Another victim in the "replication crisis" bloodbath for psychology.
Personally, I'm probably going to wait 5 years before I believe any psychology science claim. Especially if it confirms something I already believe in :)
Personally, I'm probably going to wait 5 years before I believe any psychology science claim. Especially if it confirms something I already believe in :)
In hindsight, it is kind of funny in a dark-humor way.
In saying that I think there will be a self correcting mechanism in more physically based science. If something can be replicated it can be built upon and new discoveries made. If something can't be replicated it will end up being forgotten about.
Also I do think that science needs a way of reporting failed studies and failed replication. At the moment all the glory and funding go to studies that produce positive results. Producing a failed result is still valid science and should be doccumented.
Unfortunately, this approach seems to be at odds with the incentive structure in academia
They were also pretty open in vocalizing that they didn't believe the result in paper X in journal Y. They knew the problem existed.
Psychology must be one of the hardest disciplines to design experiments for.
Personally, I see this blanket dismissal as one of the blind spots of our otherwise intelligent community.
Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail?
That's called kernel development (from scratch) :P
Problem is, right now you can't tell which they are.
Not ALL, but the replication crisis has demonstrated that at least 2/3 of such studies can't be replicated.
If you had a communication channel where 2/3 of your packets failed to deliver, I'd say a statement like "this channel isn't reliable" is very justified.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences.
I'd prefer a more substantial discussion of the findings or paper at hand rather than to just bring up the replication crisis anytime any psychological finding is mentioned on HN.
I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever.
This tends to produce responses that earn us clever points with the least effort possible.
We've heard about the replication crisis a thousand times, we've heard about the Gell Mann effect. Neither of these alone constitute a substantive argument against a particular scientific paper or piece of journalism.
I'm waiting for someone to write a bot to post Gell Mann and Replication Crisis replies to every newspaper article or psychology paper. Maybe someone already has...
Credibility doesn’t depend on the relative difficulty of proving out truth claims. We don’t owe Psychology or Sociology blind faith because their claims are (arguably) more difficult to confirm than harder sciences.
You may well be bored of hearing about the replication crisis—you’re entitled to your opinion, but the low quality of the field of psychology is pretty relevant to the topic.
> I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever.
Apparently so are psychologists :) (kidding, I have lots of respect for psychologists and other researchers even if the fields themselves are prone to drawing bad conclusions)
Just the "lol math is hard and statistics is annoying" crowd. Honestly the thing that pisses me off most about psychology students is how only a tiny fraction of them understands and gets the actual importance of hard statistics to their field.
But instead, it's almost accepted to trash the statistics courses as just these boring hurdles to get past by. And it's still cool to suck at math.