation then said reality does not exist (or is, at least, irrelevant).
I still think this is just semantics, even though both philosophies will continue to assert that their point of view is more correct.
From a practical perspective a person coming from the philosophy of a true objective reality existing and science being the process of finding those facts should be no different from a person advocating your point of view. Both will make errors and will need to correct them. Both will have to overcome dogmatic beliefs that are later proven incorrect.
The objective reality philosopher would claim that reality is correcting her errors whereas the inter-subjective philosopher would claim that new observations from other subjects (observers) are correcting his errors.
Regardless of where they believe the corrections are coming from, they seem to lead to the same science, and the same convergence toward what the data tells us.
(Regarding the P.S. That's a very helpful clarification. The terms seem to confuse the issue rather than illuminate it, in my opinion)
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if they're also rude about it and run it on a huge set of old papers, and do a big PR campaign to get attention. Otherwise, the only thing that happens is papers quietly get better and everyone on all sides is happy.
So they shouldn't run it on the old papers, so as to not offend anyone's sensibilities? Do we just declare said papers completely useless then? Or do they keep getting cited by new papers, and used to guide policy? If the latter, then not vetting them using the newer and better methodology would be unethical.
But, since you brought it up - old papers are already dead, they cannot be fixed. They can only be referenced as prior work, or retracted in extreme cases. We're not talking about extreme cases here.
Statcheck can only help new papers, it cannot help old papers. Running it on old papers was done as a publicity stunt for statcheck, and nothing more. The authors said so.
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to question you, but I can't find any evidence that Fiske was ever teaching at Penn. Her CV [1] is quite exhaustive, but only lists giving colloquia at Penn. [1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1605966/27061956/14652...
She was one of the people giving the Social Psychology prosem in Fall 2005, because John Sabini (who normally gave it) died: > September 21: The Self (Prentice) > September 28: Social Cognition (Fiske) > October 5: Attitudes (Cooper) > October 19: Social Inference (Pronin) > November 2: Prejudice & Stigma (Shelton) > November 16: Dissonance (Cooper) > November 30: Close Relationships (Fiske) > December 7: Social Infl…
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#119> and whether online critiques of past work constitute “bullying” or shaming. The PubPeer comments are just a tiny part of that debate. But it can hit a nerve. > Susan Fiske, a former president of the Association for Psychological Science, alluded to Statcheck in an interview with Business Insider, calling it a “gotcha algorithm.” > The draft of the article said these online critics were engaging in “methodological t…
You are entirely correct (p But apparently we also have Susan Fiske. I think that the real difficulty with psychology is that people care too much. Its a little easier to be objective around the decay of atomic particles than about the intelligence of different genders and races. Additionally, many psychologists are not comfortable with statistics. A large proportion went into psychology to avoid maths, and are somew…
Yup. There are powerful social forces which act to dissuade psychologists from publishing research which opposes to feelings of their peer group. One can't speak an inconvenient truth.
Re: A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, would the feminist science claim that intersubjectivity is the correct view to take? Can it? Or must it be that intersubjectivity is only the view of certain feminists and itself depends on the observer -- to some observer, independent observable facts exists, and to some others, they do not as they are intersubjective? I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science…
Intersubjectivity is a major part of modern psychology. It is a relatively new concept. Its influence grows slowly as more and more people find it usefully applicable to their work. Like most science, actually. Intersubjectivity is not a normative idea or a theory, but more of a point of view. It is a heuristic that says, in order to study a thing, study the subjective experiences of that thing and their relations. O…
>This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking.
I don't think it is any of that -- to me it smells more like a new word for classical philosophical skepticism/relativism. Which is very hard-nosed critical thinking and perniciously difficult to dismiss (see G.E. Moore's 'rejection' of skepticism -- "here is one hand") In fact while you say it is very new, I'd posit that it is very, very old. Thousands of years old. The essence of it from what I understand as you've explained it, minus the unnecessary gendering of the concepts, is taught in undergrad philosophy courses, has been for centuries.
My first point was trying to get at this question: we have two ways to approach science, the traditional approach where we choose to believe facts are objective and try to behave that way, and the "intersubjective" one. But which one should we take? What is the right framework to even make such a decision? Even if you simply assume the goal is predictive power, do we assume there is an objective assessment of predictive power that we try to get at, or that these predictions are inherently intersubjective and can't be compared so that no determination can be made?
And sure gender politics exist. But not everything is always about gender. I think what people reject is not considering gender politics at all, but for example trying to make science about gender. The relativist/skeptical position does not need to be feminine more than the realist position must be masculine. There are social gender structures that lay the burden of expectation on members in society, yes, but they do not completely pervade and define every moment of every thought of every person -- there are some instances in which we are human first and gendered second. And most I would suggest, believe (specifically hard) science is one of those instances. Or we should treat it that way. The entire purpose of mathematics is that there is no "female mathematics" and "male mathematics".
To that point, I would really be interested in hearing a little more about how intersubjectivity plays out in the mathematics research community.
This is what skeptical-about-gender-politics is about. Not rejecting gender politics themselves, but rejecting turning every discussion about anything into a discussion about gender. Which often quickly evolves into an attack on men (abusive, 'privilege', implying the work men do means less because of their advantage, etc). Where everything bad is the fault of "the patriarchy" (read: men). Which is tiresome. And not at all what you have done.
And as to your request,
>And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years.
>I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox.
I would say that you should embrace intersubjectivity in your own position and understand that your posts cannot be objective, they are observed and interpreted by many others, so what matters is not what you say, rather, how it is observed by your audience. If you want it to be a strong argument /to HN/ you should take some steps to avoid throwing up red flags that HN readers are used to using to dismiss arguments out of hand as a tribal attack (this is what I meant by "incendiary" -- I was not incensed by it but the 'men are dumb but women are smart' trope is familiar because it is as ubiquitous as it is uninteresting. Your position is not this at all, but it superficially contains some of the same characteristics).
Again thanks for your thoughtful response, I enjoyed it a great deal.