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When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

nytimes.com

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Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#71

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#72

Post by projektir »

dwaltrip wrote: post #45
skybrian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stakes matter. A million dollar poker game might be structurally identical to a game played for fun, but its effects on the people involved are very different. We wouldn't expect the players in these two games to think the same way. Talking about the stakes is in direct conflict with the scientific ideal of focusing on the science without talking about its effects on the scientists involved. For example, from Gelman'…

Perhaps we should be teaching scientists that staking their identities on particular results is to be resisted as much as possible. Science is about finding approximations of truth that are least influenced by the local context. The whims of a particular scientist's ego (especially if you are that scientist!) make for a rather nasty contextual influence. Of course, this is a difficult ask, but constantly striving tow…

> Perhaps we should be teaching scientists that staking their identities on particular results is to be resisted as much as possible.

But does this make sense? Can a scientist survive without doing this? Can a scientist get very far without results right now?

Is this a problem of the scientist, or perhaps the social/economic expectation?

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#73

Post by dingbat »

breitling wrote: post #10

Wasn't this study thoroughly debunked already? The co-author of this study, Dana Carney, distanced herself from this study [1]. She doesn't believe all the claims the study made were true. [1] http://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-autho...

the article discusses that in detail, but the article is not really about the merits, or lack thereof, of that study, its about something else.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#74

Post by lliamander »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #69
lliamander wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

good point. I missed that at first.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#75

Post by dingbat »

q123321 wrote: post #2

The most important sentence of the article, which appears at the end: "Although 11 new papers have recently been published that do not show the downstream effects of power posing on behaviors, Cuddy is still fighting for power posing." This is an astonishing number of replications to be published on one topic in psychology. 2-3x the next highest number I heave heard of. The placement of that sentence, plus the flatte…

would note that near the end of the article its noted that Cuddy has conceded that the specific cortisol effects touted have not been borne out.

she is "still fighting" for power posing but only as a useful technique which sometimes works for some people in some cases, as even the replicated studies seem to show improvements in subjective measures of "confidence", whatever that means.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#76

Post by asdf2341 »

skybrian wrote: post #38
q123321 wrote: post #2

The most important sentence of the article, which appears at the end: "Although 11 new papers have recently been published that do not show the downstream effects of power posing on behaviors, Cuddy is still fighting for power posing." This is an astonishing number of replications to be published on one topic in psychology. 2-3x the next highest number I heave heard of. The placement of that sentence, plus the flatte…

Are studies of "downstream effects" considered to be replications? It sounds like they are something different.

Yes they are considered to be replications.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#77

Post by dwaltrip »

projektir wrote: post #72
dwaltrip wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should be teaching scientists that staking their identities on particular results is to be resisted as much as possible. Science is about finding approximations of truth that are least influenced by the local context. The whims of a particular scientist's ego (especially if you are that scientist!) make for a rather nasty contextual influence. Of course, this is a difficult ask, but constantly striving tow…

> Perhaps we should be teaching scientists that staking their identities on particular results is to be resisted as much as possible. But does this make sense? Can a scientist survive without doing this? Can a scientist get very far without results right now? Is this a problem of the scientist, or perhaps the social/economic expectation?

I think this is an institution level failure to adapt to what science is like in the modern age.

New results are significantly more difficult and expensive to achieve in modern science, as the easier stuff has already been conquered in centuries and decades past.

The harder problems that science now works on means that distinguishing between actual results and incorrect conclusions is also much more difficult.

The growth of science as a percentage of the population and economy has also finally slowed down a few decades ago, after centuries of rocket-like growth. It is now a maturing enterprise, instead of a high-growth startup.

This means increased competition for resources and mindshare from those wanting to do science. Not surprisingly, all proxy measures and heuristics for evaluating scientific success are thus more likely to be abused.

I don't think we have fully adapted to these fundamental changes.

Disclaimer: I'm not a historian or researcher, but I've heard aspects of the above from a variety of sources, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#78

Post by dingbat »

has anyone gone down the list of most popular TED Talks and run similar replications of the claims made in other presentations? itd be interesting if there were some ratio that scored most-popular TED Talk vs. "B.S." content. i wonder if there'd be a link between popularity and amount of B.S.?

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#79

Post by asdf2341 »

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 in an adjacent academic field and know some of the principals in the story.

Based on private conversations with mutual friends, the reason Cuddy received so much heat is that she continues to profit off the mistaken findings and refuses to disavow them, despite overwhelming evidence.

She embodies everything wrong with the popular discussion of science.

The only analogue I can think of is Brian Wansink, whose scandal is much newer; who did not go nearly so far to profit from his own results; and who has received plenty of heat so far.

"Although 11 new papers have recently been published that do not show the downstream effects of power posing on behaviors, Cuddy is still fighting for power posing."

Re: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

#80

Post by VLM »

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…

Perhaps the meta lesson is we massively overproduce academics, making the stakes and competition insane.

In the cutthroat world of academic soft sciences you're not getting tenure unless you make a breakthru and you're allowed zero mistakes. Its up or out. She made her one mistake, and she's out. And there's 10, 50, 5000 people equally qualified without opportunity to cheer on her demise. One of hundreds or thousands of equally qualified researchers now gets a chance at tenure, good for them bad for her.

On the other hand in the commercial software development world, we usually don't blacklist software devs from the field after their first bug because 1) we're low on supplies of software devs plus or minus propaganda, at least we don't have the excess of her field 2) the experience of having a software bug makes a better dev.

You can't expect non-pathological behavior from a pathological situation. Until the supply/demand hiring issues in academia are fixed, stories about academia are going to read like an insane elementary school playground version of Lord of the Flies. You can't produce 10 to 100 times as much product (new grads) as the market can adsorb without behavior for the few good positions being viciously cutthroat and extremely dramatic.

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