An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted • Hacker News Board

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#141

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:13 AM UTC

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…

What likely happens is that since the country variable is basically random, you will get a model where the country has negligible effect on the prediction.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#142

Post by otakucode » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

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…

This is not simply a matter of social science being soft. This was caused by exactly 1 thing: researchers not releasing the code they write or use. Their code was bad, and it produced an incorrect result. There is probably TONS of this in research from the past 30 years, and most of it goes uncaught because, for some insanely unwise reason, the scientific community has tolerated researchers keeping their procedures, tools, and experimental processes secret... but only when software is involved.

Science isn't just a matter of what people believe. It often gets considered when governments create policy. Bad science can kill millions. I've run into many 'bugs' in the algorithm descriptions published in computer science and mathematics papers, I shudder to think what the code backing nontechnical research is like.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#143

Post by imperio59 » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:42 AM UTC

Can we go back to basic principles and all agree that psychology and social studies are not true sciences anyways?

Science is to me something where you extract natural laws that predict phenomena will occur 100% of the time given certain conditions. Physics, chemistry, computer science, most branches of medicine operate this way.

A field like psychology that says "well sometimes people will..." or "we found in 60% of cases that..." is not science. It's a comment upon society maybe, but it does not produce broadly repeatable, predictable results.

Not true science.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#144

Post by otakucode » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:42 AM UTC

If a research does not release the code used in their research, their papers should not be trusted. We wouldn't trust a paper where the researchers hid their experimental methods or analysis - it wouldn't even be allowed to be published. But if their experimental methods or analysis are done in code, those parts are allowed to be a black box and we're supposed to trust them. If we were willing to just trust them, there wouldn't even be a peer review process and it certainly wouldn't deserve the imprimatur of 'science'. This has been a problem for years, and I will personally not be the least bit surprised if we eventually see a death toll attached to it.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#145

Post by DanBC » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:47 AM UTC

imperio59 wrote: post #143

Can we go back to basic principles and all agree that psychology and social studies are not true sciences anyways? Science is to me something where you extract natural laws that predict phenomena will occur 100% of the time given certain conditions. Physics, chemistry, computer science, most branches of medicine operate this way. A field like psychology that says "well sometimes people will..." or "we found in 60% of…

> most branches of medicine operate this way.

No they don't.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#146

Post by OnlineCourage » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

imperio59 wrote: post #143

Can we go back to basic principles and all agree that psychology and social studies are not true sciences anyways? Science is to me something where you extract natural laws that predict phenomena will occur 100% of the time given certain conditions. Physics, chemistry, computer science, most branches of medicine operate this way. A field like psychology that says "well sometimes people will..." or "we found in 60% of…

Those sciences not developed at Edinburgh are not developed by a true scottsman, either.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#147

Post by gpvos » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 11:57 AM UTC

seganddr wrote: post #117

hnuser123456 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>rigger uh... rigour

Rigor! https://www.thefreedictionary.com/rigor

Rigour is the correct spelling in the UK.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#148

Post by TimTheTinker » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 12:04 PM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #124

TimTheTinker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would an idea exist other than to serve a purpose Because ideas are the substrate of thought, belief, motivation, desire, and human life itself. Without ideas we lack the ability to understand anything at all.

Not sure how that relates to my question. Why would an idea exist without someone to give it purpose?

Because it constitutes belief and/or knowledge.

Because it is true, or someone believes it to be so.

Because it carries explanatory power - something we all strongly desire.

You might call those reasons “purposes” - if so, I don’t disagree. But the truth or falsehood of an idea transcends any “purpose” someone may have for speaking it. This is the academic posture: to dispassionately evaluate truth claims without fearing the speaker.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#149

Post by ausbah » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 12:05 PM UTC

imperio59 wrote: post #143

Can we go back to basic principles and all agree that psychology and social studies are not true sciences anyways? Science is to me something where you extract natural laws that predict phenomena will occur 100% of the time given certain conditions. Physics, chemistry, computer science, most branches of medicine operate this way. A field like psychology that says "well sometimes people will..." or "we found in 60% of…

I think you're forgetting that the "replication crisis" also occurs in your so called "100% deterministic fields". CS has the issue of ML models, medicine drug studies, etc.

The bottom line is science is hard to do, and even harder to do right. I think all fields do try to follow the scientific method to the best of their ability, but for some fields it is simply harder to do because of the sheer complexity of the subject matter being hard to model, experiment in, and understand.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#150

Post by CDSlice » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 12:12 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #125

Interesting, waitstaff on reddit always say religious people tip worse or not at all.

Probably because most religious people don't tend to flaunt it everywhere they go, and in my experience the ones that do also tend to be jerks. It's also possible that wait staff tend to remember the ones that do more than the ones that don't because being religious and a jerk is more memorable than religious and not a jerk.

Disclaimer: I am a religious person.