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An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

psychologytoday.com

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Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#61

Post by LorenPechtel »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #44
lmkg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yup, I'm all for extremely strong typing. In 40 years of writing code I can't say I've ever had any real trouble with strong typing other than when dealing with libraries that reinvent wheels. Weak typing, though--nuke it from orbit.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#62

Post by mwfunk »

mbell wrote: post #42

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, an…

For me personally, situations like this make me trust science that much more. If someone finds that a previously published paper contained errors, as any human work is likely to, and the response is to go back and correct those errors or publicize whatever was wrong with the research, well that's science working as intended. That's freaking awesome.

What I get really, really, really frustrated with is the attitude that some people have where retractions of stories or articles makes them trust the source less, rather than more. If a journal publishes a retraction, I have that much more faith in that journal, and that much more faith in the scientific process in general.

Similarly: news outlets retracting stories or issuing corrections makes me trust those outlets that much more, because it shows that they care about making a best effort to present truth, and they care more about their reputation as being a source of facts than they do about whatever short-term backlash there might be.

Any media outlet, journal, web site, or other publication that doesn't regularly issue retractions and corrections is not to be trusted. It'd be better if the erroneous information didn't get out there in the first place, but there's no scenario where everybody gets everything right the first time, all the time- it's going to happen.

You can really see the different perspectives highlighted from people posting to social media in response to things like changing estimates of the age of the universe. There's always a contingent of outraged morons screaming stuff like, "now they're saying it's 5 billion years older than they thought it was before, and people continue to trust them?!? All those scientists are such hypocrites for doubting my belief in anti-vax/Austrian economics/chemtrails/Noah's Ark/etc., how dare they!" They act like changing your mind based on new data, or admitting you were wrong about something is a sign that you shouldn't trust someone, whereas I would say the ability to constantly revise your beliefs is a fundamental requirement for trusting someone's judgement. The inability to do so is a reason to not trust anything someone says.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#63

Post by didibus »

mbell wrote: post #42

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, an…

I think the bigger issue is intellectually lazy readers and media which don't really care to understand nuances or spend any effort reviewing and fact checking things.

You can't control labels, no one can control what is labeled science or not, we just need to educate people, demand more of our media, and breed a culture that take more pride in truth, accuracy, precision, and intellect.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#64

Post by olooney »

mbell wrote: post #42

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, an…

Scientists usually try to distance themselves by saying those are soft science or even pseudo-science. This leads to the embarrassment of the demarcation problem[1] which is that no one can give a bright-line rule[2] to distinguish between the "real" science and pseudo-science. All of the demarcation criteria that have been proposed (such as Popper's falsifiability[3]) are inadequate in one way or another. In particular, they don't seem to capture the reasons a scientist would give about why a particular nutrition or social science paper is bad. The scientist would say things like, "Well, your sample size is small and not representative of anything except psych undergrads, you didn't control for age or gender, the participants and experimenters weren't properly blinded, you tested 15 hypothesis and only reported the p-value for the one that was under 0.05, and even that is wrong because you didn't apply Yate's continuity correction on your chi-squared test, AND NONE OF THAT EVEN MATTERS because the effect size you report is too small to be of practical consequence!" Nothing in there about the hypothesis not being testable; yet this is the kind of stuff that really separately the wheat from the chaff.

So we're left with a "No True Scotsman fallacy" where have to say that some science is "good" and some is "bad" and the only way to tell is to ask someone knowledgeable to evaluate each paper on a case by case basis. Not terrible useful to the layman.

And why do we want any kind of science to automatically get respect anyway? Good science is good because its already been subjected to an incredible degree of scrutiny. It will hold up to a little more. The real problem is disingenuous, bad faith arguments which are allowed to dominate the conversation. The real problem is to teach the general public to distinguish between sincere, good faith arguments and patent bullshit. This is much more difficult than it sounds because bullshit can easily conform to any merely superficial characteristics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#65

Post by LorenPechtel »

avs733 wrote: post #39
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?

Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning. I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represented as numbers or other short indicators for storage purposes. Typically I fmultiple choice the encoding is by the order of the choice options. I not infrequently see average of gender because male = 0 and female = 1 or vice versa and someone generates a table wi…

Aha! Now we see why there are so many transgendered people these days! :):):)

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#66

Post by _edo »

ars wrote: post #50
_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.

That's really cool, even if I never find a place to use it.

Anyway you can still sort strings.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#67

Post by all-highlighter »

Scapeghost wrote: post #49

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 reli…

Not everybody wants to appease an imaginary entity called "the classification of typical human behavior as a mental disorder", either. Who would classify it, and how would they enforce it? Would use of force toward a country full of mentally-ill people with their potential being crippled by their manipulative leaders be appropriate medical intervention, or would it be starting a war? One might need a monument and a few hymns to the DSM to encourage the troops in this case.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#68

Post by baddox »

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.

Apparently the journal published the original paper in 2015, published someone else's correction in 2016, and only published a retraction of the original paper just last month.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#69

Post by xamuel »

mwfunk wrote: post #62
mbell wrote: post #42

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, an…

For me personally, situations like this make me trust science that much more. If someone finds that a previously published paper contained errors, as any human work is likely to, and the response is to go back and correct those errors or publicize whatever was wrong with the research, well that's science working as intended. That's freaking awesome. What I get really, really, really frustrated with is the attitude th…

Well then, I'll create a journal which constantly publishes garbage and instantly retracts 99% of it. By your logic, the remaining 1% should be ultra, iron-clad trustworthy! :)

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#70

Post by catawbasam »

Scapeghost wrote: post #49

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 reli…

I'd rather not be classified as insane, thanks.

If you read the OP article, the research suggests religion has positive effects on children. Your response to the corrected findings?

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