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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30033 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.

I don't really see the objection to the original study? Sure if they claimed to be testing all homeless then they're lying, and probably some popular media outlets reported on it that way and were lying, but it's pretty normal to restrict your sample in various ways to reduce noise or just study a specific thing in depth. You just have to be upfront with what question you're actually answering, this seems like a good question to answer still.

High subject mortality is definitely a source of potential bias, if you have a reason to think that the dropouts are different from the continuers in an important way; but again, that's a caveat you should be putting in the results section and discussing the implications of, not a failure of the methodology or an invalidation of the findings.

As usual, I find it helpful to refer back to Debunked and Well-refuted. Yes, lots of science is done poorly, but lots of it is done well, or still gather relevant data that you can learn true things from despite the flaws. It's fun and easy to nitpick flaws in any paper because practical restrictions prevent anything from being perfect, and it's hugely useful to do that preferentially to the papers that don't support your positions, but it's a dangerous game to play.

Yes, lots of science is done poorly, but lots of it is done well, or still gather relevant data that you can learn true things from despite the flaws.

We agree that some science is done well, meaning that it illuminates new technology that actually works.

We agree that some science is done... "poorly", meaning that the technology it purports to reveal does not actually exist.

The current norm is that all claims of new technology propagated through "official" channels are treated as true unless arbitrary standards of proof can be met to discount them. This norm is asinine, and examples overflow of claims of "new" "technology" propagating for decades, perhaps even for centuries without the slightest shred of actual function, even in the teeth of explicit and overwhelming disproof.

This junk science has massively reshaped our entire civilization, and much of it serves as the foundation of our social order. The people who produce it divert vast amounts of resources to themselves from the rest of us, use them to secure completely unjustified amounts of power over the rest of us, and suffer zero accountability for this behavior.

It is imperative that they be stripped of their resources and positions, permanently excluded from all influence over our society, and the changes they made be rolled back.

The current norm is that all claims of new technology propagated through "official" channels are treated as true unless arbitrary standards of proof can be met to discount them. This norm is asinine,

Sure, but we're not talking about popular media summaries or government agencies or w/e, we're talking about critiquing the original publication directly here.

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