Probably. He has an unusually negative view of academia, doesn’t have much firsthand experience with it (particularly elite academia), and his predictions have tended to be too negative, e.g. re the Higgs Boson, decision theory, and the skill of top academic AI/machine learning researchers. That inevitably slips in to things.
At the beginning of this year I dove into psychology in my free time. I skimmed hundreds, maybe thousands of papers. I expected to find awesome useful ideas. Let me try to explain how much crap I found instead.
It’s easy to nitpick on any specific piece of psychology. Fodor argued about empty labels that made no predictions. Computational models of memory were neither efficient nor biologically plausible. The concept literature is a mess of people arguing over the extent to which concepts are built on rules, or relations, or exemplars, or prototypes, or affordances, or schemas, or codelets, or perceptual symbols, or analogies, without ever finding the underlying math which explains why concepts are useful, when and how any of those kind of underlying concept-stuff could work.
But maybe those are examples of people failing to make unified theories out of their experimental results. What if we focus on the experiments? Here’s the setup of a fairly recent nominal combination experiment: A child is asked to picture a zebra clam, and then to point at an image which is most similar to their imagined interpretation of the phrase. This is not an unusual experiment for psychology. Asking people what they think and thereby distilling their entire thought process down to one data point is the norm is psychology, not the exception. For example, the entire personality psychology research program was built on self- and peer-evaluations, just asking people “are you a pretty confident person?” and so on. That alone is amazing. It’s like using the motion of an electron you don’t understand to predict the motion of a proton you don’t understand. But back to the zebra clam. No one decided to try that study because they thought it would answer any foundational questions of their field. It wasn’t valuable information, it was just an easy test which they could do, one that sounded relevant to their favorite child’s-interpretation-of-zebra-clam hypothesis.
That’s a taste of what I see in psychology research. Hundreds of studies that never should have been done, a field that doesn’t know what observables to measure (I don’t know either! Brains are hard, I’m not saying I would be a great psychologist, I’m just saying psychology happens to be bad presently), and fluff arguments about intuitive theories.
Those were some of the fruits of my last research binge. Now I’m looking at logic, decision theory, and game theory. The situation is different there, but not much better. That said, while academics are generally incompetent, they’re not relatively incompetent. I don’t know anywhere to find people who can reliably solve new, alien problems.
For example, the entire personality psychology research program was built on self- and peer-evaluations, just asking people “are you a pretty confident person?” and so on. That alone is amazing. It’s like using the motion of an electron you don’t understand to predict the motion of a proton you don’t understand.
You say that as if it were an obviously bad thing. But, well, if you don’t understand the motion of electrons or protons, but want to figure them out, what else can you do than start conducting easy experiments and start looking for regularities that you could build your theory on?
And yes, many research programs are partially built on self- and peer-evaluations. But those evaluations are also checked for stability between rating occasions and between raters, and then looked at in order to find stable correlations between the evaluation and objective measures, ones which persist after other factors have been controlled for.
Sure, it might be better if you could find some completely objective measures to start out from… but the human brain has great tools to evaluate other human brains. Humans have effectively been handed a ready-made toolkit, parts of which evolved for the express purpose of extracting complex regularities about the behavior of themselves and others and distilling their observations into a highly compressed format. If you devise a measure which achieves good consistency and inter-rater reliability, that’s strong evidence of something, and you’d be crazy not to take advantage of it to try to figure out what it means.
Now I’m not saying that psychology would be perfect, or even great. There is a lot of crap, and the theories are still a mess. But I don’t think it’s as hopelessly bad as you’re implying it to be, either.
What do you think about statistics/machine learning? Also what exactly do you mean when you say the situation in “logic” is scarcely better than in psychology? Do you mean mathematical logic/model theory? GOFAI? Logic in analytic philosophy?
One area where psychology journals are said to be leading the way is encouraging a discussion of effect sizes. It’s shocking to me that all journals don’t do this.
I think Eliezer had a too low prior for academic competence in physics, which rubbed off on everyone else because he can be pretty damn convincing. His Bayesian Conspiracy stories show a small dedicated group working much faster than academia. The quantum physics sequence made a similar point. He has since changed his mind a little. IMO it’s not enough, and most of LW still doesn’t appreciate how competent you have to be to make good new science.
