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

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

221–230 of 238 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't even trust data anymore

Agreed. It's not like the good old days when data was about one physical process that didn't have too many downstream impacts.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is, but it's still too high in polyunsaturated fats, most of which are omega6s.

Imho, it's vital to reduce your omega6s as much as feasible. Given our lifestyles and diets, even most "good diets" are still too high in omega6s.

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

#223
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, no one was using statistics and the scientific method to support bloodletting, or miasma theory.

No, but let's not forget that much of statistics was originally invented to provide a rigorous underpinning for eugenics. Pearson, who invented many of the most commonly used statistical results, was a prominent eugenicist and contributed greatly to its ideas.

That doesn't mean that statistics aren't a useful tool for checking the strength of evidence, or building a case for a hypothesis.

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

#224
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand one might also argue that positivism is just a school of philosophy and that positivists are piggy backing on a thousands of years old tradition of philosophy.

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

#225
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I meant more like book, or a philosopher.

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

#226

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 iterative improvement and hill-climbing is an effective process for improving results.

Not essential to science; in fact, there’d a major viewpoint within metascience that explicitly rejects this as popular mythology of how science works in practice, holding that models change by revolution more than evolution.

> That replication of experiments and convergence is a truth-generating enterprise.

Not part of science, in the same way that your use of “truth” later is not.

> That truth can be expressed numerically

No. While scientism may make essential connections between science and truth, science itself only depends on useful predictive models being expressable, not about truth being expressable, numerically or otherwise, or even being a coherent, meaningful concept.

> That there are some values that are "known good"

That's not only not essential to the scientific process, but contrary to something that is: that all results are contingent.

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

#227
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand one might also argue that positivism is just a school of philosophy and that positivists are piggy backing on a thousands of years old tradition of philosophy.

>> thousands of years old tradition of philosophy

imagine those proponents of 'thousands of years old tradition of philosophy' would try to accomplish anything with it. how funny that would be..

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

#228
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the department I worked for as a faculty member, there was an issue where the other areas would have graduation rates around 40-50%, as opposed to our area which was above 95% or so. This came up in the context of an external review. When people asked around, informally what was said was that the grad students in the other areas (especially one area, in the experimental molecular biosciences) would leave after hav…

What makes that even more absurd in my books (apart from fostering an unhealthy academic culture) is that the purpose of a doctoral dissertation is essentially to show that you can do proper original research. Getting a null result doesn't invalidate that in any way.

Exactly. In our area, the dissertation itself and defense were evaluated on the presentation of the research, not on the results, provided that they followed the proposed plan.

If you have a committee of experts who carefully evaluate a proposal and decide it's good, the results are as they are.

Broadening the discussion a bit, it seems one feature of science, as opposed to, say philosophy, is that the conclusions regarding a hypothesis are not knowable a priori. I think in contemporary academics there's some implicit idea that the quality of a researcher lies in their ability to identify hypotheses that are "correct", as opposed to simply following through with good but ultimately "incorrect" hypotheses. There's a bit of a roll of the dice involved with science; if there isn't, it's not science.

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

#229
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but let's not forget that much of statistics was originally invented to provide a rigorous underpinning for eugenics. Pearson, who invented many of the most commonly used statistical results, was a prominent eugenicist and contributed greatly to its ideas.

That doesn't mean that statistics aren't a useful tool for checking the strength of evidence, or building a case for a hypothesis.

Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that your findings will be as useful or useless as your premise. If you're trying to use statsitics to prove pseudoscience, well, it's still pseudoscience at the end of the day. (NB: I don't mean that psychological sciences are pseudoscience.)

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

#230
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can construct proofs for mathematics, but not for the existence or refutation of a divine creator.

I think you have a narrow view of philosophy. Very little modern philosophy has anything to do with that kind of question.

Nope, you're projecting and using a strawman. That's not the point. :)
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