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

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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

#211

Post by twhb »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #200
nicoburns wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. This is pretty trivial. Why do you think most scientists aren’t aware of their limitations? 2. This is studied in statistics classes. It is impossible to analyze data without a statistical model, so of course your conclusions rely on it. So this is also quite trivial. 3. Again, are scientists oblivious to this simple notion? I doubt it.

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom?

That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial.

Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own.

It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instead of to what you’d look like if you floated over the top. This assumption of horizontal travel is incredibly deeply engrained in humans, to the point that the English language doesn’t even have up/down equivalents to the words “left” and “right”, i.e. a word that means the direction closer to your head than to your feet regardless of your orientation.

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

#212

Post by Kim_Bruning »

twhb wrote: post #211
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This is pretty trivial. Why do you think most scientists aren’t aware of their limitations? 2. This is studied in statistics classes. It is impossible to analyze data without a statistical model, so of course your conclusions rely on it. So this is also quite trivial. 3. Again, are scientists oblivious to this simple notion? I doubt it.

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom? That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial. Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own. It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location

I guess technically correct, because they're mostly latin loan words.

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

#213

Post by twhb »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #212
twhb wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom? That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial. Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own. It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location I guess technically correct, because they're mostly latin loan words.

I didn’t know that terminology, thank you.

But reading the article, are those not applicable only to body parts? Would an astronaut ever say to another astronaut, while floating in different orientations, “Hit the button to your superior”?

Either way, I think it’s at least correct to say that there are no layman words for it.

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

#214

Post by Ao7bei3s »

twhb wrote: post #211
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This is pretty trivial. Why do you think most scientists aren’t aware of their limitations? 2. This is studied in statistics classes. It is impossible to analyze data without a statistical model, so of course your conclusions rely on it. So this is also quite trivial. 3. Again, are scientists oblivious to this simple notion? I doubt it.

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom? That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial. Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own. It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instea…

A mirror doesn't swap left and right, it swaps front and back.

The realizations that people expect yaw rotation because that's what they are used to, or that normal day language isn't always precise (my left? your left?), seem extremely trivial to me and doesn't require any deep philosophical "insights".

In the hard sciences, you often don't even need the handwavey "swap a and b" explanation when it is much more useful to just model its behavior (ingress ray/plane intersection, normalize ingress ray, subtract twice normal vector of plane from ray to get egress ray direction).

I'm sure Feynman was a great physicist and teacher, but he's also great at just wowing people by using lots of words without saying much. Like in his famous why-is-ice-slippery video where he goes onto a completely unnecessary discourse on the nature of questions instead of just answering the dang question.

I always felt that is the perfect way to showcase the difference between education and edutainment, and I assume his lectures were a bit more substantial.

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

#215

Post by twhb »

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #214
twhb wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom? That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial. Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own. It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instea…

A mirror doesn't swap left and right, it swaps front and back. The realizations that people expect yaw rotation because that's what they are used to, or that normal day language isn't always precise (my left? your left?), seem extremely trivial to me and doesn't require any deep philosophical "insights". In the hard sciences, you often don't even need the handwavey "swap a and b" explanation when it is much more usef…

I think you’re certainly correct, but remember that the question wasn’t just about understanding mirrors, but using mirrors to make a point about bias. “A mirror image is swapped left to right” doesn’t appear to be biased at all, and yet it is.

Also, just for fun: what makes calling it swapped front to back more valid than left to right? One could recover the (translated, rotated) original image through any of a front to back swap, left to right swap, or top to bottom swap. They’re all lenses, and equally valid.

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

#216

Post by zeroonetwothree »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #171
denimnerd42 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's an acceptable oil? olive? peanut? I was told to use olive oil (not even EVOO except for taste related) so that's what I get but it's impossible to know anything.

Anything thats mono or saturated fat. Mono is probably healthier. But coconut oil, beef tallow, duck fat, butter are all healthier than canola, sunflower, or soybean oil or crisco.

Canola oil is pretty high in mono fatty acids actually. Not as high as some others but pretty good for a commonly available one.

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

#217

Post by akiselev »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #151
akiselev wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its utility [1]. The social sciences study a lot of things that people in group A intuitively understand that group B can be completely ignorant of - say, for example, how to navigate a complex social structure like office politics in a modern workplace. Making any sort of predictions about intangible outcomes where the Hawthorne effect is in full effect is pretty much impossible since group A will respond to the new…

I don't understand what difference you're trying to make between utility and predictive power. If you can give information on what approach in general will be better to approach office politics that is just a prediction. It doesn't mean that these predictions have to be always right, but if they don't have predictive power and are no better than a coinflip, that "understanding" is just a post-rationalization that doe…

For something to be predictive in a scientific sense, it has to be repeatable. There is so much variety in individuals and their environments that most social sciences have little repeatability - they mostly study affluent western college students who have time to volunteer for college psychology studies. However, if you're mostly an affluent western college student, chances are that you can take some value out of the studies because they're selected for your environment rather than humanity as a whole (which is what they purport to do by claiming to study 'psychology' rather than western college students specifically).

Closest analogy off the top of my head is psychiatric drugs: their efficacy is generally bottom of the barrel except for some group with factor X (each drug has their own unique factor X). For the vast majority of these drugs, we have no method of screening for whether a person has factor X - we don't even know what it is most of the time - so doctors have to go through a process of trial and error with patients until they find the right drug or combination. Once they do, it's like a night and day difference for the patient, yet if we applied the same standard of evidence for psychiatric drugs that we do for blood pressure pills, we'd never make any progress. A lot of the drugs look like they don't work in phase III and we have no way to predict which drug which help which patient but the patients figure it out with their doctors because they have actionable data, even if it isn't predictive in general.

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

#218

Post by brnt »

handrous wrote: post #64
brnt wrote: post #3

Psychological science is now thoroughly privatized. Don't read papers if this subject is of interest to your, look al big tech, ad tech, troll factories, influencer science, media consolidation, for-pay research-charities (great rabbithole to dive into btw). Academics are thoroughly out of the loop on this one, as are we all incidentally.

> for-pay research-charities (great rabbithole to dive into btw). Any getting-started pointers for this (or your other suggestions)?

A useful keyword is psychographics, but you'll find that much research is privatized (comes from media/software companies), and that some of the meat seems to be not publicized. Which makes sense, it's what gives them an edge over the competition. The Cambridge Analytica dossier is of course a good way to find references.

In terms of the why, and the who's paying, Dark Money (Mayer) and Democracy in Chains (MacLean) touch on it: psychographics is huge for anyone doing manipulation, not just commercial ads, also political ones. Probably even moreso.

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

#219

Post by sprafa »

BurningFrog wrote: post #180
fallingknife wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process? Engineering. If you can build something that works based on the rules theorized by scientists, they are on to something. e.g. building a skyscraper proves we know the properties of steel to a pretty good margin of error.

For many sciences, like psychology, that's not normally an option.

Psychology is basically applied neuroscience. They are both in their infancy and we are using the best information we can, but I wouldn't call the body of work comparable to other sciences.

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

#220

Post by thu2111 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #180
fallingknife wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process? Engineering. If you can build something that works based on the rules theorized by scientists, they are on to something. e.g. building a skyscraper proves we know the properties of steel to a pretty good margin of error.

For many sciences, like psychology, that's not normally an option.

Which raises the question why we study this subject at all, if it's not actually applicable to anything beyond making viral TED talks.
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