If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999 • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by acchow » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #162

Tarsul wrote: 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…

SPE was needed at the time because everyone knew the Germans were like us, but needed a framework to say it. It also opened up the idea the Japanese were like us too. It allowed us to say what we believed and build on that. It's not science. But science isn't the only way forward.

Can't we just look at history and conclude that we are "just like the Germans"? Why do we need to shroud it in pseudo-science?

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

#182

Post by bsder » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

andi999 wrote: post #163

nicoburns wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be biased as someone who studied philosophy. But I wish Philosophy of Science was mandatory in more science degrees. A lot of scientists don't seem to be familiar.

Can you point to something good and useful in the Philosophie of Science? I mean let's say physics is as good as it gets (laws in mathematical language, strong experimental evidence, solid results); from my perspective a success. But it has nothing to do with how like popper imagines science. So insisting on like a popper process would also not be benificial for physics in my opinion. But probably there is better stu…

> Can you point to something good and useful in the Philosophie of Science?

Every scientist should be able to answer the particular tenets that they take on faith.

Scientists do take on faith that the universe is causal and that the rules today are the same as the rules yesterday.

Yes, scientists double check these assumptions over and over, but they can never "prove" them.

This kind of introspection is important for science to set itself apart from religion, for example.

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

#183

Post by anthk » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

1999 to me was almost yesterday.

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

#184

Post by acituan » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

rijoja wrote: post #135

bluetomcat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People" sciences like sociology, psychology and economics can make incredibly misleading claims because one experiment over a small sample of people at a certain moment in time might seem to support a claim, while the actual reason for the observed results is a factor which is never taken in consideration. On the other hand, conducting those experiments over wider demographics and in different points in time means t…

Yeah so you have to make a difference between empirical science and science here really. Which Max Weber who was one of the pillars of social sciences stated around one hundred years ago. "As such, he was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than empiricist) methods, based on understanding the purpose and meanings that individuals attac…

Alternatively, anti-positivist endeavors should find themselves another space to occupy and not piggy-back on an institutional adjacency to actual sciences to posture credibility, authority, attain public funding etc.

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

#185

Post by anthk » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #45

At least they have not independently rediscovered integration yet. https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf

I don't get the downvotes.

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

#186

Post by svieira » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

caenn wrote: post #152

fnord123 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Indeed, and if you think metascience is bad, imagine meta-metascience.

Meta-metascience has been studied _extensively_ by previous generations, where what this generation calls "science" was called "natural philosophy" and interesting discourse and study was had on such things as:

* The study of knowledge (epistemology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

* The study of existence and what exists (ontology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

* The study of the purpose of things (teleology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

It turns out that these are hard areas of study and it requires a lot of properly focused leisure time to understand properly. Most people don't consider these things, wing it, and wind up working with a half-baked meta-meta science of their own creation ... oh, I see what you mean :-D

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

#187

Post by nicoburns » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

andi999 wrote: post #163

nicoburns wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be biased as someone who studied philosophy. But I wish Philosophy of Science was mandatory in more science degrees. A lot of scientists don't seem to be familiar.

Can you point to something good and useful in the Philosophie of Science? I mean let's say physics is as good as it gets (laws in mathematical language, strong experimental evidence, solid results); from my perspective a success. But it has nothing to do with how like popper imagines science. So insisting on like a popper process would also not be benificial for physics in my opinion. But probably there is better stu…

Some key things for me would be the ideas that:

1. There is no such thing as objectivity in inquiry. There is always a scientist interpreting things, and they are always looking at things through the lens of their own biases and cultural norms. The best you can hope to do is to be aware of your limitations.

1. Statistical evidence on its own is not always a good basis for believing something to be true. Typically you also want a good theoretical model, and an understanding of the mechanism that underlies the observed phenomena (physics is good at this, psychology not so much).

3. That there is more knowledge than is detectable through statistical methods (currently at least). And that lack of evidence from statistical studies does not necessarily constitute good evidence that a theory is false.

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

#188

Post by svieira » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #136

chromaton wrote: post #32

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…

> That truth can be expressed numerically

I don't think this is what is held by those-who-do-science-and-philosophy-at-large (though it may be a generally accepted hand-wave, I don't know). See, for example Category Theory for a branch of what-I-believe-would-generally-be-called-science that doesn't use numbers, but instead expresses things with sets and relations.

The logician is the intersection of the set of all scientists and the set of all philosophers.

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

#189

Post by panagathon » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

svieira wrote: post #188

munificent wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That truth can be expressed numerically I don't think this is what is held by those-who-do-science-and-philosophy-at-large (though it may be a generally accepted hand-wave, I don't know). See, for example Category Theory for a branch of what-I-believe-would-generally-be-called-science that doesn't use numbers, but instead expresses things with sets and relations. The logician is the intersection of the set of all s…

I think I disagree, since mathematics cannot be reduced to logic (or any other instrumentalisation).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/#M...

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

#190

Post by whakim » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #47

hpoe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly all sociology I have seen or been exposed to, including in college, seems to be more interested in acting as a platform to push specific ideas, rather than an attempt to find truth. Beyond that those involved in sociology seem to believe that a study is the same thing as an experiment and like to believe that constitutes proof. Ultimately we can't really run AB experiments on society at large because we are…

I think you are naive about history. I'm an economist. If I threw away the half of the data that didn't support my findings, and got caught, I'd lose my job and never publish again. I'm pretty sure the same is true in other social sciences, such as psychology. This is true irrespective of the well-documented problems that the article describes, which certainly also apply in economics and elsewhere, to varying degrees…

The thing about textual evidence is that you can't cite an entire text (obviously). You have to selectively choose what to quote in order to support your claims. Additionally, people can write one thing, and then write other contradictory things. Or they can act in ways that contradict what they write. It is from this totality of evidence that non-quantitative methods draw their conclusions. To get to the point, I'm not necessarily claiming that Nancy Maclean (the historian "caught cutting sentences in half") is in the right here, but if you actually follow the debate it seems quite nuanced and the internet critic hadn't actually even read most of the book they were criticizing (and also clearly has certain political leanings to boot). Certainly nothing like "throwing away half the data that didn't support my findings."