Live data from Hacker News

If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

141–150 of 238 posts

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process? Iterating on existing systems to see if you can get results to converge and also testing new systems to see if they also result in known good values.

It's fun to realize how deeply ingrained the current scientific process is in our way of thinking. All of these ideas that you tacitly take for granted are itself mutable parts of the scientific process: * That iterative improvement and hill-climbing is an effective process for improving results. * That replication of experiments and convergence is a truth-generating enterprise. * That truth can be expressed numerica…

The only nit I'd pick with the list is:

* That truth can be expressed numerically.

Isn't the basic point of quantum physics that this isn't true? We can only make guesses with probabilities, but we can't know the actual truth, and therefore can't express it numerically.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#142
post #2

I still don't understand why we "believed" studies that claimed knowledge about typical behavior and subconscious decisions while those studies were only based on a single experiment with limited participants, e.g. Stanford Prison Experiment. These type of studies should ALWAYS be looked at critically and not just because they fail to reproduce but because they are based on a very small sample size in a very discreet…

same reason we believe observational studies in nutrition, or worse - studies on animals.

if you have the weight of peer review or at least a well documented study, then the media runs wild with it's claims, it gets shoved into textbooks, then governments shape policy on those claims, corporations and medical practices sell gimmicks, books, supplements, therapy and plans of action to heal you... it all becomes lies, half-truths, bad data all just repeating itself ad naseum until "truth" is established in the public consciousness. Quacks on the web, the American Heart Association, your local doctor's office will all pedal garbage based on the bad data. And once it's well established as true, backing away from it is hard because it's become so woven, institutionally.

This is why people think saturated fat and sunlight are bad or at least a net-negative.

Even modern medicine, psychology and nutrition sciences all have horrible replication crisis's and we're no better in rejecting the nonsense now than we were then.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#143

The realities of science as actually practiced rather complicates the religion of "trust the science!" (which usually actually means "trust the scientists!")

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” - W. Edwards Deming.

I don't even trust data anymore

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#144

The realities of science as actually practiced rather complicates the religion of "trust the science!" (which usually actually means "trust the scientists!")

The science-as-religion people think that science delivers truth in the same way any other theology does.

I took a philosophy class filled with people in science degree programs and a few of my classmates were often vocally upset about how nothing was certain in philosophy and everything had multiple sides to it. That was very eye opening, many of these people were soon to be graduated and through their entire educational career they had only been exposed to Truth to the extent that being shown debate and disagreement on a topic made them upset.

You're not supposed to "trust the science" you're supposed to trust the process to approach the truth. If you can't read multiple arguments on the same topic and analyze them, you really don't get it at all (and waaay too many people with degrees can't do this).

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#145

Reading the other comments about the lack of integrity in scientific research that they’ve witnessed, is it any wonder why people might be skeptical about important issues like climate change, vaccines, masks, etc? There’s great research being done and a larger part of the population is becoming more and more skeptical because lies are being published and touted. Science needs to clean its house.

Independent replication needs to be incentivized, either as part of tenure process or have grad students do it as part of getting a PhD or something. Then the results are published in a journal of replication studies.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's insane that metascience isn't studied more. It is, probably more than is apparent. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_scientific_knowle... There is an interesting recursive problem here, though: what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process? Whatever tools you use will themselves be hobbled by the same systemic flaws you…

Indeed, and if you think science is bad, imagine metascience.

When you think about it, it's insane that metametascience isn't studied more. We're going to question every little detail about the scientific process, but we're just going to take on faith that peer-review and publication in journals is an effective method for weeding out "bad" metascience?

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cottage industry of what you may call,if you feel uncharitable, bullshit peddlers: Simon Sinek Cal Newport Charles Duhigg Mark Manson Ryan Hollyday Malcolm Gladwell The list is endless to be honest, they are each different on their own way but they have the following common points: - They are on this for the money, so expect them to be always pushing their books, products, next book, next tour, next progra…

A good rule of thumb is to assume increasing probabilities of bullshit for subjects further to the left on this scale: https://xkcd.com/435/ Even biology outside of a cellular level is already above 50% BS for me. It is just insanely difficult to have the necessary controls.

