[HN Gopher] The control group is out of control (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
The control group is out of control (2014)
Author : stakkur
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-01-22 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slatestarcodex.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slatestarcodex.com)
| amelius wrote:
| Reminds me of a talk of Rupert Sheldrake at Google Talks:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic18Xyk9is
|
| and then later he gave a talk called "The Science Delusion" which
| got banned from TED:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg
| 3np wrote:
| What do you mean by "banned" (as opposed to just taken down
| from their video channel)?
|
| BTW, YouTube title says "TED TALK"; note that it's TEDx.
| amelius wrote:
| Does it matter? Sheldrake makes some wild claims, but
| eloquently packs them in a talk that is entertaining and at
| times thought-provoking. In any case, his braveness is
| certainly admirable. Worth a watch, I would say (perhaps with
| a pint of beer).
| monocasa wrote:
| [2014]
| darkerside wrote:
| Arthur Conan Doyle, through Sherlock Holmes, said, once you've
| eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how
| improbable, must be the truth.
|
| This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and
| Wiseman does not. It actually makes perfect sense. People who are
| psychic wouldn't be skeptics, and people who are not psychic
| certainly would be skeptics.
| kibwen wrote:
| I suppose that, had Conan Doyle been aware of quantum
| mechanics, Sherlock Holmes would have spent a portion of every
| case entertaining the notion that quantum phenomena caused the
| universe to spontaneously arrange the crime scene.
|
| "It's elementary particles, my dear Watson."
| ModernMech wrote:
| No, I think the story would have been exac
| eternalban wrote:
| > This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and
| Wiseman does not.
|
| Alternatively it is possible we all have psychic powers (but
| not all are conscious of it) and our thoughts actually shape
| our reality.
| aradox66 wrote:
| This is a simpler and more coherent theory that also has more
| explanatory power
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| It also simplifies gender theory a lot by making self-
| identification the end of the discussion.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| (2014)
| jrockway wrote:
| They need to invent control group version 2. It worked for Linux.
| olliej wrote:
| Well this certainly makes me glad that the only time I was having
| to do statistical studies for research purposes, it was in the
| context of generated code performance.
| FabHK wrote:
| The "fits of nervous laughter" paper by Wiseman & Schlitz (1998)
| was replicated by Wiseman & Schlitz (1999) [1], with a similar
| yet different result: RW (again) found no effect of staring, MS
| found a significant (p=0.05) effect of staring, but with
| _opposite_ direction than the 1998 paper.
|
| [1] https://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/expt2.pdf
| , found on
|
| https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/research/parapsychology...
| mannykannot wrote:
| Hence the enthusiasm for preregistration of trials.
| gumby wrote:
| > That is, in let's say a drug testing experiment, you give some
| people the drug and they recover. That doesn't tell you much
| until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn't
| work - but which they themselves believe in - and see how many of
| them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover
| whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do
| significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven't
| found anything.
|
| I had a drug program in which we blew away the standard placebo
| rate ... unfortunately our placebo arm did too, though not by as
| much. But it was just enough that we weren't _enough_ better than
| our placebo arm.
|
| We changed modality from the current standard (we were an
| injection rather than a tablet and all the trial participants
| were super excited.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| So you just accidentally performed an experiment that
| injections have a stronger placebo effect than pills.
| dTal wrote:
| For that, they would have needed a control group that took
| placebo pills. They can estimate the likely behavior of such
| a group from other trials, but it's not a rigorous experiment
| unless they do it themselves, carefully controlling all the
| other possible variables.
| csee wrote:
| Assuming methods were the same, the first study was the
| control.
| [deleted]
| civilized wrote:
| There is no such thing as a standard placebo rate. If there
| was, there would be no need for every study to have a control
| group.
| gumby wrote:
| For the particular indication we were going after there had
| been a number of topical trials and academic studies that
| showed that the placebo response was less than 1%,
| essentially no different from spontaneous (i.e. no
| treatment). Same was true of oral. This is pretty common in
| fungal infections unfortunately.
