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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

#111

Post by greggman2 »

tathougies wrote: post #84
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…

So here's the issue. There is a segment of the population that is skeptical and a segment of the population that is not. When the skeptical segment expresses distrust of a scientific paper and names specific grievances, oftentimes the unskeptical population will accuse them immediately of being 'anti-science'. This is a major problem, because when -- inevitably -- some problem in a paper is acknowledged by the wider…

I'd divided the world into more than that. For me most of the world is superstitious (I realize that's my judgement). In my experience 95% of the people I meet believe in homeopathy, acupuncture, aroma therapy (not just that things smell nice but they they have strong medicinal benefits), spirits, ghosts, astrology, blood type personality, supreme beings, MSG causing headache, changes in weather causing colds, airconditioning making people sick, blowing fans causing sudden death, and a million other discredited things. Some of those people overlap with the type of skeptics you mention but most are not

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#112

Post by Fomite »

ALittleLight wrote: post #76
0xb100db1ade wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from, but would the subjects be comfortable with all their data becoming public?

I think you could, and should anyways, make the data anonymous. Just give every participant a GUID for a participant ID and add a step to purge personally identifiable information. Then you can share records without identity.

Making things like medical records actually anonymous, especially in the face of bad actors, is an unsolved problem.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#113

Post by Fomite »

human20190310 wrote: post #26
leereeves wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really very easy to do, roughly the stats equivalent of declaring a variable signed instead of unsigned. Many algorithms work on both categorical and continuous variables, with different results depending on the variable's type.

At risk of embarrassing my self statistically, what exactly happens when you do this? I.e., if you're controlling for country, that means you're bucketing by country, and looking at each subset, right? So if country is represented by a non-discrete value... what exactly happens?

So let's pretend there's three types of trees we want to study: Oak, Maple and Aspen, which we code as 0, 1, and 2 for reasons (there are some good reasons to do this).

Statistically, if you treat them as a continuous variable, the estimates you get will act like there's an ordering there, and give you the effect of a one unit increase in tree. So it will tell you the effect of Oak vs. Maple and Maple vs. Aspen, assuming those are proportional and that Oak vs. Aspen will be twice that.

This is...nonsense, for most categorical variables. They don't have a nice, ordinal stepping like that.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#114

Post by hnuser123456 »

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…

>rigger

uh... rigour

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#115

Post by imron »

olooney wrote: post #107
imron wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is that no one can give a bright-line rule[2] to distinguish between the "real" science and pseudo-science "if you can't repeat and predict, stop calling it science" seems like a nice bright line. Peer-review obviously isn't enough, I'd like to see peer-replicated studies become a thing.

What about astronomy, cosmology, archeology, paleontology, volcanology, evolutionary biology, cladistics, macroeconomics, etc., which do not allow us to "repeat and predict," as you say? Some of these cases can be rescued by considering "retrodiction"[1][2] as valid substitute for prediction in the right circumstances, but not all. I personally think the analysis of the Mott problem[3] points the way to the solution…

> What about ... which do not allow us to "repeat and predict," as you say?

"if you can't repeat and predict, stop calling it science" seems like a nice bright line.

For what it's worth, there is science meeting the "repeat and predict" definition that can be done in each of the fields you list.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#116

Post by RickJWagner »

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…

I've always thought this is what gives science a strong position. Science can always reverse itself and change positions (180 degrees if needed) to support the latest findings.

Politics, religion, etc. don't have the same advantage.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#117

Post by seganddr »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #114
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…

>rigger uh... rigour

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

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#118

Post by nurettin »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #41
dukoid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would an idea exist other than to serve a purpose, and why would that purpose be distant from the mindset which benefits the most from it?

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#119

Post by bshoemaker »

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 you're looking for the word rigor
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