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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-ubc-covers-for-bad-science-in-homeless-cash-transfer-study

A major university (in Canada) published another one of those studies where they give homeless people money and see if they spend it on crack or job applications. Mostly this was met with admiration and joy by the journalist class. The more right-leaning publication I posted above is more skeptical, pointing out of some of the potential problems with the study:

Unfortunately, putting a thumb on the scale was almost the first thing the researchers did. 732 possible participants in the study were screened. The UBC folk didn’t want their sample to include the long-term homeless, so to be eligible, participants had to have been homeless for less than two years. Also, they rejected severe drug and alcohol abusers and the mentally ill.

...

Note that the researchers didn’t even consider including the tent-dwelling, park-occupying homeless: merely by working with shelters, and with the people who prefer to sleep indoors despite some filth and danger, they were giving themselves an enormous implicit advantage. The study, having kinda announced at the outset that it’s garbage, goes on to describe how 229 people were chosen from the screening sample to provide the experimental group for the study. Alas, of the 229 people who took $7,500 payments, half (114) of them disappeared from view and didn’t complete the series of questionnaires and tests they had supposedly undertaken.

This isn't that interesting, it's just a bad study done in Vancouver, what I found interesting was the writer starts with a brief summary of the replication crisis, to an audience that is presumably not intimately familiar with it:

You ever hear of a guy named Daryl Bem? Bem is a social psychologist from Cornell University, now retired at age 85. In the ‘90s, after a long conventional career as an experimenter, he took up the cause of establishing evidence for human extrasensory precognition, and did some studies that seemed to confirm it exists. This set off a war in psychology as critics descended on Bem to nitpick the flaws in his studies and citations of psychic phenomena. Article content

In the end, the consensus about Bem’s research was mostly not that he used mainstream tools of statistical analytics improperly. He had mostly coloured within long-established scientific lines and followed his training in hypothesis tests — everyone’s training. Article content

Bem is now widely regarded as a weird sort of antihero who inadvertently demonstrated flaws in classic hypothesis testing, and whose late work was ground zero for the current “replication crisis” in psychology. It is not that humans are psychic: it is that you can prove the absurd proposition “humans are psychic” by very lightly abusing the received 20th-century scientific method.

There has been and is lots of discussion here about relaying rationalist concepts or ideas to outsiders or average random people in Mottizen's day-to-day lives. With the rise of culture war divisions, and especially the political rhetoric surrounding the Coronavirus Lockdowns and other policies, I'm wondering what approach if any you use when talking to acquaintances or friends who skew liberal, who broadly are happy to have the inertia of universities or the intelligentsia on their side, that you often reject social science research or findings unless personally having vetted them, without sounding to them like a low-IQ backwater hick redneck science denying flat-earther. I suspect that this is impossible.

The researchers are not "putting their thumb on the scale" when designing their study to address a certain subset of the homeless population that actually wants to leave their condition of homelessness by explicitly excluding the long-term homeless from its cohort (who presumably are more content with that lifestyle, having been in that situation for longer).

Correct, it's more like both hands, both feet, and possibly a small elephant on the scale.

They excluded the homeless who are the biggest problem, then when half their study population disappeared with the money that didn't count against their claim that the results were good.

I don't think the design was fraudulent or the researchers stooges, but the reporting of anything will become trivial if you add enough conditions and disclaimers. Obviously if you give some people thousands of dollars, /some/ of them will be /some/ degree of better off. But the bridge between the magnitude of that benefit from the study to "And that's why this would be a good policy for governments to implement" is weakened by every one of those conditions and disclaimers which reduce the level of generality the study is good for.

No, but the design is so obviously flawed before the data was gathered and further ignoring those they lost track of should have been more than enough for any reputable journal to reject the paper. I’m personally suspicious even of the good faith of the team here, these flaws are so large and obvious to outsiders that it seems impossible that people doing professional research could just accidentally make them.

I think the opposite is true, though, in this case. You don't need a well-designed study to tell you that drug addicts and the mentally ill and people who prefer sleeping on the street when shelter beds are available probably aren't going make the wisest decisions when given large sums of money. We already know that; the more interesting question is what happens if we give people who don't have all these problems large sums of money, because homeless people are usually lumped together into one homogeneous mass of derelicts.

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