Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 150 posts

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#61

Post by rukuu001 »

ryanobjc wrote: post #56
danso wrote: post #9

Andrew Gelman (of NYU), who is featured in the story and is criticized by Cuddy as being unfair and trollish, wrote a response: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/18/beyond-power-pose-using-r... I thought that Gelman wasn't presented in the best of light, especially his awkward quotes about not wanting to engage in "interpersonal conflict". But he called the piece "excellent and fair to all sides" and was pretty graciou…

Sexism is more than "safer to talk shit to a woman compared to a man" as you say in your article. Sexism comes out in target choice, and the strength of which ones chases their prey, and the vehemence of attacks. I do strongly believe that Cuddy was overly punished for being a woman, and being prominent in the field. Everyone loves when the "high and might" come "crashing down" -> the underdog stories and the desire…

> I do strongly believe that Cuddy was overly punished for being a woman, and being prominent in the field.

Theres a pattern of successful women receiving extreme levels of hate (Kathy Sierra et al). I'm not aware of this happening to guys.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#62

Post by Bartweiss »

danso wrote: post #9

Andrew Gelman (of NYU), who is featured in the story and is criticized by Cuddy as being unfair and trollish, wrote a response: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/18/beyond-power-pose-using-r... I thought that Gelman wasn't presented in the best of light, especially his awkward quotes about not wanting to engage in "interpersonal conflict". But he called the piece "excellent and fair to all sides" and was pretty graciou…

> I also can believe that she faces hostile criticism that isn't equally distributed among all the other researchers who used weak, but previously acceptable standards.

I agree that this is true, but at a certain point it seems like a justified reaction to unequal importance.

Other Gelman targets like the "himmicanes" paper generated a bit of media attention without any real consequence. Power poses, meanwhile, have become a major pop-science hit. They're still being widely read and promoted, even by tech conferences and news orgs like the BBC. And Cuddy in particular has chosen an aggressive non-scientific promotion campaign while her co-authors have made more honest attempts to take on the replication question - if Carvey was getting the same amount of flak I'd be more concerned that something unfair was happening.

If power poses don't work, it seems like a much worse indictment of academic social psych than most other failures to replicate - the results were widely touted and are still being raised to public acceptance even as they fall apart. The challenges to stereotype threat, priming, and the IAT are even scarier - those results have become well-established and even enshrined in law.

Throughout the replication crisis, my greatest frustration has been the inconsistent narrative coming from researchers. They're simultaneously demanding formal academic critiques instead of blogs, ignoring those critiques when they do exist, and then replying with the same sort of informal aggression they decried in the first place.

I think you're exactly right that Gelman's aggressive approach is motivated by the field's unwillingness to acknowledge anything milder. And seeing responses like Fiske, Cuddy, and Wansink have largely convinced me that there's a major double-standard at work between the level of seriousness applied when attacking critics and the level applied when presenting results as academic truth.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#63

Post by srtjstjsj »

lovich wrote: post #11
throwawayjava wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mischaracterize. Fiske is not criticizing "people who pointed out statistical errors" and begins the entire essay by explicitly stating as such: "Our field has always encourages -- required, really -- peer critiques"! She is criticizing "unfiltered trash-talk [on social media]... [and] online vigilantes [who] are attacking individuals, their research programs, and their careers". It's the same tension the article…

Is that not the case anyway? I admit I have no experience contributing but that's from hearing things like how the linux development team runs and people like Sarah Sharp quitting over the abuse. It's given me the impression that if I don't create something that is up to a teams standard from commit 0 then I will be ridiculed in a public forum

Before deciding that Linux (the most successful open source projecting history?) is poorly run. you have to weigh people quitting over the abuse against all the other contributors and maintainers building something that relies in part on that abuse.

> It's given me the impression that if I don't create something that is up to a teams standard from commit 0

Linus has said that he reserves his abuse for senior people who should know better. It's his antidote to a complacent overclass that mistreats the kernel development process.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#64

Post by throwawayjava »

conistonwater wrote: post #58
throwawayjava wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I re-read the comment, and disagree. The preceding sentence is: Fiske controls the venue and is (mis-)using the "scientific venue" to denounce her critics I'm having trouble finding a charitable way to read the claim that someone is misusing a scientific venue. And much more to the point, I doubt even more that the subject of those sentences (or the e.g. tenure/promotion committee of that subject) could be reasonably…

Think "corrupted file", not "corrupt official". The key difference is that there is a primary purpose for their existence (a file stores data, a scientific process produces good and reliable findings), and something can be corrupted (no longer suitable for its purpose) without malice involved. To call an official corrupted, you need to allege malice, to say that a file is corrupted, you only need to show that it's no…

edit: My defense of my reading isn't necessary; just see OP's sibling post. I interpreted their post correctly.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#65

Post by tunesmith »

yawaramin wrote: post #29
09bjb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One note; in general, I think we tend to diminish finding when we find out that the placebo effect is partly behind them. Wrongly, in my opinion. Better reactions might be, "Wow, we take this action and our bodies/brains take care of the rest of the effect through some placebo magic? That's amazing!!"

That's a great point. No one should be able to argue with Dr Cuddy if she decides to make her living pushing this 'placebo-trigger' technique.

But doesn't pointing out a placebo effect also have power? I know the placebo effect still exists even if you're aware of it being placebo, but does it lessen? And what if it's accompanied by shaming?

