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Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

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Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#51

Post by ORioN63 »

danschumann wrote: post #32

According to marines, will power depletion is bs. This is anecdotal, sure, but I believe in momentum. If you have momentum, at some point, you don't want to fail at any will power task, because you are on a winning streak.

I agree with momentum. I've been using the anology for years.

There are only so many points in life where it changes direction. Most of the time is doing what you did the past months/years, whatever is staying home getting drunk or working non-stop. Sure you can change direction, but it's not easy to fight inertia. You gotta apply some force to change direction!

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#52

Post by dwaltrip »

meesterdude wrote: post #47

I'm all for replication and ensuring scientific accuracy - but this does not change my perspective of ego-depletion. I have observed it in myself, time and time again. If not it directly, something similar enough. Even at a glucose level, various studies have shown relation between our blood sugar and ability to tolerate frustration and make decisions. So while the accuracy of ego-depletion may be in question, I can…

> I have observed it in myself, time and time again. If not it directly, something similar enough. [Emphasis added by me]

This is the crux. I agree with you that there are certainly some sort of effects related to will-power, self-control, focus, energy levels, and so on. This feels obvious enough, based on everyday experience.

But it seems we don't yet know how to isolate, measure, or analyze these dynamics in a highly rigorous way.

Of course, there is possibility that the everyday experience is actually by caused some different mechanism we don't understand yet.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#53

Post by edilastic »

averagewall wrote: post #22
OskarS wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give some extra context: this is another study confirming the "replication crisis"[1] in psychology and social psychology (and other sciences as well, but these are the most prominent fields) where longstanding results that were thought to be rock-solid are falling like dominoes. Basically, the science backing, like, half of all TED talks and most episodes of Radiolab is crumbling before our eyes. [1] https://en.w…

It seems like the least competent people to be designing and analysing psychology studies are psychology researchers. Statistics should be the number one skill required. The psychology part of these high-profile studies is usually trivial so that anyone with no psychology background could have thought of it, or at least easily understand it. I don't really see the need for a specialist psychology researcher to do thi…

The irony is that a lot of statistics has really been developed in psychology and allied disciplines without even realizing. Meta-analysis, for example, really developed into its modern form in psychology, as a way of examining psychotherapy effects (even though the basic idea was around beforehand). Deep learning models too also have their roots in psychological models. They're called neural networks, but the models are more psychological than neurobiological per se, and have connections to other models that are firmly in the realm of psychological models.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#54

Post by dwaltrip »

danschumann wrote: post #32

According to marines, will power depletion is bs. This is anecdotal, sure, but I believe in momentum. If you have momentum, at some point, you don't want to fail at any will power task, because you are on a winning streak.

So perhaps the real metric is "motivational momentum"?

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#55

Post by opportune »

ajross wrote: post #29
colemannugent wrote: post #18

I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…

Modern experimental science is just garbage on the whole. Psychology has the disadvantage of a very poor theoretical foundation, making a lot of its pronouncements seem hokey and fabricated. But on the whole I don't think the prevalence of poor measurement and (espeically) bad statistics is any worse there than it is in, say, biology. Unreproducible experiments are the rule in modern science, not the exception.

Depends on the discipline. I haven't really heard of frequent non-reproducible results in physics, chemistry, and geology. It seems to be more of a medicine-biology-psychology problem.

Personally I think psychology shouldn't even be a separate field from neuroscience. Psychology is, after all, merely an emergent phenomenon from neuroscience, but culture can muddy whether psychological results are truly indicative of how humans think or rather of how a culture has conditioned us to behave in a certain way. I can't remember his name (and I hope someone does and links his wikipedia article), but there was a very well-known and controversial figure within the psychology/psychiatry community who believed that psychology was only slightly better than pseudo-science, and that oftentimes it merely studies behavior and pathologizes others based on our culture rather than science. I just think we don't know enough about neuroscience to really make psychology a very legitimate field of study - it's like trying to perform chemistry without the knowledge of electrons.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#56

Post by colemannugent »

aetherson wrote: post #43
colemannugent wrote: post #18

I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…

While most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit, the problem isn't with the idea of observing behavior and trying to deduce underlying principles from that. How do you think that we arrived on those lower-level phenomena that you're lauding? It wasn't by getting an electron microscope and a particle collider from God and starting from there. And we disproved phlogisten without use of lower-level prin…

Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction.

