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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I got bored. This is an article style I really don’t like, the interesting information is buried towards the end after thousands of mostly irrelevant bits of narrative which aren’t worth remembering.

I can guess the ending though, technical guy sees psychologists appropriating a well defined mathematical structure, doing some hand waving, and claiming that it applies to your everyday life in a shallow way. Guy is hero.

Yes, psychology is absolutely full of bad science and bad scientists. Lots of fields are, but particularly psychology.

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> Yes, psychology is absolutely full of bad science and bad scientists. Lots of fields are, but particularly psychology.

Social sciences in general are probably harder than other fields for the simple reason that it requires other people's time and effort.

A psychologist friend of mine once dropped the line "we know a lot about how university students view the world" when discussing the replication crisis. I think that while simplifying things quite a bit, it is very apt.

Edited for coffee

If the latter were true, I'd be surprised. It's obviously a quip about using students as subjects for credits, but the average psychology study reveals very little about students. After all, it's how they got convinced psi exists (Bem, 2011).

Economics is where you really glean insights into university students. For example, they enjoy free food exponentially more than they like very cheap food. Also, they great at playing games for money.

A related concept which is just a bit broader is WEIRD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic dominate the participants in psychology studies, even when they're not just psychology undergrads encouraged to participate in research.

It's more than that, people who aren't really interested in science or the math required to do good science are attracted to the "social sciences" in a much higher degree. People who are unqualified to do analyses are publishing papers and those papers are getting published with the approval of their peers who are similarly likely to be unqualified.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this article was about twice as long as it needed to be.

I will throw out there that, despite all of the flaws and issues with Psychology as a field of science, it does seem like everyone involved, mostly, did the right thing here. I did skim it, but I didn't really see anyone do anything other than have sour grapes over how it went down, so I feel like this article and situation generally is a good example of a flawed system working out; deferring to truth over ego and orthodoxy.

Some groups would have circled the wagons to protect against this outsider, but that's not what ultimately happened here. Good!

>This is an article style I really don’t like, the interesting information is buried towards the end after thousands of mostly irrelevant bits of narrative which aren’t worth remembering.

This sort of journalism is something I find extremely frustrating. Honestly, I don't care about pretty much anything in the entire section about Brown meeting Wiseman. That whole thing could've been a single paragraph with no valuable information lost. Maybe this is just because we're in the ADHD age, but I couldn't read it because of all of this extraneous information.

Agreed. You're not the only one who dislikes having their time wasted by that kind of writing.

A bit masochistic, but here's my 'favourite' example of this kind of writing, shamefully from none other than the BBC. [0]

See how long it takes you figure out what on Earth they're on about. Also, see how long it takes you to realise the title is an outright lie.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771

This isn't an instant gratification issue, the details which pad this article just aren't very relevant to the point or the title. The life story and mundane details of this man's life don't, or barely, support the main point of the article which is how he debunked and got retracted a well-known paper in a field which wasn't originally his. I might want to read a biography of Albert Einstein, but the biography of this guy just isn't remarkable.

It's the same issue with SEO recipe articles where before the actual recipe there's an inane story about going to the beach with the family dog and finding a starfish before finally getting to the point about fish tacos, or whatever. If the article had been fine details about a few of the ingredients or sourcing them or preparation techniques down to specifics, sure, that would make sense; but if I ask you what time it is and you start telling me about how your grandfather served in WWII I'll probably be a little annoyed.

Agreed. I read through two sections (chapters?) before internally screaming "Get to the point".

Immediately went to the comment section to find a TLDR. This one helped me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30247456

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