There’s already a fair bit of discussion of a left-bias in the social sciences and it’s something I hear many academics complain about. My impression is that this is a limitation, but that the issue is a lot more complicated than a simple “we just need more conservative scientists” answer.
Yeah. Both sides would agree that the answers are already known. Instead we need people looking for answers in the territory, doing experiments, and evaluating them impartially.
Okay, temporarily, adding people from underrepresented political groups would help to also make their standard answers considered. But what we need in long term is people without strong political agenda. (And yes, the predictable counter-argument is that people “without agenda” are actually proponents of status quo. But what I mean is not being for or against status quo, but the ability to change one’s mind after observing evidence.)
I could imagine the Chinese Government being in a position to spearhead social science research in a way not at all accepted in the United States. Arguably their propaganda sophistication is already quite good. I’m not sure if their improvement of propaganda has led to fundamental insights about human behavior in general, but I would expect things to go in that direction, especially if they made a significant effort.
As long at they can keep the “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice” approach, it could work. But who knows how long before the pendulum swings in the opposite direction.
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I have an idea—not sure whether it was tried before—to do research on people who are willing to pay for self-improvement. I mean, some people already participate in all kinds of programs that promise to fix their problems and improve their skills; they are even willing to spend a lot of money. So maybe we could popularize research on paying volunteers; which would simultaneously solve the problem of funding research.
Like, imagine that psychologists have 3 different ideas of how to… get rid of bad habits, or whatever, and they open a program for volunteers who will pay a relatively small sum to be randomly assigned to one of 3 groups, and given the therapy. For the client, they receive scientific treatment, for relatively small money. For the researcher, they get lot of volunteers. The disadvantage is that the volunteers are not representative of the population in general, but let’s not kid ourselves, neither are the subjects of most experiments. We could simply admit that we research what techniques work best for the research volunteers, and then do the research on them properly.
I’m not sure about your specific proposal, but in general imagine there’s a lot of room to experiment on “paying people to be test subjects in interesting ways”. This can only go so far in the short term, but as technology improves it will probably get easier to manage.
I believe Vertias Genetics gives large discounts to people who are willing to give up their genetic data for scientific use, for instance.
Yeah. Both sides would agree that the answers are already known. Instead we need people looking for answers in the territory, doing experiments, and evaluating them impartially.
Okay, temporarily, adding people from underrepresented political groups would help to also make their standard answers considered. But what we need in long term is people without strong political agenda. (And yes, the predictable counter-argument is that people “without agenda” are actually proponents of status quo. But what I mean is not being for or against status quo, but the ability to change one’s mind after observing evidence.)
As long at they can keep the “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice” approach, it could work. But who knows how long before the pendulum swings in the opposite direction.
.
I have an idea—not sure whether it was tried before—to do research on people who are willing to pay for self-improvement. I mean, some people already participate in all kinds of programs that promise to fix their problems and improve their skills; they are even willing to spend a lot of money. So maybe we could popularize research on paying volunteers; which would simultaneously solve the problem of funding research.
Like, imagine that psychologists have 3 different ideas of how to… get rid of bad habits, or whatever, and they open a program for volunteers who will pay a relatively small sum to be randomly assigned to one of 3 groups, and given the therapy. For the client, they receive scientific treatment, for relatively small money. For the researcher, they get lot of volunteers. The disadvantage is that the volunteers are not representative of the population in general, but let’s not kid ourselves, neither are the subjects of most experiments. We could simply admit that we research what techniques work best for the research volunteers, and then do the research on them properly.
Thanks for the thoughts here!
I’m not sure about your specific proposal, but in general imagine there’s a lot of room to experiment on “paying people to be test subjects in interesting ways”. This can only go so far in the short term, but as technology improves it will probably get easier to manage.
I believe Vertias Genetics gives large discounts to people who are willing to give up their genetic data for scientific use, for instance.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/01/for-600-veritas-genetics-sequences-6point4-billion-letters-of-your-dna.html