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What has happened down here is the winds have changed

andrewgelman.com

51–60 of 187 posts

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

#51

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck

A pithy quote, but it does not have to be. There is no reason or law that prevents us from acknowledging our failures in the past and updating our beliefs to the corrected findings of the present. Death is just the minimum bar, the floor, for progress, not the ceiling.

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

#52
post #27

Oh, free speech and criticism is okay as long as it's moderated and appropriate... Well played. The work of psychology researchers influences our LAWS. They influence how I can live my life. It's a very personal thing. I will criticise them however I want and as much as I want until this branch of 'science' has cleaned up its conduct. If your work cannot withstand criticism, it's worthless. Get out of science, Susan…

While I am sympathetic to people concerned with the amount of scientific trash talk online, I have to agree with the basic thesis:

Evidence-based policy is important. The alternative is gut-feel based populist wingnuttery.

To stand against Trumpism, evidence-based policy needs to be above reproach. The correct way to be above reproach is to be flawless, not to silence informed criticism.

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

#53
post #20

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 collec…

That is a TL; DR of an article to which this article is a rebuttal to. Your TL; DR thus omits literally the entire content of what the author has written. Please read the article through before you make a TL; DR. It's well worth the read in any case.

This is a digression, but maybe one day someone will satisfactorily explain to me why the lovely and understandable term "summary" was replaced by the ugly and unpronounceable term "TL;DR"

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

#54
I was a big fan of "Thinking fast, thinking slow", like pretty much everyone, until the replication crisis came along. Now I see a lot of the work in this field as a sort of scientifically informed stereotyping that might someday end up on par with phrenology, but it's still fun to read and consider as if it were true. It's really awful how pseudo-science can get so far though.

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

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well this comment isn't really helpful too. I would claim it is: My only reason to make it was to prevent people from going away with that TL;DR. I don't want to make one myself, because why not just click on the link and read the article ? The comment is not a summary of that article at all , that is all. This is a complex subject and details matter very much. I don't think it is healthy to have people get only a…

> TL;DR. I don't want to make one myself, because why not just click on the link and read the article? There's an essentially infinite amount of information out there on the internet, and people have a finite amount of free time; thus, many of us try to glean the thesis of an article before committing an hour to reading it -- particularly slow readers and non-native English speakers. Especially in articles like this…

No, the post you replied to opposes incorrect TLDRs. Not TLDRs in general.

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

#56
post #55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TL;DR. I don't want to make one myself, because why not just click on the link and read the article? There's an essentially infinite amount of information out there on the internet, and people have a finite amount of free time; thus, many of us try to glean the thesis of an article before committing an hour to reading it -- particularly slow readers and non-native English speakers. Especially in articles like this…

No, the post you replied to opposes incorrect TLDRs. Not TLDRs in general.

Reread the part I quoted.

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

#57

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…

From Wikipedia: "Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, the continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory."

"Recently, Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. This emerging field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception. Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, intergroup hostility, and impression formation."

Neural systems.

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

#59
Good scientists should welcome this challenge with open arms, sunlight all of their data and code in a repository, and show how proper statistically rigorous research is conducted. That's an elevator right to the top of the field.

If I wrote code that messed up, I'd patch it. If someone else points out a bug? Even better, now I don't have to find it myself. But I would definitely not feel attacked or nor would I blame the QA engineer. It's my mistake, and so I must own it. These researchers need to do the same.

I believe full publication of code and data should be required for peer-reviewed research. If I can't look at your raw data or your algorithm, it is simply not possible to determine whether the study is correct. The social sciences must adapt to more statistically rigorous methods.

After all, the only two choices are adaptation or extinction.

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

#60
Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory: "The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser) Such an indictment that this "science" can debate these topics with a straight face.

As Feynman said: "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

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