This is a very good point. You make a compelling case that the use of careful statistics is not a recent trend in psychology. In that regard, my penultimate paragraph is clearly just deeply and irrecoverably wrong.
(And ultimately, I notice that your examples of recent discoveries are from biology, astronomy/physics, and math—fields whose basic soundness has never been in doubt. But what non-trivial, correct, and useful insight has come from all these mathematized soft fields?)
Well, I was responding to Eliezer’s claim about a general lack of a scientific process. So the specific question then becomes can one give examples of “non-trivial, correct, and useful” psychological results that have occurred in the last year or so. There’s a steady output of decent psychology results. While the early work on cognitive biases was done in the 1980s by Kahneman and Tversky, a lot of work has occurred in the last decade after. But, I agree that the amount of output is slow enough that I can’t point to easy, impressive studies that have occurred in the last few months off the top of my head like I can for other areas of research. Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta’s investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn’t even this year.
However, at the same time, I’m not sure that this is a strike against psychology. Psychology has a comparatively small field of study. Astronomy gets to investigate most of the universe. Math gets to investigate every interesting axiomatic system one can imagine. Biology gets to investigate millions of species. Psychology just gets to investigate one species, and only certain aspects of that species. When psychology does investigate other intelligent species it is often categorized as belonging to other areas. So we shouldn’t be that surprised if psychology doesn’t have as high a production rate. On the other hand, this argument isn’t very good because one could make up for it by lumping all the classical soft sciences together into one area, and one would still have this problem. So overall, your point seems valid in regards to psychology.
I didn’t have in mind just psychology; I was responding to your comment about soft and wannabe-hard fields in general. In particular, this struck me as unwarranted optimism:
[A] paper that uses statistics in a flawed fashion is indicative of how much progress the soft sciences have made in terms of being real sciences in that one needs bad stats to get bad ideas through rather than just anecdotal evidence.
That is true if these sciences are nowadays overwhelmingly based on sound math and statistics, and these bad stats papers are just occasional exceptions. The pessimistic scenario I have in mind is the emergence of bogus fields in which bad formalism is the standard—i.e., in which verbal bad reasoning of the sort seen in, say, old-school Freudianism is replaced by standardized templates of bad formalism. (These are most often, but not always, in the form of bad statistics.)
This, in my opinion, results in an even worse situation. Instead of bad verbal reasoning, which can be criticized convincingly in a straightforward way, as an outside critic you’re now faced with an abstruse bad formalism. This not only makes it more difficult to spot the holes in the logic, but even if you identify them correctly, the “experts” can sneer at you and dismiss you as a crackpot, which will sound convincing to people who have’t taken the effort to work through the bad formalism themselves.
Unless you believe that such bogus fields don’t exist (and I think many examples are fairly obvious), they are clear counterexamples to your above remark. Their “mathematization” has resulted in bullshit being produced in even greater quantities, and shielded against criticism far more strongly that if they were still limited to verbal sophistry.
Another important point, which I think you’re missing, concerns your comment about problematic fields having a relatively small, and arguably less important scope relative to the (mostly) healthy hard fields. The trouble is, the output of some of the most problematic fields is used to direct the decisions and actions of the government and other powerful institutions. From miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscience used in courts to catastrophic economic crises, all kinds of calamities can directly follow from this.
No substantial disagreement with most of your comment. I will just note that most of your points (which do show that I was being overly optimistic) don’t as a whole substantially undermine the basic point being made about Eliezer’s claim.
I think your point about small fields being able to do damage is an interesting one (and one I’ve never seen before) and raises all sorts of issues that I’ll need to think about.
In 2011, we’ve had such novel scientific discoveries as snails that can survive being eaten by birds, we’ve estimated the body temperature of dinosaurs
(...)
Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta’s investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn’t even this year.
Have these results been replicated? Are you sure they’re correct? Merely citing cool-looking results isn’t evidence that the scientific process is working.
Remember, “the scientific process not working” doesn’t look like “cool results stop showing up”, but looks like “cool results keeping showing up except they no longer correspond to reality”. If you have no independent way of verifying the results in question, it’s hard to tell the above scenarios apart.
