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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28318 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.

There are probably some good heuristics to cut through dubious social science publications, from simply ignoring it, to ignoring journalism about specific studies while perusing the study yourself. It seems the op-ed writer didn't understand some basic points about the study. He seemed critical of the (not unusual) large amounts of screening/filtering of participants. This only means that it isn't a study about homelessness in general, which isn't necessarily good or bad. The NP author also seemed to imply a (not unusual) about 50% loss to follow up. This didn't happen. The half of people they lost contact with were never enrolled in the first place. They did exclude people with severe drug and mental problems for ethical issues, fearing overdose. Nevertheless, ~15% of the participants had moderate drug problems, and about 50% had mental health diagnoses. So this seems to make the case for ignoring journalists. The study results seemed to indicated that giving a well screened subset of homeless reduces the State and saves money. Its one study. And I'm reminded of this Oren Cass article on "Policy Based Evidence Making". So while I'm optimistic, I'm only about 2% swayed. More study is needed.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/policy-based-evidence-making

that you often reject social science research or findings unless personally having vetted them

Well, the easiest person to fool is myself, so I'm generally skeptical of unreplicated social science (there have been some fantastic, salacious recent scandals!). Plenty of liberals write books and papers making the case for skepticism of social science, so I just mention those books, the reproducibility crisis, the math behind it, things like Bem (iirc there is also a study that proves you can age one year backwards), the recent scandals, etc, and the conversations are pretty normal.

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