The Scent of Bad Psychology
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The Scent of Bad Psychology
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Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#2Is there a list of websites that discuss the latest research? Open to all fields...
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#3> The experience of weight, exemplified by heaviness and lightness, is metaphorically associated with concepts of seriousness and importance. This is exemplified in the idioms “thinking about weighty matters” and “gravity of the situation.”
How could an article like this seriously have gotten through peer review?
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#4Is there a list of websites that discuss the latest research? Open to all fields...
Nature and Science are excellent starting points.
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#5The author offers rules of thumb for evaluating research, but is a business school grad (MBA? BBA?) and "a data science amateur, from the Latin amare – to love." Am I misunderstanding something? On what do they base these instincts and intuitions for evaluating research papers? If they wrote a blog post on rules of thumb for evaluating code, would you take it seriously?
The "scent" here may be something on my shoe ...
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#6It's been said before but needs to be said again: this is happening everywhere in the biomedical and related fields. The neurosciences, oncology... the list goes on and on. Anyone take a look at AI research lately? How much tweaking is going on there? How much is your big data finding due to the idiosyncracies of your particular dataset?
Psychology, as has historically always been the case--meta-analysis itself bloomed largely from the field--is the one turning inward and looking at itself. And it's getting crap from people who love to use it as their favorite punching bag.
The irony of this article is that it's psychologists looking at other psychologists, doing the math etc.
The truth is closer to the second hypothesis by the author: bullshit is incentivized everywhere in academics. Reality is less interesting, harder, more incremental. Everyone wants the next genius savior to point to because it's a simpler story than reality. Sexy means more pubs, more grant money.
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#7The author offers rules of thumb for evaluating research, but is a business school grad (MBA? BBA?) and "a data science amateur, from the Latin amare – to love." Am I misunderstanding something? On what do they base these instincts and intuitions for evaluating research papers? If they wrote a blog post on rules of thumb for evaluating code, would you take it seriously? The "scent" here may be something on my shoe ..…
https://osf.io/8pc9x/
As per the large amount of links in the article, the author seems to have passed the test themselves, then talked about what heuristics they used to get their result (that matched the studies linked). Did you read the article?
One can argue with their heuristics, of course, but dismissing them because they're open about their background is a classic middlebrow dismissal. This isn't presented as rigorous science.
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#8> Imagine yourself washing your hands. Do you feel any impact whatsoever on your desire to rationalize decisions? Now imagine explaining this study to Nassim Taleb’s grandma.
What's the joke with invoking Nassim here? That he is some kind of anti-pretentious truth-teller whose grandma is even further on that spectrum?
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#9> Imagine yourself washing your hands. Do you feel any impact whatsoever on your desire to rationalize decisions? Now imagine explaining this study to Nassim Taleb’s grandma. What's the joke with invoking Nassim here? That he is some kind of anti-pretentious truth-teller whose grandma is even further on that spectrum?
The image at the top of that section is a tweet of him describing his "grandma test".
Re: The Scent of Bad Psychology
#10The author offers rules of thumb for evaluating research, but is a business school grad (MBA? BBA?) and "a data science amateur, from the Latin amare – to love." Am I misunderstanding something? On what do they base these instincts and intuitions for evaluating research papers? If they wrote a blog post on rules of thumb for evaluating code, would you take it seriously? The "scent" here may be something on my shoe ..…
https://osf.io/8pc9x/ As per the large amount of links in the article, the author seems to have passed the test themselves, then talked about what heuristics they used to get their result (that matched the studies linked). Did you read the article? One can argue with their heuristics, of course, but dismissing them because they're open about their background is a classic middlebrow dismissal. This isn't presented as…
> Did you read the article?
> classic middlebrow
That is classic unwelcome behavior on HN. Maybe you can keep your judgements of other commenters and hot take reactions to yourself and stick to the subject.
I didn't criticize them for being open about their background, but because they lack expertise to offer expert opinions. Again, if they wrote an article on rules of thumb for evaluating code or on reading radiology images for cancer - things they appear equally expert in - it wouldn't be taken seriously here.
> As per the large amount of links in the article, the author seems to have passed the test themselves
Huh? Lots of links pass some test? Reading a bunch of links make you an expert? I guess the Internet really is full of experts.