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An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

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Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#41

Post by TimTheTinker »

dukoid wrote: post #13
neaden wrote: post #2

"The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American." And how many of these will cover the retraction? A dozen at most? And all those articles will be sitting out there, getting cited and read on occasion.

I think there is no need to be concerned that the retraction won't be widely covered in the long run in this particular case though -- all the religious interest groups will make a big fuss about this...

That's almost like saying it's OK to falsely report about religion in the first place because "the religious interest groups will defend themselves adequately", etc.

False reporting of any sort (including the failure to correct prior false reports, whether intended or not) always causes harm. Truth and principles matter.

Furthermore, reducing ideas to power struggles between those who speak them is to commit both the genetic fallacy and the ad-hominem fallacy.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#42

Post by mbell »

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, and one where I can't. The later just amounts to 'our best guess' where the accuracy is entirely unknown. If we want the general populous to 'trust science', we need to stop calling the later science. In short, if you can't repeat and predict, stop calling it science.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#44

Post by tempguy9999 »

lmkg wrote: post #24
shriphani wrote: post #10

From the article: Although Decety’s paper had reported that they had controlled for country, they had accidentally not controlled for each country, but just treated it as a single continuous variable so that, for example “Canada” (coded as 2) was twice the “United States” (coded as 1). I mean I don't even understand how this seemed like a normal thing to do?

The variable for Country should have been treated as a categorical variable, but was instead processed as a numeric variable. This mistake would be downright trivial to make in R. Just declare that Country is a Factor (which is the built-in type for categorical variables), and then throw the data into a library whose attitude towards errors is to coerce everything to numbers until the warnings go away. Background: Fa…

Right then...

...strong typing: for or against?

(To be fair even strong typing won't save you if you don't use it. But fuuuuuk, what an error. I noted that paper mentally and would have quoted from it)

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#45

Post by realradicalwash »

so a categorical variable got mixed up as a numerical one and produced misleading results.

to the credit of the authors, they released their data sets. -- however, i suspect that proper data exploration and visualisation would have prevented all this. visual inspection would have most likely revealed that there is no visible effect, or even an effect in the opposite direction, and once you see this, all alarm bells should go off if your model predicts otherwise. so i suspect that the authors skipped some basic steps and got carried away by results that promised a nice headline.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#46

Post by jedberg »

crooked-v wrote: post #36
_edo wrote: post #34

Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident. On topic, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764 It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the…

Non-US postal codes often include letters and spaces, and some areas don't use postal codes at all.

All US postal codes have an optional - (hyphen) in them as well, and so you should always encode them as strings anyway.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#47

Post by tastygreenapple »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #32
rahidz wrote: post #17

"But when they included their categorically-coded country (1 = US, 2 = Canada, and so on) in their models, it was entered not as fixed effects, with dummy variables for all of the countries except one, but as a continuous measure. This treats the variable as a measure of ‘country-ness’ (for example, Canada is twice as much a country as the US) instead of providing the fixed effects they explicitly intended" How did t…

I don't think it's quite as obvious of an error as you are suggesting. They were trying to correct for scenarios like this: Hypothetically, Canadians are twice as generous as Americans and twice as religious, but religious Canadians are equally generous as non-religious Canadians and religious Americans are equally generous as non-religious Americans. On the surface, it appears that religious people are more generous…

I'm a data scientist and this is an incredibly embarrassing 'n00b' error to make. If these researchers were using anything other than deep learning, it's almost certain that each parameter of the model was manually selected. That the author made the mistake is bad, that no one caught the error is a disaster.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#48

Post by rossdavidh »

realradicalwash wrote: post #45

so a categorical variable got mixed up as a numerical one and produced misleading results. to the credit of the authors, they released their data sets. -- however, i suspect that proper data exploration and visualisation would have prevented all this. visual inspection would have most likely revealed that there is no visible effect, or even an effect in the opposite direction, and once you see this, all alarm bells s…

Agreed. However, another factor may be that, we tend to scrutinize more closely results that don't line up with what we expected. In fact, in this case it was another researcher who had gotten results that pointed in the opposite direction, who convinced the original researcher to release their data (which, to their credit, they did).

Which, is one reason why having higher and higher percentages of academia and science researchers be from the same part of the political spectrum, is worrisome to me. If you have more diversity in ideology, there is more likely to be someone in each field to have the instinct to scrutinize closely a result which, when scrutinized, won't hold up.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#49

Post by Scapeghost »

I am from a third-world religious country and I'd just like to take this chance to say that religion should be classified as a mental disorder.

I see the effects of it first hand, severely crippling the potential of individuals and entire cultures. There's nothing it offers that can't be taught by basic morals which don't require you to appease an imaginary entity or repress the human spirit.

Even the leaders of religious countries know it's bullshit (see the UAE, where there are "No Displays of Affection" signs in upscale shopping malls but the streets are littered with cards advertising phone numbers for prostitution services), but maintain it as a convenient form of manipulation.

If a handful of Dungeons & Dragons players got together and started dedicating all their actions to the Drow goddess Lolth they would be called loonies, but when millions of people worship an imaginary entity for centuries and erect monuments to it and start wars in its name, apparently that's something that should be respected.

This is scary to even talk about. Not only would criticizing religion be frowned upon by first-worlders who seem to have a fetish for "exotic" cultures they have never lived in, it would put the critic at risk of physical harm in their own community.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#50

Post by ars »

_edo wrote: post #34

Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident. On topic, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764 It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the…

> If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error.

One interesting thing you can do though, is sort by zipcode. This sorts your mail from East to West in the US. You can use that as a rough estimate of shipping time.

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