The idea was that phlogiston was released when things burned. This was disproved when it was observed that some things gained weight when burned. Either the concept of weight was wrong, or the concept of phlogiston was wrong.

The scientific method requires you to reduce your reasoning into the lowest-level possible discrete arguments. In this case, scientists were forced to abandon phlogiston as it worked on a very high level, but did not integrate with lower level observations.

My gripe boils down to a desire of psychologists to provide sweeping high-level conclusions without even being able to describe possible lower-level phenomena.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#57

Post by opportune »

dwaltrip wrote: post #54
danschumann wrote: post #32

According to marines, will power depletion is bs. This is anecdotal, sure, but I believe in momentum. If you have momentum, at some point, you don't want to fail at any will power task, because you are on a winning streak.

So perhaps the real metric is "motivational momentum"?

I think the real metric is "it's complicated" and that we shouldn't be hasty to draw over-generalized, innaccurate analogies.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#58

Post by opportune »

averagewall wrote: post #22
OskarS wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give some extra context: this is another study confirming the "replication crisis"[1] in psychology and social psychology (and other sciences as well, but these are the most prominent fields) where longstanding results that were thought to be rock-solid are falling like dominoes. Basically, the science backing, like, half of all TED talks and most episodes of Radiolab is crumbling before our eyes. [1] https://en.w…

It seems like the least competent people to be designing and analysing psychology studies are psychology researchers. Statistics should be the number one skill required. The psychology part of these high-profile studies is usually trivial so that anyone with no psychology background could have thought of it, or at least easily understand it. I don't really see the need for a specialist psychology researcher to do thi…

I think you're being down voted because this might sound overly elitist, but to an extent I agree. As someone who considers himself relatively knowledgeable of statistics (coming from ML background) I have a hard time taking a lot of social science research seriously, because quite frankly, I am often left frustrated at the lack of rigor of their methodologies. Sample sizes are often way too small, and even more frequently, unacceptably biased to draw significant scientific conclusions. You also have the publication-bias problem which means that studies may be accepted as "legitimate" due to p-value hacking or because enough people were studying the problem that someone was bound to get a "statistically significant results" even when there was none.

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#59

Post by forapurpose »

aetherson wrote: post #43
colemannugent wrote: post #18

I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…

While most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit, the problem isn't with the idea of observing behavior and trying to deduce underlying principles from that. How do you think that we arrived on those lower-level phenomena that you're lauding? It wasn't by getting an electron microscope and a particle collider from God and starting from there. And we disproved phlogisten without use of lower-level prin…

> most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit

Based on what? What better source do we have that contradicts it?

Identifying, defining, and measuring psychological phenomena is much more difficult than doing the same with physical phenomena, for obvious reasons. That leads to lower accuracy. Should humanity not even try, leave these questions unanswered, and suffer the consequences?

While there are many failures and there are the flaws associated with every human endeavor (and that applies to other fields too - computer security comes to mind), modern psychology successfully treats many conditions and helps a very large number of people. Consider the world before it, when we didn't understand depression ('stop being lazy!' 'just buck up!'), schizophrenia (demonic possession), bi-polar disorder, anxiety, PTSD (General Patton assaulting a hospitalized soldier), etc. Is all that knowledge and treatment just "bullshit"?

It's sort of common on HN to toss off derisive remarks about psychology - or any field besides what HN readers personally know well, such as computers, math, and natural sciences - but let's hold ourselves to a higher standard: What do we really know?

Re: Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis

#60

Post by Retric »

z55 wrote: post #34
colemannugent wrote: post #18

I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…

It might not seem as clear cut as other natural sciences (which also get fuzzy once you go into the details) but there is credibility in psychological reasoning. The mechanisms that cause a certain behavior are represented as models in psychological research. Such models must, by design, simplify the real mechanisms. But, as opposed to the real mechanism, they can be discussed and disproven, which is what apparently…

When papers drop below the 50/50 threshold and are more likely to be false then true, the entire discipline becomes worthless.
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