Cargo Cult Science (1974) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#11

Post by aspaceman » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community.

People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" scientific research (and vice-versa).

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#12

Post by smnrchrds » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 2:53 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

If measurable chemical changes fall under soft sciences, is there any hard science at all? By this definition, chemistry, physics, and biology are all soft sciences.

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#13

Post by seibelj » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

aspaceman wrote: post #11

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community. People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" sc…

Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer. Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or some such.

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#14

Post by jeffdavis » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 2:57 AM UTC

"We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals."

Not sure that's obvious. Crime has steadily fallen. Particular practices may not stand up to scrutiny, but I'm guessing a lot of it does kind of work.

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#15

Post by jeffdavis » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 3:08 AM UTC

aspaceman wrote: post #11

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community. People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" sc…

I use "soft" to mean that the measurements are more subjective, contextual, or open to interpetation.

Chemical changes are "hard", but "power pose" and "improvements to your abilities" may be "soft".

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#16

Post by chillacy » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #3

Experiments that attempt to create AGI singularities by just making huge neural networks strike me as cargo cult science.

I've never seen that before but I have seen businesses:

* Use hadoop/latest distributed computing with data that fits on one machine

* Use way higher variance models than necessary for the problem at hand

And in general just cargo cult what the big players are doing when it's unnecessarily complex for the size of the business.

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#17

Post by PopePompus » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 3:42 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

Things don't always work out this way though. If you publish a scientific paper that reports an interesting result, it can permanently help your career even if it is later proved to be wrong. It just needs to be believed for about 10 years or so - you'll extract most of the career advancement possible from the paper during that time. When the paper is debunked, as long as there is no evidence of fraud, you'll still have tenure, you'll still be the PI on projects you have started after the paper, you'll still have your network of collaborators who won't shun you if it looks like you made an honest mistake years ago.

I've seen the above happen, and it can be caused by a perverse fact one of my mentors told me in grad school: "Bad data almost always looks interesting." Cold fusion started out as bad data, and looked very interesting. Those faster-than-light neutrinos that were in the news several years ago were bad data. When I was a kid in the 1960s, there were numerous reports of exoplanet detections - all were bad data. Etc.

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#18

Post by acidburnNSA » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #10

killjoywashere wrote: post #5

> there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find anything.

Paul Thomas Young obit: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1421573 rat paper still missing

Here's some stuff from him:

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=%22Young,...

The 1945 one sounds closest: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012277991?type%5B%5D=a...

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#19

Post by acidburnNSA » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 4:01 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #2

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…

Somewhat interestingly, the rat-studying scientist Feynman refers to in the linked piece discussed body postures in animals to some degree in [1] back in the 1940s. No mention of Power Posing directly but it's just a curious coincidence. Maybe it means something! (Just kidding)

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026431919&vi...

Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

#20

Post by brians » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #13

aspaceman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community. People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" sc…

Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer. Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or some such.

You tell that to the geometers.