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What has happened down here is the winds have changed

andrewgelman.com

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Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#11

Post by lifty »

threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

I think Fiske met that constructive criticism with negative hyperbole and vague counter arguments that were not on point. People protect their vested interests and status quo by praying on people's decency and politeness, but ignore the fundamental facts in the criticism brought against them, and that leads to a proportional negative reaction from the other side. This situation reminds me of the Eastern European political systems where failure to recognise and deal with basic problems like fairness, corruption, nepotism, etc leads to a progressive degradation of trust that in turn leads to more violent/drastic changes, with total disregard for decency. So, if you want to be treated decently, than you'd better act decently as well, and not only superficially.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#12

Post by skybrian »

threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

I think the idea isn't to listen to everyone on the Internet but to take seriously the conversations scientists have on their blogs and social media accounts.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#13

Post by Noseshine »

threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

Your comment seems to me to go off into a completely different direction, one far away from saying anything concrete about actual research and going towards a very fuzzy general direction. This is completely different from the article, which has a lot of very concrete points about a concrete subject. I see a big mismatch between the article you criticize and how you do it. "Strawman" comes to mind too, most of your comment is about things that you yourself introduce into the debate.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#14

Post by mafribe »

barry-cotter wrote: post #9

Reading Susan Fiske's Wikipedia article makes this even more depressing. But please resist the urge to write off all of psychology, or even all of social psychology. Psychophysics and psychometrics both replicate very, very well, and they're not the only areas of psychology to do so. This is true even if you file biological psychology and neuroscience somewhere other than psychology. And social psychology makes socio…

Fiske's Wikipedia article reads like PR material. It should be edited to be more somber, and reflect the extant criticisms of her research performance. I suspect that that would lead to an edit war though.

   Psychophysics and psychometrics
   both replicate very, very well,
It might be good if researchers in those sub-fields lead the drive of improving psychology's research methodology.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#15

Post by scandox »

threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gelman

He is not some random commentator.

Sadly, experts are being vilified because the perception of their accuracy has been damaged and expectations about the certainty of results have been poorly managed.

Blind respect got us where we are. Now we have to find a different way.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#17

Post by mafribe »

lifty wrote: post #11
threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

I think Fiske met that constructive criticism with negative hyperbole and vague counter arguments that were not on point. People protect their vested interests and status quo by praying on people's decency and politeness, but ignore the fundamental facts in the criticism brought against them, and that leads to a proportional negative reaction from the other side. This situation reminds me of the Eastern European poli…

   reminds me of the Eastern 
   European
That's interesting, but maybe not so surprising, because the techniques that people like Fiske use stem (at least in parts) from the communist tradition of undermining and taking over institutions (e.g. Trotsky's entryism).

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#18

Post by bobcostas55 »

threeseed wrote: post #3

Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives. Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are pe…

When <50% of results in a particular field can be replicated, should you trust the experts of that field?

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#19

Post by SonOfLilit »

Houshalter wrote: post #16

I love this essay. Also relevant, the Control Group is out of Control : http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

Oh yes. This should be required reading.

I have a long-term bet with a friend on the truth behind Wiseman & Schlitz (I think I bet 1 dollar on "beyond known science" to his 50 on "methodological error", but maybe the odds were different, and the amounts were definitely more. Maybe we will try to reproduce it at home, because otherwise who knows if it will be resolved at all in our lifetime.)

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#20

Post by ptero »

TL; DR: uncurated social media is used to critisize scientific peer-reviewed publications in psychology. This hurts scientists (peer reputation / society reputation?).

IMO this is not specific to psychology: climate change, biology, computer science, physics, etc. research is exposed to the same phenomena. The hotter the topic, the bigger the flames get.

However, if publication is clear about methodology, data collection and conclusions those flames do not hurt -- the published work stands on its own and anyone can go back to it as a sanity check on whether accusations have merit. If I disagree on methodology I will not think worse about the author. However, if I suspect he manipulated the data I will; and real quick.

Being clear on what was done is, IMO, a practically foolproof way of protecting your reputation. Researchers unnecessarily making publications readable to only a tiny minority of field experts (sometimes hoping to minimize criticism -- "I just need this published; and 3 more for a postdoc") or being vague about how they collected data shoot themselves in the foot. And this, IMO, is a major source of self inflicted wounds that are most frequent in the fuzzier fields like psychology.

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