|
| The FDA wanted us to compare against the topical treatment
| placebo rate for various technical reasons.
|
| Perhaps you thought that "standard" was some sort of standard
| for any placebo for any indication and any mode of
| administration? Indeed that would make no sense.
|
| Even specifying a placebo itself is non obvious. Of course
| your procedure and the object itself (tablet, whatever) is
| ideally indistinguishable by the study participant and,
| ideally the clinician (hard to do, say, when it's a surgical
| procedure; you can't hide that from the clinician). But even
| with a pill, you can't always just supply, say, a slug of
| mannitol -- that might actually affect what you're studying.
| civilized wrote:
| Thanks, this is helpful additional info. Sorry, I didn't
| mean to contradict you, I was actually trying to reinforce
| the principle behind your experience. There is no true
| "standard" for what sort of placebo should be used in a
| trial, even if something has become "standard" in the sense
| of commonly used. It is not something that can be specified
| in the abstract, but is a matter of expert judgment with
| many variables.
|
| Your trial gave an appropriate placebo, regardless of the
| "standard" in the field, and thus you were shielded from
| overstating the evidence of drug effectiveness.
| mauricioc wrote:
| I understood it as "(standard placebo) rate", not "standard
| (placebo rate)". That is:
|
| "standard placebo" (tablets) << "new placebo format"
| (injection with no active components) < "real drug"
| (injection).
| [deleted]
| skrebbel wrote:
| So maybe that isn't what the GP meant? You're telling the
| person who did a study that they misunderstand the utter
| basics of studies, based on a 3-sentence comment they wrote.
| rictic wrote:
| Sometimes people misunderstand the basics of their full
| time work yes
|
| We've all seen that person, and almost all of us have at
| times _been_ that person
|
| And unfortunately, given the replication crisis, there is
| no reason to assume that a published scientist is not
| making a fundamental error that undermines the validity of
| their work. It apparently happens quite frequently, and we
| should be quite grateful for those that question and probe
| at assumptions and potentially faulty analysis techniques
| [deleted]
| nathanwh wrote:
| Honestly this XKCD arguing that psychic phenomena don't exist
| because they're not exploited for profit is a comforting
| difficult to refute argument for me: https://xkcd.com/808/
| HWR_14 wrote:
| You don't know if people are using them for profit. Are the
| best surgeons guided by auras or do Oil companies use
| divinations?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| How do you know the things the chart says aren't happening
| really aren't happening?
| Groxx wrote:
| Astrology, Tarot, and many similar things are absolutely used
| by people in financial planning, yeah. And on the more
| "acceptable" and orders of magnitude more people side of
| things, just look at "lucky x" with lottery purchases.
|
| But that's still a LOT less profit exploitation than e.g. GPS
| which is ubiquitous. Curses haven't replaced drones in the
| military. Crystals aren't in billions of electronic devices
| wait
| wtallis wrote:
| There would be evidence. The chart helpfully points out a
| specific kind of evidence that is more or less impossible to
| conceal with any kind of conspiracy.
| Izkata wrote:
| One kind of possible evidence.
|
| A flipside example: Financial world could instead be used
| by individuals on casinos, betting, stock markets, etc. and
| they'd have incentive to keep it secret so they keep
| winning.
| wtallis wrote:
| It might be plausible to assume that someone exploiting
| ESP or whatever to beat the house could keep the secret
| of _how_ they 're winning. But it's a lot less plausible
| to postulate that they could keep secret the fact that
| they _are_ beating the house or beating the market,
| unless the effect size is too small to be of much
| interest in the first place (ie. you have to largely
| abandon part of the original hypothesis: that the crazy
| phenomenon actually _works_ ).
| yosamino wrote:
| This argument has the structure of a conspiracy theory:
| "A small group of people being able to keep an enormous
| secret, in order to manipulate the rest of us."
