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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28386 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.

Did you look at the "randomized" cohort breakdown of the ~half of the already heavily screened applicants from a pool of already screened applicants (homeless shelters) they were able to contact for the length of the study? There are a few blazing red flags of confounded and polluted data, e.g., gender split, first time homeless, "want to be employed," annual income, receiving income assistance, receiving disability assistance, and more.

If you did a "randomized cohort controlled" study and your demo breakdown in the participants who lasted to the end of it were this different even after you have heavily pre-screened an already screened group from which you recruited participants, you should go back and try again because your randomization process either didn't work or your methodology influenced the results to such an extent as to confound the effect you were "studying," especially given the statistical power were talking about.

As far as I can tell, they're using individual participant outcomes while randomizing at the cluster level using an already small sample size and calculating the stat sig based on the participant n instead of adjusting downwards due to likely correlative effects from the clustering itself. They have different inclusion data for control/cash groups, i.e., control group had to complete a post-survey whereas the cash group were included if they simply received the cash, which is troubling because the groups had 20% different response rates which makes me think if they had the same inclusion criteria the left-over numbers either didn't produce significance even with their p games or a result they didn't like. They fiddle with a bunch of other stuff in odd ways which make me suspicious they're fiddling with an agenda, but I'm not diving into the appendix info, and I'm not going to request raw data they claim they will give out.

This study has an obvious agenda, the purpose of this study is to affect public policy, every methodology decision will bias the results in a certain way the authors want, and the abstract is written for journalists who share that agenda to push it likely glossing over all of the caveats which the authors littered throughout the paper rendering its application to policy all-but worthless even if that data wasn't poor (and it is).

It's a made-for-journalists "study" designed to create evidence to push an agenda. The study is very underpowered even if they didn't expect high attrition rates. These people aren't morons; they know what they're doing and it's high time we stop pretending they don't.

particularly when that journalist has no formal training in the sciences themselves. It's precisely these kind of low-brow takes that throw the humanities into question, not reputable scientific researched published in (of all journals!) PNAS.

no, the humanities and "reputable scientific research" published in "reputable" journals earned skepticism if not outright hostility all on their own with this published study being yet another example of why

arguing that this study is roughly up to the standards of this area of research and writing isn't a defense of the study, but a condemnation of it, its authors, and the journal which published it

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