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.
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.