|
| The more enormous the secret and the larger the group of
| people who supposedly are in on it, the more the
| probability of the secret not being a secret very long
| approaches one.
|
| I find it very unlikely that a shortcut to making a lot
| of money would be secret for very long.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| no planned obsolescence took place for a number of
| consumer products.
|
| multiple and costly military invasions were to offer
| democracy as goodwill and for world safety.
|
| a certain vaccine I can't dare to name is a vaccine as it
| does provide immunity.
|
| the institutions of most democracies surely can't be so
| corrupted.
|
| worldwide cocoa isn't mostly harvested by enslaved
| workers.
|
| HIV is so far more prevalent in Africa because they can't
| afford treatment and understand prevention measures
| there.
|
| JFK.
|
| I could go on and on but not sure how many examples you
| would need to accept that the chances for enormous
| secrets known by even a significantly large group to not
| take a freaking long time before blowing up is rather
| close to zero. thus reconsidering your opinion on the
| existence of conspiracies.
|
| and, about shortcuts to making a lot of money being kept
| rather well secrets: dark budgets, secret and hidden
| inflation, supply fudging
| wtallis wrote:
| In particular, as the scope of the conspiracy grows, the
| cost of _keeping_ that secret _very quickly_ outstrips
| any potential profit from exploiting the secret. Eg. if
| oil companies could use ESP to know where to drill, then
| they would still need to be spending large sums of money
| on computers and software to analyze seismic data, or
| else the collapse of demand for those products would
| expose the conspiracy.
| aradox66 wrote:
| theptip wrote:
| It's a sound point. Even a very small edge in precognition or
| mind reading (no matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds
| to beat the market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do
| not exist because nobody is doing this.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Mind reading doesn't seem terribly useful if it is in a
| relatively small radius.
|
| But you could do that, or just make enough money gambling in
| poker rooms and racetracks.
|
| Hell, if you could see a few days into the future, it might
| be smartest to just break that out when the lottery gets big
| enough one time.
| mistermann wrote:
| Actually this only shows that this specific form does not
| exist, or has not been discovered, or possibly something else
| both of us have overlooked.
| rkk3 wrote:
| Hedge funds do beat the market, individually. Steve Cohen
| probably has psychic powers.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers.
|
| What about his track record cannot be adequately explained
| by mundane insider trading?
|
| Edit: Puzzled by the downvotes. I think it's entirely fair
| to ask whether Cohen is enough of an outlier that it
| requires a psychic explanation, even after accounting for
| the degree of success that can be reasonably attributed to
| luck and non-psychic skill (effects which other hedge fund
| managers are also subject to) plus the insider trading he's
| been involved in (which other hedge fund managers are not
| necessarily subject to).
|
| In a world with a finite number of hedge fund managers,
| there is always going to be somebody who is the most
| successful out of the bunch, and that somebody is almost
| certainly going to appear to be an outlier even without a
| supernatural influence on their success. So before
| attributing anything to psychic powers, we first have to
| establish whether he's _too successful_ to be accounted for
| by the non-psychic explanations. I genuinely don 't know
| enough about Steve Cohen's track record to know whether
| he's that much of an outlier, and I'd appreciate some real
| information about the degree of his success rather than
| just downvoting.
| nradov wrote:
| Just to play devil's advocate, how do you know they're not? A
| psychic hedge fund manager wouldn't necessarily reveal their
| secret.
| alar44 wrote:
| Because hedge funds don't beat the market for more than a
| year or two at a time, no one does. It's all a scam.
| Nothing beats just holding index funds.
| aradox66 wrote:
| That's only true on average.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Renaissance's Medallion fund, net fees, has beat the
| market almost every year since 1990. Twice by more than
| 100 percentage points.
|
| Maybe Simons is psychic and all the quant stuff is just a
| coverup.
