Fully agree on the bias part, although specialists being incompetent isn’t a thread in my article? There’s an entire aside about why some research doesn’t get done, and incompetence isn’t among the reasons.
I’ve read the Slate article you linked, and I think it’s good. I don’t see anything in there that I disagree with. The article is from 2019 when the amount of evidence (and importantly the number of people who successfully replicated it) was just one Instagram dog. Even back then in the article scientists are cautious but lukewarm and want a more rigorous study. Now we have a more rigorous study running.
All this stuff has been addressed in the comments and in the updated article. I’m quite adamant that misinterpreting dog output is the primary danger and I don’t claim confidence in specific abilities, precisely because we need more study to determine what’s real and what’s confirmation bias/misinterpretation.
That wasn’t a point about dog research, it was a point about dynamics of what kind of discoveries and research gets made more often.
“in the 60s” for social/cognitive/psychology-adjacent research has to be a bit like “in mice” for medicine. Either way, people try to do something and fail, 60 years later someone comes up with an approach that works. That’s a completely normal story.
I thought about taking you up on the bet at 3:1 but I don’t like the “vast majority” part. I think it’s too much work to specify the rules precisely enough and I’ve spent enough time on this already.
Fully agree on the bias part, although specialists being incompetent isn’t a thread in my article? There’s an entire aside about why some research doesn’t get done, and incompetence isn’t among the reasons.
I’ve read the Slate article you linked, and I think it’s good. I don’t see anything in there that I disagree with. The article is from 2019 when the amount of evidence (and importantly the number of people who successfully replicated it) was just one Instagram dog. Even back then in the article scientists are cautious but lukewarm and want a more rigorous study. Now we have a more rigorous study running.
All this stuff has been addressed in the comments and in the updated article. I’m quite adamant that misinterpreting dog output is the primary danger and I don’t claim confidence in specific abilities, precisely because we need more study to determine what’s real and what’s confirmation bias/misinterpretation.
That wasn’t a point about dog research, it was a point about dynamics of what kind of discoveries and research gets made more often.
“in the 60s” for social/cognitive/psychology-adjacent research has to be a bit like “in mice” for medicine. Either way, people try to do something and fail, 60 years later someone comes up with an approach that works. That’s a completely normal story.
I thought about taking you up on the bet at 3:1 but I don’t like the “vast majority” part. I think it’s too much work to specify the rules precisely enough and I’ve spent enough time on this already.