On cellular level too! I remember looking at some summarising paper on Duchenne muscular dystrophy for educational purposes. There was a question regarding concentration of certain molecule inside affected muscle cells. 5 papers were quoted - 3 were showing that the concentration is way above normal if DMD is present while other 2 were showing complete opposite. You can not imagine anything like that in math or physics.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason we believed eggs will give you heart disease. Science reporting is terrible and the general education system doesn't teach rational skepticism, it teaches unconditional trust of intellectual authority.

every mainstream thought about diet is untrustworthy to me due to the above type of example :/

it is. mainstream diets will tell you:

* saturated fats are bad (lies told us by a crappy Ancel Keys study, promoted for decades by processed food companies (like Kellogs) ran by Seventh Day Adventists who were convinced "meat led man to dangerous impulses and temptation")

* polyunsaturated fats are good. The American Heart Assocation had an article up for years that went as far as to claim Omega6s are heart healthy. They only recently took it down this year. But we know they're inflammatory and we know we're consuming 25-100x more Omega6s than we ever would before the industrial invention of seed-oils being shoved into every product imaginable (bread, cereal, granola, anything that comes in a box, feed given to animals meant for meat production) here's a webmd article on it: https://www.webmd.com/heart/news/20090126/expert-panel-omega... \

* sunlight creates high cancer risk (ignoring that cancer is unlikely, treatment if caught early has a high survival rate, and the risk of not having vitamin d throughout your life risks far more likely autoimmune issues, depression, anxiety and even certain cancers and inflammatory disease).

* sugar is good for you. Sure, they'll specify processed sugars are bad for you or "added sugar", but common wisdom will accept a NET (subtract fiber) 200-300g carb diet as acceptable. Grain is still often listed as the most important and largest part of the food pyramid.

The reality is - all mainstream health advice, including that which you'll get from your doctor who got a whole single nutrition class in school, ensures that processed foods don't loose business on the front end and the medical/pharma industries don't lose money on the back end.

even in the push for a more vegetarian/blue-zone diet world - they're doing so by promoting meat alternatives like "Beyond Meat" which is chock full of so much seed oil and other processed substances, it's mainstreaming vegetarianism-as-fast-food. McDonald's burger.. is still a McDonald's burger and you shouldn't be eating it.

If a factory isn't making it at scale, shoving it in a box, branding it and ensuring you don't have to spend any time making/cooking/preparing whole, fresh foods (those pesky things that tend to have short shelf lives and are costly to Ag businesses), then your PCP, the government, most food businesses, your medical insurance company, absolutely no one of any kind of "authority" isn't going to promote it highly.

They'll do ANYTHING except remove seed oils. They'll make your potato chips out of broccoli and carrots and still drench them in sunflower or canola oil. They'll reduce the salt. they'll make shit out of beets. And still manage to make it horrible for you.

The MSM regurgitates "health" info regarding diets in a way that acts as advertising for these orgs.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#149
What I don't understand is psychology research (at least in academia) does not seem to have moved behind the "we locked three dozen college kids in a classroom and had them perform some bizarre acts, through which we hope to pierce the veil of human nature" - style research. I feel like if something good could have come out of the social media age - is that we have documented the natural behaviour of a vast number of people over long stretches of time. I think this is the sort of invaluable data, that has the potential to advance the quantitative understanding of human nature.

Re: If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been answered a million times before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science

And it starts with that the terms are colloquial and bereft o an actually hard definition. “colloquial”, “roughly”, ”perceived”. — these are not the terms that definitions are made of. The point is that there is no actual hard distinction between “hard science” and “soft science” but there is a hard distinction between an exact theory, and an inexact theory.

‘Hard science’ is just a title people have been using to distinguish physical sciences from social sciences. Don’t get too hung up on worrying what ‘hard’ means or thinking that it is some kind of difficulty or value judgement; it’s not. It may have been at some point, but today it’s just a category and nothing more. This WP entry is much more clear than the above one, IMO: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science
Post reply on HN