| theptip wrote:
| A single psychic hedge fund manager wouldn't reveal
| themselves, but as an industry if you're trying to hire
| psychics it would not be possible to keep this fact secret.
| q-big wrote:
| > Even a very small edge in precognition or mind reading (no
| matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds to beat the
| market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do not exist
| because nobody is doing this.
|
| It is known that many people who consider that they might
| have psychic powers are on the highly sensitive side.
|
| Knowing people who are highly sensitive, I can easily imagine
| that the enormous stress, pressure and greed in a hedge fund
| environment would make hedge funds a horrible work
| environment for such people.
| bshepard wrote:
| Just because a phenomenon can't be industrialized doesn't mean
| it doesn't exist; you can't industrialize lyric poetry, for
| example.
| wtallis wrote:
| The phenomena discussed in that comic were chosen for
| inclusion specifically because they actually _would_ lend
| themselves quite easily and obviously to commercial
| exploitation if they really existed as popularly conceived.
| If you stipulate that all of those alleged psychic phenomena
| are inherently not exploitable in those ways or any other
| significantly profitable way, you 're basically redefining
| those terms contrary to their popular meanings and just
| moving the goalposts.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The same could be said of antibiotics. However, before
| Ehrlich & Pasteur, there were no large scale use or even
| specific awareness of the concept (i.e. some cultures had
| folk medicinal remedies that involved antibiotics but the
| mechanism and specific compounds were not understood).
|
| So until the 1880s, there was no commercial exploitation of
| these compounds, yet they nevertheless existed either in
| actuality or potential. Once there was an understanding of
| the principles and the development of some related chemical
| and biochemical processing, this exploded and had a
| dramatic impact on human life.
|
| If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps
| there were specific compounds that could be used to cure
| infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it
| not be analogous to respond that since nobody is
| commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not
| exist?
| wtallis wrote:
| > If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that
| perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used
| to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse,
| would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is
| commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do
| not exist?
|
| None of the ideas included in the xkcd comic are
| particularly new or obscure. Despite being pigeonholed as
| a certain kind of bullshit, they are still ideas that a
| _lot_ of people have heard about and been hearing about
| for a very long time--more than enough time for someone
| to get around to commercially exploiting if that were in
| fact practical. _Ghostbusters_ came out 37 years ago, and
| the stuff it made fun of was familiar enough to its
| audience.
|
| However, in 1785 the principles of chemical engineering
| _were_ largely unknown, precluding the development of a
| modern-style pharmaceutical industry. It did not,
| however, prevent widespread use of antibiotic treatments
| that we now understand the mechanism for and can refine
| or synthesize into more effective forms.
| bshepard wrote:
| (1) All of these practices depend on cultivating virtues that
| are contradictory to industrialization/capitalization: just
| as lyric poetry is.
|
| (2) It is intriguing to consider commercial music as an
| industrial utilization of lyric poetry, but the point is that
| the individual activity of lyric poetry is not amenable to
| industrialization IN ITSELF, but it still exists. But perhaps
| this example doesn't work -- the really important argument is
| above, namely, that the cultivation of these practices --
| astrology, dousing, etc, is individuated, and oriented around
| virtues directly opposed to their mass utilization.
|
| (3) As other commentators have noticed, we also don't know
| that these sciences aren't used on a mass
| technological/industrial fashion --- it seems likely, for
| instance, that there are corporate entities that use i ching
| divination, and likely, too, that there are financial firms
| that utilize astrological methods -- but wouldn't reveal this
| because of the likely opprobrium from a still dominant (if
| clearly declining) orthodox materialism...
| itronitron wrote:
| The parent comment didn't mention industrializing it but
| rather turning a profit, and many recording artists have
| profited from their lyric poetry.
| Stupulous wrote:
| Many self-proclaimed psychics have made a good amount of
| money in the practice as well.
| kragen wrote:
| RCA did.
| jpttsn wrote:
| What if in the time before the discovery of e.g. quantum
| mechanics you did the same analysis? Would it tell you that
| quantum mechanics doesn't exist?
