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An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

psychologytoday.com

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Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#81

Post by mbell »

baddox wrote: post #75
mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

How does your criticism apply to this scenario? The conclusion of the study (if correct) would in fact provide some predictive power: one would be able to make some predictions about a random child's generosity given their religious upbringing. It should also be repeatable, assuming the methodology for gathering and analyzing the data was published.

They didn't confirm the model worked by testing the predictions. No successful predictions = not worthy of being considered as 'fact'.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#82

Post by sanchezdev »

mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

I partially agree. Perhaps you comment is related to Brieman's Two Cultures? Paper: https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726

I think you're right that they are two different things, but I'm not sure that later isn't science.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#83

Post by mbell »

didibus wrote: post #63
mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

I think the bigger issue is intellectually lazy readers and media which don't really care to understand nuances or spend any effort reviewing and fact checking things. You can't control labels, no one can control what is labeled science or not, we just need to educate people, demand more of our media, and breed a culture that take more pride in truth, accuracy, precision, and intellect.

> I think the bigger issue is intellectually lazy readers and media which don't really care to understand nuances or spend any effort reviewing and fact checking things.

Sure, I don't disagree, but do you have any path toward this 'enlightenment'? I mean, the average college attending student has a literacy level of about 7th grade. How would you propose we move from there to a point where even the average, much less most, voting age adults can not only digest a paper but also be capable of poking holes in its reasoning?

> You can't control labels

Of course you can, it's what politics and marketing are all about.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#84

Post by tathougies »

mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

So here's the issue. There is a segment of the population that is skeptical and a segment of the population that is not. When the skeptical segment expresses distrust of a scientific paper and names specific grievances, oftentimes the unskeptical population will accuse them immediately of being 'anti-science'. This is a major problem, because when -- inevitably -- some problem in a paper is acknowledged by the wider 'science' community, the unskeptical 'pro-science' people who have framed the entire issue as being 'for' or 'against' science automatically make the less educated skeptical people all the more skeptical of science, until they actually become the caricature they were believed to be.

The solution to this of course is for everyone to remain more skeptical when it comes to science, and -- for the times when you do have reason to believe particular studies -- to respond in good faith to other skeptics, rather than to resort to name calling. If you are unable to defend why a certain piece of research should be believed, you should probably either accept that you are not educated enough to be able to comment and thus are also not doing 'science', or that the guy you disagree with may have a good point and the researcher in question bears the burden of proof.

On it's own, I think scientists making bad research and then retracting it would not cause people to distrust science. The 24-hour pop science news cycle combined with the massive rise of scientism as a religion (and the skeptics the equivalent of a medieval atheist) has.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#85

Post by caseysoftware »

efa wrote: post #8
bediger4000 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said that the retraction was covered by 4 outlets.

Boy how common and sad that is. Sensational findings on the front page. Correction saying sensational finding totally wrong buried on page ten or not published at all.

Which furthers the "fake news" narrative because now even more people can point out the BS on the front page.

Why don't reporters get angry about this and demand more and better retractions? This hurts their credibility more than anyone.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Scapeghost wrote: post #49

I am from a third-world religious country and I'd just like to take this chance to say that religion should be classified as a mental disorder. I see the effects of it first hand, severely crippling the potential of individuals and entire cultures. There's nothing it offers that can't be taught by basic morals which don't require you to appease an imaginary entity or repress the human spirit. Even the leaders of reli…

[deleted]

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#87

Post by mbell »

tathougies wrote: post #84
mbell wrote: post #42

I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, an…

So here's the issue. There is a segment of the population that is skeptical and a segment of the population that is not. When the skeptical segment expresses distrust of a scientific paper and names specific grievances, oftentimes the unskeptical population will accuse them immediately of being 'anti-science'. This is a major problem, because when -- inevitably -- some problem in a paper is acknowledged by the wider…

> There is a segment of the population that is skeptical and a segment of the population that is not.

I think you missed the biggest segment: not paying attention. It's for these folks where terminology and clarity is important.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#88

Post by blackbrokkoli »

This is fundamentally one of the many disastrous outcomes of scientific publishing being controlled by greedy conglomerates.

For the uninitiated: If you want to publish a scientific paper today, you basically sign up to sign over the rights to any publisher that's interested (please someone publish me). That publisher will then review that paper in a more often than not mostly undisclosed process and publish that paper. Everyone knows that to be a high-regarded publisher one must have a very own typographic formatting: Unreadable font, weird multi column layout to prevent accessibility and tables disregarding standards are a good start. Afterwards, the paper gets published on the publisher website, which again follows as little agreed upon standard as possible. Data is of course excluded, study itself is in PDF. Also put up a fat paywall, don't want those pesky poor people be scientifically literate. Give a few cents of your $70 fee to the authors, it is not an unethical business you're doing here!

THIS is the systemic error people seem to be so happy to ignore because they're neck deep in social science not being real science memes.

This prevents interesting new startups for fact-checking or meta analysis, which are e.g. happening in journalism because that field has a lot of the things science is sadly lacking.

This creates a drift between extremely rich and rather poor countries/unis/humans in scientific ability.

This generates a tar pit for scientific process.

This wastes billions in funds because of people unaware of each other doing redundant studies (and not referencing/refuting/supporting each other in the process neither, of course) because they are literally better search engines to find Harry Potter fan fiction than there are for finding studies.

And finally, this of course allows anything from honest statistical mistakes to snake oil sellers to slip through and doing generations worth of damage, because correcting, fact checking, re-researching, comparing, meta research, anything is slowed to a crawl.

So please stop embracing scientific elitism and gatekeeping for this is exactly what brought us here in first place...

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#89

Post by gnicholas »

xamuel wrote: post #73
dukoid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is no need to be concerned that the retraction won't be widely covered in the long run in this particular case though -- all the religious interest groups will make a big fuss about this...

A good religious institution should rise above the fray and not even bother fussing about something like this. No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study. It's the religious equivalent of a political cartoon--it changes no one's mind, it just fills up space and generates clicks/citations. "Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they…

No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study.

It may be true that reading about the study would not have convinced anyone to become a practicing Christian. But there were undoubtedly people who were on the fence about going back to church, either for themselves or for their kids, who decided not to based on the purported conclusion that it made kids less generous. So just because the study alone might not have convinced anyone to follow Christ, there still might be more practicing Christians if the study had been done correctly (and therefore garnered very little coverage) or if the correction had been covered as widely as the original flawed study.

Re: An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted

#90

Post by blackbrokkoli »

cjohansson wrote: post #52

Psychology, sociology and theology (and more logys?) was never meant to be sciences. We can blame the enlightenment for that idea, let’s revert them back to renaissance activities

I hope you do realize the irony in just declaring that something was "never meant to be a science"...

Science is about constantly evolving via falsification of theories.

You might want to base your definition of what can be science on something different than an unsourced appeal to authority from 300 years ago?

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