I would like to see fewer low quality science papers posted. FB put in way more work than was justified. My new policy is to down vote every psychology paper posted without any discussion of the endemic problems in psychology research and why that paper might not be pure noise.
Are all psychology papers garbage? And if only some are, how do you tell which is which if you don’t read past the first line of the abstract? (which FB didn’t, because he was unaware that more than one experiment was conducted).
We have to filter the papers somehow and the the people who do the filtering have to read them. But that doesn’t mean that the people doing the filtering should be people on LW. Username relied on a journalist for filtering. This does filter for interesting topics, but not for quality. That Username did not link the actual paper suggests that he did not read it. Thus my prior is that it is of median quality and pure noise. Even if psychology papers were all perfectly accurate, there are way too many that get coverage and it is unlikely that one getting coverage this month is worth reading.
There are standard places to look for filters: review articles and books.
I would like to see fewer low quality science papers posted. FB put in way more work than was justified. My new policy is to down vote every psychology paper posted without any discussion of the endemic problems in psychology research and why that paper might not be pure noise.
Are all psychology papers garbage? And if only some are, how do you tell which is which if you don’t read past the first line of the abstract? (which FB didn’t, because he was unaware that more than one experiment was conducted).
We have to filter the papers somehow and the the people who do the filtering have to read them. But that doesn’t mean that the people doing the filtering should be people on LW. Username relied on a journalist for filtering. This does filter for interesting topics, but not for quality. That Username did not link the actual paper suggests that he did not read it. Thus my prior is that it is of median quality and pure noise. Even if psychology papers were all perfectly accurate, there are way too many that get coverage and it is unlikely that one getting coverage this month is worth reading.
There are standard places to look for filters: review articles and books.
Okay that’s very fair.