Is the default prior on academic competence on LW low/unfavorable? If so, why?
availability bias from being exposed to bad examples of scholarship?
I wonder if EY is partly to blame.
Probably. He has an unusually negative view of academia, doesn’t have much firsthand experience with it (particularly elite academia), and his predictions have tended to be too negative, e.g. re the Higgs Boson, decision theory, and the skill of top academic AI/machine learning researchers. That inevitably slips in to things.
I do have some firsthand experience with it and still feel somewhat negatively about it, though not to the degree EY does.
At the beginning of this year I dove into psychology in my free time. I skimmed hundreds, maybe thousands of papers. I expected to find awesome useful ideas. Let me try to explain how much crap I found instead.
It’s easy to nitpick on any specific piece of psychology. Fodor argued about empty labels that made no predictions. Computational models of memory were neither efficient nor biologically plausible. The concept literature is a mess of people arguing over the extent to which concepts are built on rules, or relations, or exemplars, or prototypes, or affordances, or schemas, or codelets, or perceptual symbols, or analogies, without ever finding the underlying math which explains why concepts are useful, when and how any of those kind of underlying concept-stuff could work.
But maybe those are examples of people failing to make unified theories out of their experimental results. What if we focus on the experiments? Here’s the setup of a fairly recent nominal combination experiment: A child is asked to picture a zebra clam, and then to point at an image which is most similar to their imagined interpretation of the phrase. This is not an unusual experiment for psychology. Asking people what they think and thereby distilling their entire thought process down to one data point is the norm is psychology, not the exception. For example, the entire personality psychology research program was built on self- and peer-evaluations, just asking people “are you a pretty confident person?” and so on. That alone is amazing. It’s like using the motion of an electron you don’t understand to predict the motion of a proton you don’t understand. But back to the zebra clam. No one decided to try that study because they thought it would answer any foundational questions of their field. It wasn’t valuable information, it was just an easy test which they could do, one that sounded relevant to their favorite child’s-interpretation-of-zebra-clam hypothesis.
That’s a taste of what I see in psychology research. Hundreds of studies that never should have been done, a field that doesn’t know what observables to measure (I don’t know either! Brains are hard, I’m not saying I would be a great psychologist, I’m just saying psychology happens to be bad presently), and fluff arguments about intuitive theories.
Those were some of the fruits of my last research binge. Now I’m looking at logic, decision theory, and game theory. The situation is different there, but not much better. That said, while academics are generally incompetent, they’re not relatively incompetent. I don’t know anywhere to find people who can reliably solve new, alien problems.
You say that as if it were an obviously bad thing. But, well, if you don’t understand the motion of electrons or protons, but want to figure them out, what else can you do than start conducting easy experiments and start looking for regularities that you could build your theory on?
And yes, many research programs are partially built on self- and peer-evaluations. But those evaluations are also checked for stability between rating occasions and between raters, and then looked at in order to find stable correlations between the evaluation and objective measures, ones which persist after other factors have been controlled for.
Sure, it might be better if you could find some completely objective measures to start out from… but the human brain has great tools to evaluate other human brains. Humans have effectively been handed a ready-made toolkit, parts of which evolved for the express purpose of extracting complex regularities about the behavior of themselves and others and distilling their observations into a highly compressed format. If you devise a measure which achieves good consistency and inter-rater reliability, that’s strong evidence of something, and you’d be crazy not to take advantage of it to try to figure out what it means.
Now I’m not saying that psychology would be perfect, or even great. There is a lot of crap, and the theories are still a mess. But I don’t think it’s as hopelessly bad as you’re implying it to be, either.
What do you think about statistics/machine learning? Also what exactly do you mean when you say the situation in “logic” is scarcely better than in psychology? Do you mean mathematical logic/model theory? GOFAI? Logic in analytic philosophy?
One area where psychology journals are said to be leading the way is encouraging a discussion of effect sizes. It’s shocking to me that all journals don’t do this.
I think Eliezer had a too low prior for academic competence in physics, which rubbed off on everyone else because he can be pretty damn convincing. His Bayesian Conspiracy stories show a small dedicated group working much faster than academia. The quantum physics sequence made a similar point. He has since changed his mind a little. IMO it’s not enough, and most of LW still doesn’t appreciate how competent you have to be to make good new science.