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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

#71

Post by jpeloquin »

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.

While theory indicates that many (or even most) published empirical findings are false [1], this doesn't make experimental science garbage in its entirety. Although the signal from individual papers is noisy, some results do get confirmed repeatedly by independent experiments over time. Those results are likely to be correct. Theory and multiple independent experimental methods should converge on the same result as work continues; if this doesn't happen, it's a red flag. Working scientists have to constantly estimate and re-estimate their confidence in a result, but progress still (so very slowly) gets made.

Tracking research developments this way takes a lot of time and expertise. Sometimes unpublished knowledge or insider access are needed. Unfortunately, news reports about science rarely provide the context of prior work and competing hypotheses that is necessary to estimate the veracity of a result. Simple, sensational statements apparently get more clicks. This is not a good situation and leads to the impression that entire fields are garbage. Any effort to fix this communication problem is greatly appreciated.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

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

#72

Post by colemannugent »

canjobear wrote: post #65
colemannugent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sometimes you don't need knowledge of the lower-level phenomena. Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were persuasive even though neither he nor contemporaries could conceive of what the chemical basis of gene transmission would look like.

But they did know that genes were transferred. Modern psychology feels to me like researchers all want to be the one who gets to the big revelation first and so they abandon the typical scientific pursuit of building a standard model.

Newton came up with classical mechanics by simply observing mechanical systems. Darwin and friends came up with the idea of gene transmission by observing the offspring of plants and animals. The difference between them and modern psychologists is that psychologists make very little attempt to explain the underlying phenomena.

Without any explanations, modern psychology is little more than a series of observations. Science is a process, and I feel like that you can't claim real knowledge of things if you can't explain them.

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

#73

Post by _0w8t »

watwut wrote: post #70
BeetleB wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even at a glucose level, various studies have shown relation between our blood sugar and ability to tolerate frustration and make decisions. I think it is exactly these kinds of studies that are being questioned. Can they be reproduced?

Stay hungry (e.g. On low calorie diet) for few days and then watch yourself more nerveus and making dumber decisions.

I fasted for few days on many occasions. The only ill effect was that it was difficult to fall asleep and the sleep was very shallow on second and third night. After that sleep got better. I have not noticed any dumbness. Subjectively perception even improves. This is in line with experience I read in books and articles.

Sometime I use that if I need to drive a long way. I stop eating the day before that ensures that I never fall asleep behind the wheel and my attention stays sharp all the time.

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

#74

Post by travjones »

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.

Interesting. There is actually a concept from behavior analysis called "behavioral momentum." [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_momentum

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

#75

Post by rad88 »

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…

Science isn't driven by principles like that. Nothing is built from the ground up, and data that isn't formally understood or modeled is relied upon often. Though we think of it as a dead end today, the experiments and thinking of alchemists (like Isaac Newton) are part of the history of science and were essential to the development of e.g. chemistry and physics.

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

#76

Post by tmalsburg2 »

nurettin wrote: post #36

Not disputing the paper or the scientific method applied here, but how is "bayesian factor" different than p-values?

In a nutshell: If the p-value is below some conventional threshold (in psychology it's usually 0.05), you can conclude that the null-hypothesis (no effect) is likely wrong and that something else must be the case. However, if p is above the threshold you can't conclude anything, because that means that there is either no effect or that the data was not sufficient to show the effect. So the p-value method (formally known as null-hypothesis significance testing, NHST) can only ever be used to reject the null hypothesis but not to support it. This is where Bayes factors are different. In that approach, you formulate not just one hypothesis but two. Then you test how well both hypotheses are supported by the data. Three conclusions are possible: Hypothesis A receives more support, the alternative hypothesis receives more support, there is not enough evidence to conclude anything with sufficient certainty. Presented this way, the Bayes factor approach appears to be strictly superior to NHST. But there are also some complications that make Bayes factors tricky (related to how you select and formulate the hypotheses) and some statisticians go as far as to say that Bayes factors are obviously non-sense (e.g. Andrew Gelman). The truth is probably that they are neither a panacea nor non-sense.

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

tossaway1 wrote: post #33
pavement wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross. It sounds like a total failure to correctly model reality. Like measuring how blue the sky is, based on how much "blue" is left in the universe. The idea they attempt to quantify is improperly described in terms of qualities. e.g. Do colors even work that way? (...and keep your planck unit, M theory, quantum field eigenstate, history-of-the-big-bang, age of the universe remarks away from this hypothetical exam…

Well of course it sounds ridiculous when you use an absurd analogy. A more reasonable analogy was something like muscle fatigue, or even mental fatigue, and it seems reasonable to believe that willpower can be depleted in a similar way. In fact, there were many published studies consistent with this hypothesis (as the abstract states).

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by danschumann »

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.

Here's the anecdotal video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyakvZgU_gk NVM it was former navy seals who said it

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

#79

Post by pavement »

tossaway1 wrote: post #33
pavement wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross. It sounds like a total failure to correctly model reality. Like measuring how blue the sky is, based on how much "blue" is left in the universe. The idea they attempt to quantify is improperly described in terms of qualities. e.g. Do colors even work that way? (...and keep your planck unit, M theory, quantum field eigenstate, history-of-the-big-bang, age of the universe remarks away from this hypothetical exam…

Well of course it sounds ridiculous when you use an absurd analogy. A more reasonable analogy was something like muscle fatigue, or even mental fatigue, and it seems reasonable to believe that willpower can be depleted in a similar way. In fact, there were many published studies consistent with this hypothesis (as the abstract states).

I disagree.

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

#80

Post by dwaltrip »

opportune wrote: post #57
dwaltrip wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can agree with that.
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