121–130 of 187 posts
Psychology as a science has far fewer reliable results than it claimed it did. It's not that the winds have changed. It's that the field was broken. Realizing this is a good thing. It's going to set back careers and reduce funding, though. Next, economics? "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle
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…
Take the stories around Ferguson - I think Alex Tabbarok won the internet the day he released "Ferguson and the Modern Debtor's Prison" but that point of view only appears in other references to the situation sparingly if at all.
I just have to flatly disagree with the idea that better information leads to higher confidence in conclusions - there's simply no way that can be true unless the subject is inherently trivial or unless some methodological advance has made the previously intractable tractable. More information means more uncertainty unless you're dealing in convergent statistical situations.
What's needed overall is for more people to listen with respect and genuine curiosity to people with whom they disagree.
The effect of social media so far has been decidedly uncomfortable, especially in the Middle East. Perhaps that is the Islamic Protestant Reformation, with social media playing the role of printing press, but I doubt it - people who know Islam much better than I claim it's actually riddled with deep apostasy and not the kind that seems overall a positive thing. Ignoring deeply normative Koranic instructions for the application of Islam in favor of violence ( perhaps even war-crime-shaped violence ) cannot be a good thing.
Who is paying for all this bad science? Do they even have a choice in what they are funding? We have so many "industries" now whose function is to exploit the taxpayer. We wouldn't have all this bad science or bad risk taking if there weren't a huge patsy willing to pay for it all without regard to actual results.
Excerpt from post on Robin Hanson's blog covers this well[0]: "In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be ru…
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 blam…
"sunlight all of their data and code in a repository" Good idea where possible, but "all their data" will be problematic in many social science studies, and also in medicine, because of privacy laws.
Why does he keep referring to PNAS as "PPNAS?" It's clearly the former, and I don't know what the latter stands for.
>Meanwhile, the prestigous Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PPNAS) gets into the game
Who is paying for all this bad science? Do they even have a choice in what they are funding? We have so many "industries" now whose function is to exploit the taxpayer. We wouldn't have all this bad science or bad risk taking if there weren't a huge patsy willing to pay for it all without regard to actual results.