Meaning, say the power pose effect doesn't exist. But early on, it's exciting and new, and there's a placebo effect (which is fine!), but people also think it's real.

But then studies get replicated, and there's well-known doubt on whether the effect is real in a non-placebo manner. There might still be a placebo effect, but does it shrink?

And then there's a lot of controversy and the study is dragged through the mud, and power poses are mocked. Might the placebo effect be lessened even further (or obliterated) from this?

Could this be true even if it was originally valid and not just placebo?

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#66

Post by mattmcknight »

throwawayjava wrote: post #31
mattmcknight wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Confining scientific critique to scientific venues" Fiske controls the venue and is (mis-)using the "scientific venue" to denounce her critics. She is the one refusing to publish the very critiques you describe. The "scientific venue" has been corrupted. The well has not been "poisoned" for further inquiry, rather the necessity of replication and sensitivity to statistical errors has increased. Science was being don…

> The "scientific venue" has been corrupted That's a pretty strong accusation. Do you have any evidence? Cuddy herself, in the linked article, even asks: "Why not come to a conference or hold a seminar?" I don't think you're wrong about the lack of quality reviewing, but I also think that blogs and Facebook and articles in pop sci news venues are pretty shitty places to address the quality of editorial review. And yo…

"That's a pretty strong accusation. Do you have any evidence?"

Fiske is the journal editor. Fiske is allowing articles with weak stats to get published. Fiske is publishing her defense in that journal. Fiske is not publishing critical articles in that journal. That's corruption based on her position of authority.

Cuddy just had sloppy stats and her results failed to replicate. Notice how you deceptively switch to Cuddy from Fiske in your response, because you have no point about Fiske.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#67

Post by mattmcknight »

throwawayjava wrote: post #52
conistonwater wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're using a different sense of the word "corrupt" from the one in the post you're replying to ("The "scientific venue" has been corrupted."). I know it's easy to lose nuance in internet discussions, but please read the posts above more carefully/charitably. Nothing Cuddy did was corrupt in any sense, only poor science.

I re-read the comment, and disagree. The preceding sentence is: Fiske controls the venue and is (mis-)using the "scientific venue" to denounce her critics I'm having trouble finding a charitable way to read the claim that someone is misusing a scientific venue. And much more to the point, I doubt even more that the subject of those sentences (or the e.g. tenure/promotion committee of that subject) could be reasonably…

How's this- Fiske publishes a letter critical of Gelman, with no peer review of said letter, in her journal. She then claims her letter is "science" because it is in a scientific journal, while his self-published piece is "methodological terrorism."

In a sense, both pieces are self-published, and she is using the mantle of Science to falsely claim that her self-publishing is superior because of the authority of her position as editor. This is corruption. This is misusing the scientific venue.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#68

Post by matt_morgan »

throwawayjava wrote: post #32
hirundo wrote: post #17

Cheers for scientific revolutions being gentler than political ones. Cuddy lost her reputation rather than her head. But losing a reputation hurts more, or at least longer. More civility could have helped, but there's no painless way to lose status. The scandal is that Cuddy's work met the standard of the bulk of published social science until lately. She studied the same phlogiston with the same tools as her colleag…

The tragedy of the ordeal is that she tried and was lined up against the wall regardless, mostly due to lack of civility and poor communication: > But the email that Simmons and Simonsohn had sent was, in fact, ambiguous: They had explicitly told her to drop the P-curve and yet left the impression that the paper was otherwise sound. At my request, Simmons looked back at his original email. I watched as he read it ove…

This is really the key point of the article (or maybe one of two, the other being Cuddy's unwillingness to accept change in favor of continuing to survive on her unsupported results); and the overall message is that we all do dumb things, directed toward our own benefit, under pressure. (E.g. Carney saying there's no ninth planet, when in fact they only did not show there is a ninth planet). Gelman is actually the only primary player in the piece who mostly escapes this; he does some nerdy things but in no case says something other than what he means, or actively deceives (as Simmons appears to have done here) or self-deceives (Cuddy).

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#69

Post by srtjstjsj »

lliamander wrote: post #21
throwawayjava wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abuse from your own insular community re: a particular project is one thing; public abuse published in some of the most popular print media on the planet resulting in lost jobs/lost job opporunities is quite another.

I certainly have a fair degree of sympathy for Cuddy's losses, but should she have been given the accolades (TED talk, tenure track at Harvard, etc.) in the first place? Her work was interesting no doubt, and in our scientific age we have always celebrated the novelty and originality of the scientific geniuses that have advanced our understanding. But the real value of science has always been novelty plus certainty .…

(note: Havard _Business_ School, not any of the Harvard schools of sciences)

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#70

Post by gt_ »

rukuu001 wrote: post #61
ryanobjc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexism is more than "safer to talk shit to a woman compared to a man" as you say in your article. Sexism comes out in target choice, and the strength of which ones chases their prey, and the vehemence of attacks. I do strongly believe that Cuddy was overly punished for being a woman, and being prominent in the field. Everyone loves when the "high and might" come "crashing down" -> the underdog stories and the desire…

> I do strongly believe that Cuddy was overly punished for being a woman, and being prominent in the field. Theres a pattern of successful women receiving extreme levels of hate (Kathy Sierra et al). I'm not aware of this happening to guys.

>I'm not aware of this happening to guys.

Can you be more specific? Or do you mean this in a general sense? Because isn't this obvious ignorance if so?

Post reply on HN