51–60 of 238 posts
I have no basis to argue against the article, but I would think there is more incentive to game it now so I wouldn't take it as a given that things have improved.
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> 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…
>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.
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>When you think about it, it's insane that metascience isn't studied more. We're going to question every little detail about the universe, but we're just going to take on faith that peer-review and publication in journals is an effective method for weeding out "bad" science? In a sense we do have this: engineering and finance. Engineering turns good hard science into new tools, machines and weapons, and Finance turns…
> In a sense we do have this: engineering and finance. Engineering turns good hard science into new tools, machines and weapons, and Finance turns good (predictive) soft science into new ways to make money. I think this is a common critique, but I also think it is missing the point. What if the question of interest isn't so easily verifiable like in Engineering? Do we just throw up our hands and give up on those ques…
Some things may well be complex enough that it's simply impossible, with the amount of resources available to the average university, to conduct a thorough enough study on a representative enough sample that accounts for enough confounding factors to make a statistically sound prediction that generalises. If this were the case for a significant proportion of the subjects of study of a particular field, then it might well be better to "give up" and admit we don't and cannot know, otherwise we're essentially creating a factory for bad science (as the available resources relative to the scope of the problem aren't sufficient to create good science, and there's no negative feedback to stop the bad science).
If it is not a hard science, then it is likely a variant of philosophy.
The part that confused me the most, as someone who has never done research science, was how the questions were casually categorized as gender, ethnicity or no-identity salient. If someone is from Brazil and is of second or third generation Japanese descent, how much of the questions are 'salient' to Brazilian identity vs Japanese? There's an unspoken implication that part of the 'good at math' stereotype relies to so…
When you think about it, it's insane that metascience isn't studied more. We're going to question every little detail about the universe, but we're just going to take on faith that peer-review and publication in journals is an effective method for weeding out "bad" science?
Also dont want to point fingrers but some scientists come from places where cheating is the norm.
What I remember most is that the clinical psychologist kept fishing as to why I covered my face with my hair and I kept saying that there is no reason other than gravity and that I cannot control that my hair obscures parts of my face and the report contained that I did it on purpose to hide my face, which I'm fairly certain I did not, but it seemed that this was really what the clinical psychologist settled on early and continued to search evidence in support of.
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>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.
That seems broad enough to describe the human history isn’t it? So, “keep doing what you do”?
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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…
We truly are as T.S Elot said the hollow men.
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…
This has been criticized since 1999 and far longer back. How long ago is the Rosenhan Experiment again?
Dare I say that a majority have always held a dismissive, critical view of such matters. But of course, those that hold dismissive views of it are not the ones who work in such fields, and certainly not at the top ready to implement changes, so it can continue to persist and go on despite of being highly criticized.
At least when I studied physics at a university around what must have been 2005, most of the students and professors there were highly critical of softer science and it often came up that some of these papers popped up and were viciously criticized for clear and obvious systematic errors in the methodology.