Bertsch and Pesta’s work has been replicated. The dinosaur temperature estimate is close to estimates made by other techniques—the main interesting thing here is that this is a direct estimate made using the fossil remains rather than working off of metabolic knowledge, body size, and the like. So the dinosaur temperature estimate is in some sense the replication by another technique of strongly suspected results. The snail result is very new; I’m not aware of anything that replicates it.
This is a very good point. You make a compelling case that the use of careful statistics is not a recent trend in psychology. In that regard, my penultimate paragraph is clearly just deeply and irrecoverably wrong.
Well, I was responding to Eliezer’s claim about a general lack of a scientific process. So the specific question then becomes can one give examples of “non-trivial, correct, and useful” psychological results that have occurred in the last year or so. There’s a steady output of decent psychology results. While the early work on cognitive biases was done in the 1980s by Kahneman and Tversky, a lot of work has occurred in the last decade after. But, I agree that the amount of output is slow enough that I can’t point to easy, impressive studies that have occurred in the last few months off the top of my head like I can for other areas of research. Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta’s investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn’t even this year.
However, at the same time, I’m not sure that this is a strike against psychology. Psychology has a comparatively small field of study. Astronomy gets to investigate most of the universe. Math gets to investigate every interesting axiomatic system one can imagine. Biology gets to investigate millions of species. Psychology just gets to investigate one species, and only certain aspects of that species. When psychology does investigate other intelligent species it is often categorized as belonging to other areas. So we shouldn’t be that surprised if psychology doesn’t have as high a production rate. On the other hand, this argument isn’t very good because one could make up for it by lumping all the classical soft sciences together into one area, and one would still have this problem. So overall, your point seems valid in regards to psychology.
I didn’t have in mind just psychology; I was responding to your comment about soft and wannabe-hard fields in general. In particular, this struck me as unwarranted optimism:
That is true if these sciences are nowadays overwhelmingly based on sound math and statistics, and these bad stats papers are just occasional exceptions. The pessimistic scenario I have in mind is the emergence of bogus fields in which bad formalism is the standard—i.e., in which verbal bad reasoning of the sort seen in, say, old-school Freudianism is replaced by standardized templates of bad formalism. (These are most often, but not always, in the form of bad statistics.)
This, in my opinion, results in an even worse situation. Instead of bad verbal reasoning, which can be criticized convincingly in a straightforward way, as an outside critic you’re now faced with an abstruse bad formalism. This not only makes it more difficult to spot the holes in the logic, but even if you identify them correctly, the “experts” can sneer at you and dismiss you as a crackpot, which will sound convincing to people who have’t taken the effort to work through the bad formalism themselves.
Unless you believe that such bogus fields don’t exist (and I think many examples are fairly obvious), they are clear counterexamples to your above remark. Their “mathematization” has resulted in bullshit being produced in even greater quantities, and shielded against criticism far more strongly that if they were still limited to verbal sophistry.
Another important point, which I think you’re missing, concerns your comment about problematic fields having a relatively small, and arguably less important scope relative to the (mostly) healthy hard fields. The trouble is, the output of some of the most problematic fields is used to direct the decisions and actions of the government and other powerful institutions. From miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscience used in courts to catastrophic economic crises, all kinds of calamities can directly follow from this.
No substantial disagreement with most of your comment. I will just note that most of your points (which do show that I was being overly optimistic) don’t as a whole substantially undermine the basic point being made about Eliezer’s claim.
I think your point about small fields being able to do damage is an interesting one (and one I’ve never seen before) and raises all sorts of issues that I’ll need to think about.
(...)
Have these results been replicated? Are you sure they’re correct? Merely citing cool-looking results isn’t evidence that the scientific process is working.
Remember, “the scientific process not working” doesn’t look like “cool results stop showing up”, but looks like “cool results keeping showing up except they no longer correspond to reality”. If you have no independent way of verifying the results in question, it’s hard to tell the above scenarios apart.
Bertsch and Pesta’s work has been replicated. The dinosaur temperature estimate is close to estimates made by other techniques—the main interesting thing here is that this is a direct estimate made using the fossil remains rather than working off of metabolic knowledge, body size, and the like. So the dinosaur temperature estimate is in some sense the replication by another technique of strongly suspected results. The snail result is very new; I’m not aware of anything that replicates it.