| wtallis wrote:
| If you don't have a theory of quantum mechanics and you don't
| have any observable phenomena that require a quantum
| explanation, then there's nothing to apply this kind of
| analysis to, and nothing to reject the existence of.
| normac2 wrote:
| The author of this blog, Scott Alexander, has an online novel
| called Unsong [1] based on this idea. In the book's universe,
| Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things)
| corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew
| characters to find names of God that give various powers.
|
| [1] https://unsongbook.com/
| mathattack wrote:
| Yes. The existence of casinos disproves psychic powers.
| NateEag wrote:
| It may be that psychic powers exist but that they are not
| powerful, general, or controllable enough to be reliably
| profitable.
|
| Also, if every profitable phenomenon in the world is already
| developed, then no business should ever invest in fundamental
| research - i.e., the pharmaceutical companies are wasting their
| research dollars.
|
| Why is it comforting to you to believe psychic powers don't
| exist?
| gs17 wrote:
| Yeah, e.g. someone who can, for example, consistently predict
| single bits of output from true random number generators 51%
| of the time would be evidence of something very strange going
| on, but not necessarily usable for anything practical. (Maybe
| if you could gather enough of these people to overcome the
| "weak" ability?)
| mathattack wrote:
| If you could consistently predict stock moves 51% of the
| time eventually you'd have all the money in the universe.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by 51% of the time. If you're
| just making a directional prediction, "will the next
| market day be up or down?", that's nowhere near enough.
|
| A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you
| can't use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all
| the money.
| ajuc wrote:
| Try "will the X go up or down next second".
|
| > A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet
| you can't use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make
| all the money.
|
| You can make money, just not ALL the money. And that's
| because other people know that too.
| SilasX wrote:
| Wait, what? I don't have a specific cite, but I thought
| that predicting a random number generator that well is good
| enough to break common crypto algorithms?
|
| IIRC, doing better than chance by 2^-32 is enough for the
| randomization system to be thrown out, and marching the
| output 51% is way better than that.
|
| But yes, I'd agree with a steelmanned version of your point
| with a much smaller improvement over chance. But then, you
| would have to do a realllllly long test and it wouldn't
| actually look that impressive.
| prionassembly wrote:
| AdaBoost, etc. were invented precisely to make good use of
| weak predictors.
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of
| different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be
| conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because
| the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting,
| apparatus and procedure beforehand, "conducted by" pretty much
| just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental
| instructions, and doing the staring._
|
| _The results? Schlitz's trials found strong evidence of psychic
| powers, Wiseman's trials found no evidence whatsoever._
|
| _Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two
| experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus,
| having no contact with the subjects except to introduce
| themselves and flip a few switches - and whether one or the other
| was there that day completely altered the result. For a good
| time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to
| make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This
| is the only journal article I've ever read where, in the part of
| the Discussion section where you're supposed to propose possible
| reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-
| author hacked into the computer and altered the results._
|
| Well, if you would take the "psi can never exist" blinders off,
| Mr. Codex, then this seems to be a pointer towards "this works
| better if you believe it will work", and it makes _perfect_ sense
| if you accept this.
|
| Schlitz's belief that it would work resulted in it working.
| Wiseman's belief that it wouldn't resulted in it not working.
|
| The whole idea behind psi is that the human mind can sense and/or
| effect the world in currently-inexplicable ways, and _here it is
| doing just that_. With at least ten other experiments on this
| idea getting similar results. But parapsychology is completely
| and utterly a scam in your eyes so that is not a result you will
| consider.
| einpoklum wrote:
| One can get quite a bit of popular traction from arranging for
| one's theory to be effectively-impossible to disprove (e.g. "it
| only works if you believe in it during the experiment"). Not
| much explanatory power though.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The experiment I excerpted his description of seems to go
| along with _exactly that_. Experimenter who believes? Things
| happen. Experimenter who does not believe? Nothing happens.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| So if you assume ESP doesn't exist then parapsychology research
| has something important to say about the replication crisis in
| social sciences.
