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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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A psychologist himself, Adam Mastroianni proclaims: I'm sorry for psychology's loss, whatever it is.

I found this post on the slatestarcodex subreddit. The main article discusses how the replication crisis really isn't as bad as most people think, because:

Gino's work has been cited over 33,000 times, and Ariely's work has been cited over 66,000 times. They both got tenured professorships at elite universities. They wrote books, some of which became bestsellers. They gave big TED talks and lots of people watched them. By every conventional metric of success, these folks were killing it.

Now let's imagine every allegation of fraud is true, and everything Ariely and Gino ever did gets removed from the scientific record, It's a Wonderful Life-style. (We are, I can't stress this enough, imagining this. Buzz buzz, I’m bees.) What would change?

Not much.

Basically this idea can be boiled down to 'well most modern psychologists don't do anything that's even remotely important, so why do we care if these studies don't replicate?' I'm very wary of buying this type of argument. One reason is that over $2 billion dollars went into psychology research, in the US alone, way back in 2016. I'm sure it has increased since then.

On top of that, as psychologists themselves have acknowledged, many public policies get based on psychological research. In the light of the replication crisis, this is perhaps the largest and most under-discussed mistake of the 21st century. The majority of our politicians are basing their decisions, and public justifications, on a field of science that has been proven to be mostly fake. To me, that's not something we can just throw up our hands at and say is trivial.

Another interesting point, which I won't go too far into, is that many of the replicable studies in psychology are just completely ignored. Here's a highly-upvoted comment on the SSC subreddit:

Psychology has nothing interesting left because all of the rock-solid empirical results with tremendous real-world consequences were buried due to being politically awkward.

Psychometrics, heredity of various personality traits, innate gender differences, etc.

So you're naturally left with irrelevancies (monkey prostitutes) and lies (growth mindset, power posing, priming, multiple intelligences).

It's almost enough to make me empathize with Gino and Ariely. The modern discipline is all about garbing feel-good falsehoods with vestments of science. Their only crime was taking the more direct path to that end, rather than undertaking the standard rituals of plausibly innocent methodological infirmities (p-hacking etc.)

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not Psychology deserves an equal place among the rest of the sciences.

In all, 3.2 percent of the nation's $66.2 billion in federal research funding went to psychological research in 20161,2 (approximately $2.1 billion).

2 billion is still way too much but it's at least better than 66 billion!

I agree with your premise though. Psychology is important and it's done badly. Mental health is getting worse.

“I agree with your premise though. Psychology is important and it's done badly. Mental health is getting worse.”

Interested way to word this. It’s also the standard I have for complete abandonment of an idea. Sounds a lot like communism has never been tried etc.

"Psychology" is not analogous to "communism"; it's analogous to "politics". It doesn't make sense to say that because X theory about Y phenomenon is wrong and harmful, Y phenomenon isn't worth studying.

You think understanding the human mind is not important? Clearly there's a lot wrong with academic psychology but the very notion of understanding human behavior is not wrong.

66b is way too much.

LMAO. Thanks for the correction. Will edit.

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