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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

#101

Post by nickff »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #100
nickff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not one of convenience, the problem is that you are depriving yourself of huge amounts of valuable (closed) data, and this may cause large gaps in what is researchable.

This was the point. You have to pay the price for the principles and hope that the tide turns one day. If you take your suggested easy route then this day may never come.

My point is that there are large fields where we may not get access to open source data in the foreseeable future; in the meantime, we are depriving ourselves of potentially useful or valuable knowledge. Imagine if you could reduce the number of traffic deaths by analyzing a closed data set from Lyft or Uber; is this worth doing, or should we just tell the PhD candidate not to bother?

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

#102

Post by wyager »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #96
wyager wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are falling for a classic argumentative attack. Everyone agrees "abuse" (e.g. beating your wife) is bad, so Fisk just redefines "abuse" to mean "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" but you keep on using the connotations of the real definition.

Where can I find the redefinition?

In Fisk's statement. Unless she is actually referring to wife beating or something similar, which would be very confusing in context.

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

#103

Post by whyever »

mikeklaas wrote: post #93
botexpert wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it turn out that research in the book is flawed or not reproducible?

Yes, some of the studies haven't been reproducible. I don't have references right now, unfortunately.

Here is one: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/StrackRRR_manuscrip...

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

#104

Post by Kenji »

ktRolster wrote: post #66
Pxtl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the counter-argument to evidence-based policy: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459.long The point being that not everything we know as true shows up in a study.

Yeah, and this extends even to the purest studies of nature, like mathematics, as we know from Gödel's incompleteness theorems. It's just that e.g. whether or not the Rieman Hypothesis is true doesn't influence whether the state cracks down on a certain demographic.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

sbwm wrote: post #62

> 2011: Daryl Bem publishes his article, “Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect,” in a top journal in psychology. Not too many people thought Bem had discovered ESP but there was a general impression that his work was basically solid, and thus this was presented as a concern for pscyhology research. > In retrospect, Bem’s paper had huge, obvious multipl…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by Kalium »

hackuser wrote: post #72

> In short, Fiske doesn’t like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. This doesn't at all match Fiske's article. As people on HN know very well, there's a difference between, on one hand, serious, constructive criticism; and on the other, the trolling, abuse, and just endless barrage of nonsense that buries any signal in noise, all of which is common online. It's clear Fiske…

> Maybe we found one of the trolls.

Is there anything in this article that you could point to as trolling? Personal attacks? Abusive language?

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #47
Kenji wrote: 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…

> The work of psychology researchers influences our LAWS. They influence how I can live my life. It's a very personal thing. While I agree with the above sentiment: > If your work cannot withstand criticism, it's worthless. Get out of science, Susan T. Fiske, you give it a bad name. I think the tone is very much incorrect. While researchers should be responsible for bad science, you may it sound like it was necessari…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by mwfunk »

wyager wrote: post #92
hackuser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why rapid feedback is bad She doesn't say rapid feedback is bad. She says online personal attacks and abuse are bad.

You are falling for a classic argumentative attack. Everyone agrees "abuse" (e.g. beating your wife) is bad, so Fisk just redefines "abuse" to mean "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" but you keep on using the connotations of the real definition.

What about "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" that is useless, uninformed, and counterproductive to researchers? I was under the impression that that was the concern here.

Just because someone says something non-sugar-coated doesn't mean it has any truth or value to it. In my experience, a lot of the people who publicly congratulate themselves on never pulling any punches and telling it like it is and keeping it real, etc., aren't motivated because they feel like they have valuable feedback to offer (they usually don't), but rather it's just a way to act out and maintain a tough-guy public persona that they want everyone to believe in.

I'm 100% in favor of public peer review, I just question the value of stereotypical Linus Torvalds-style "I'm just telling it like it is, you idiot" feedback that some people fetishize in these parts. The best course of action here is by definition whatever leads to more and better research, with whatever the appropriate amount of public and private peer review is that leads to that outcome.

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

#109

Post by nonbel »

s_q_b wrote: post #43
mafribe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only an incredibly insular community Or a community that has had previous success with adversarial labelling.

Ahh.. I forgot which field with which we're dealing. However, I do like the ring of it. Instead of Data Scientist, I think my new title will be Senior Methodological Terrorist.

What about this resume/cv:

  Junior Open Data Vexationer(2008-2010)
  Associate Shameless Little Replication Bully (2010-2012)
  Lead Methodological Harasser  (2012-2015)
  Senior Methodological Terrorist (2015-2016)
  Chief Research Parasite (2016-Current)
All those terms have really been used to label people trying to get psych and medical research up to pretty minimal scientific standards. It is really telling about the kind of immature high school mentality that pervades those fields.

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

#110

Post by apatters »

The phenomenon described here is one of many side effects of what I think is the greatest disturbance in the zeitgeist since at least 9/11: the disintermediation of information itself.

We live in an era where authorities of all kinds are under greater scrutiny than ever before, because the Internet's made it so much easier for everyone to learn about and discuss what they're doing. And to believe that we know better than them. The mass media gatekeepers who once shaped public opinion are still present but have a fraction of the influence they had in the 20th century.

Nassim Taleb discussed this recently from a more political angle: https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...

But it is really the same thing. From the post-Snowden privacy movement to Brexit to the Trump campaign to "the destructo-critics" referred to in this article, all of these things are a product of people becoming more informed about what authorities are really doing, getting pissed off about it, and taking action.

You can make your own value judgments about whether all of these things are good or bad (we surely know what the predominant opinions will be among HN's audience of left wing tech people: pro-Snowden, anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, pro destructo-critics). But I think the overall trend is good. And intensely destabilizing to society, in no small part because even as we approach this information equality, wealth inequality is soaring.

I think one important thing to understand about this trend is that _numbers win_ -- you can be right but if a large enough part of the population disagrees with you, you're going to be on the defensive anyway.

Another thing is that while people are rapidly becoming better informed, they're becoming more confident in their opinions even faster. So again we are not necessarily always going to see better decisions being made -- but they are going to be made with more public input.

I know that might sound a little crazy when we seemingly hear about a new secret conspiracy or abuse of power every day, but that's the point: _this stuff was always going on and we just didn't know._

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