|
| This is a surprising thing I wouldn't have thought of on my own.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _The Control Group Is Out of Control_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7666575 - April 2014 (74
| comments)
| ed-209 wrote:
| "...things we haven't discovered yet which are at least as weird
| as subconscious emotional cues" - sounds like psi to me.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This post really makes you think and challenged my world view
| when I first read it.
|
| A while back I looked at the CIA "Star Gate" files[1], which, are
| a collection of documents released under FOIA detailing the CIA's
| investigation into psychic powers and whether or not those powers
| serve an intelligence gathering purpose. I just opened up random
| files and skimmed them - I wish I had taken notes when doing so,
| but my impression was that the CIA was actually producing some
| better than chance results with their experiments.
|
| I don't really know what to make of parapsychology or psychic
| powers in general. Sometimes I'll idly wonder if I should
| dedicate time to trying to uncover my psychic powers.
|
| 1 - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
| mcculley wrote:
| I was intrigued by this wording: "which most reasonable people
| believe don't exist"
|
| Maybe I am pedantic, but it should be "which most reasonable
| people don't believe exist"
| intrepidpar wrote:
| Well, arguably believing that something doesn't exist and not
| believing that something exists are two different things.
| mcculley wrote:
| Exactly. As a skeptic, I have no reason to believe. I don't
| believe it exists. If I believed that it did not exist, I
| would have a belief about it.
| xapata wrote:
| No, it's reasonable to phrase it as a belief that the
| phenomenon doesn't exist. That's a positive belief of the
| negative. The alternative of lack of belief in existence is a
| more neutral stance.
| mcculley wrote:
| Lack of belief is the more skeptical stance, which seems more
| reasonable to me.
| wtallis wrote:
| Skepticism doesn't mean resisting any justification for
| moving the needle of your certainty away from 50%.
|
| You are allowed to expect that psychic phenomena being real
| would lead to the existence of clear evidence that psychic
| phenomena are real, and to conclude from the lack of such
| evidence where it ought to be found that it is less likely
| that psychic phenomena are real.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| this is similar to a kind of subject and object confusion:
|
| subject: most reasonable people
|
| object: psi phenomena
|
| verbs: to believe, to exist
|
| The full statement can be stated in at least two ways:
| "[ these people ] don't believe that [ these phenomena ]
| exist." "[ these people ] believe that [ these
| phenomena ] don't exist."
|
| Either one is valid, as are the contracted versions, but the
| first one describes the absence of belief in existence, and the
| second describes the presence of a belief in non-existence.
|
| These are closely related things, but not identical, and I
| imagine the author likely chose carefully.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| > I know that standard practice here is to tell the story of
| Clever Hans and then say That Is Why We Do Double-Blind Studies.
|
| Yes, this is the answer to this entire article, and his attempt
| to dismiss this for some reason is strange to me.
| igorkraw wrote:
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| This is a strange take.
|
| I thought it was a fascinating write up about how if you
| assume ESP doesn't exist then parapsychology research has
| something important to say about the replication crisis in
| social sciences.
|
| Going into how double blind solves all this means skipping
| the interesting bit: that parapsychology can be viewed as a
| control group for the scientific method.
| igorkraw wrote:
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. He's definitely smart, and so it was a mystery to me
| why his articles were so incredibly long and rambling. (I get
| that some people enjoy his prose regardless of content, but
| I'm not one of them.) Why would a smart person who in theory
| wants to convey important points be so obscurantist about
| them? I threw up my hands and put it down to a personality
| quirk.
|
| It was the Sandifer article "The Beigeness" that cleared it
| up for me: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-
| beigeness-or-how-to...
| wpietri wrote:
| And I really object to the comment I'm replying to getting
| flagged. I get that some people will disagree, but flagging
| it as if it were somehow inappropriate is a misuse of
| flagging power.
| phreack wrote:
| That was a very eye opening article that also cleared up
| what was bothering me about Scott's style. Thanks for
| sharing.
| _dain_ wrote:
| have you considered the possibility that he is simply correct
| about HBD?
| igorkraw wrote:
| Depends what you and him _exactly_ mean, but since he 's
| talking about the neoreactionaries being correct, I'll
| assume he doesn't mean the scientific version which posits
| that race has no genetic basis (ctrl+F "race")
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
|
| but more this variation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism.
|
| Even if it was correct, I think if there are no nefarious
| consequences being pushed for, I think people who want to
| argue HBD should rise to the challenge of explaining in
| plain english what they mean and what consequences they
| would draw from their assumption being correct, instead of
| hiding behind obfuscation. While I am not necessarily 100%
| aligned with groups like AntiFa chapters, BLM etc., at
| least they are _honest_ about what they think and want to
| achieve.
| wpietri wrote:
| Have you considered the long history of racist misuse of
| science and its "just asking questions" defenders?
| chalst wrote:
| Andrew Gelman had an interesting 9-years-too-late idea for what
| to do in cases like Bem's article:
|
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/27/jpsp-done-...
|
| Rather than publish all of the dubious speculations and the
| analysis whose problems took time to emerge, simply publish the
| data. The advantage, in his words:
|
| > In the example of the ESP study, if anything's valuable it's
| the data. Publishing the data would get the journal off the hook
| regarding fairness, open-mindedness, and not missing a scoop,
| while enabling others to move on reanalyses right away, and
| without saddling the journal with an embarrassing endorsement of
| a weak theory that, it turns out, was not really supported by
| data at all.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Incentives: Spend five years doing difficult / expensive /
| dangerous research, gathering data that demonstrates X. The
| data set is vast, and you can get ten papers out of it, one
| every six months with some awesome collaboration and possibly
| tenure.
|
| Do you do that or
|
| publish all your data in the first paper and watch a dozen grad
| students publish your next nine papers in three weeks ?
|
| Incentives matter yes. Science and data should be free and
| transparent. But if we pay peanuts and expect the monkeys to
| appreciate the applause of publication, we need to change our
| incentive structure.
|
| The reasons AI / ML researchers don't mind publishing the data
| early is because they already get 500k salaries and equity.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Obvious question then: what are the arguments/forces opposing
| this? Just inertia in the publishing norms?
| [deleted]
| Misdicorl wrote:
| The approach fails miserably when taken in aggregate. I would
| read five to ten papers from my own field a week while in
| grad school. If I had to do the analysis for myself as well
| there wouldn't be any time to do my own research.
|
| Add on twenty more papers a week from adjacent fields where I
| don't even know all the techniques and the magnitude of the
| problem hopefully becomes clearer.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| The raw figures would be available in addition to the paper
| itself, not instead of it.
| chalst wrote:
| Gelman's suggestion is how to handle articles with
| unlikely conclusions: don't publish the submitted
| article, though that presumably would be circulated as a
| preprint, but just the data. Then the journal is bringing
| attention to interesting data without endorsing the
| dubious analysis or conclusions.
| csee wrote:
| There is an incentive against doing it. No researcher wants
| the embarrassment of having an error that they didn't know
| about discovered. Journals don't fancy the embarrassment or
| hassle either. It would serve broader scientific progress,
| but that's not who is deciding to hide the data.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| A tragedy of the commons, then?
| teekert wrote:
| If you ever find yourself thinking like this, get the f out
| of science asap, you have no idea what you are doing.
| teh_infallible wrote:
| " Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for
| psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able
| to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena."
|
| Therefore psychic phenomena exist? I don't see the problem.
| selestify wrote:
| It's only a problem if you have strong priors telling you that
| they don't exist, because that indicates a lot of other
| scientific fields are in trouble.
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