61 ms·

Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”

819 points by skmurphy 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
skmurphy 9y ago
Summmary: explains context and background for a comment left by Kahneman https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc... "I accept the basic conclusions of this blog. To be clear, I do so (1) without expressing an opinion about the statistical techniques it employed and (2) without stating an opinion about the validity and replicability of the individual studies I cited. What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. [...] My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me, but the argument only holds when all relevant results are published." [Edit/add] Kahneman also outlined an approach to address concerns in 2012 in an open letter in Nature see https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppinfoFile/Kahneman%20Letter.pdf https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppin... [linked from https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...] which was apparently ignored by the priming researchers.
- rhizome 9y ago
  are you quoting from something?
  - dang 9y ago
    We've added quotation marks to disambiguate that.
  - SapphireSun 9y ago
    Daniel Kahneman responded to this blog in the comments section.
  - skmurphy 9y ago
    yes I put the link first before the quote https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
- felon123 9y ago
  He goes on to say that he still believes actions can be primed. I believe that chapter on priming Has been widely cited and used in practice. For example, law enforcement agencies use the ideology behind priming whenever they run a sting operation, and clearly believe it actually works. Look at the new prevalence of terrorism, gun, Drug, and rape stings.
JadeNB 9y ago
Is the article meant to be a link to Kahneman's comment https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc... that you quote elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228754)? It seems weird for it to be a link to this article itself.
- dang 9y ago
  We've linked the submission to the relevant URL so hopefully that will be clearer now.
criddell 9y ago
> This does not mean that we can trust the published results, but it does suggest that some of the published results might be replicable in larger replication studies with more power to detect small effects. At the same time, the graph shows clear evidence for a selection effect. So, there might be a priming effect but the studies that Kahneman used don't necessarily show that? Is that right?
- huac 9y ago
  Yes. Essentially there is some qualitative evidence that there is a priming effect, but the quantitative evidence is insufficient given the sample sizes collected by the cited studies.
- jerf 9y ago
  "So, there might be a priming effect but the studies that Kahneman used don't necessarily show that? Is that right?" Perhaps more importantly, there still might not be. Part of the problem is that priming isn't a binary thing, but a range. Some uses of things that could be described as priming are so well established that even if they are not "science", they are certainly engineering, inasmuch as marketers successfully use them routinely. On the other hand, studies that seem to show that if you flash words of negative connotation faster than they can be consciously read (or possibly even consciously seen), pictures conforming to stereotypes associated with those words are slightly more quickly recognized may turn out to be bunk they intuitively are after all. (Note that I'm not saying they're bunk because our intuition says they are. But contrary to what seems to be a somewhat popular belief, it is in fact possible for our intuition to be correct. It's one of those things where you only ever hear about where it's wrong, precisely because that is in some sense news. It's right quite often, moreso for one trained on existing science.) Personally I'd say this is one of those cases where the recent Nature proposal to up the standard of significance from 0.05 to 0.005 would probably have been helpful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15192610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15192610 If implemented it wouldn't solve everything instantly, but it would certainly raise the bar on this sort of side track being taken.
felon123 9y ago
The more interesting question to ask is since there is such strong evidence of priming, how far should law enforcement agencies go in there own efforts to prime an individual into committing a crime(a la stings} are there any lines that shouldn't be crossed?
- mattnewport 9y ago
  You seem to have rather missed the point of the comment, which is that the evidence for priming turns out not to be strong at all. In fact, it is so weak that the effect may not actually exist.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    furthermore, priming has nothing to do with the situation that the person is mentioning
new299 9y ago
For those who like me didn't know what "priming" is in this context: "Priming is a theory in which an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus (i.e., perceptual pattern) influences the response to another stimulus. ... For example, NURSE is recognized more quickly following DOCTOR than following BREAD." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  To be clear, the DOCTOR/NURSE example is an example of "semantic priming" as mentioned near the end of the blog comment. There's decent experimental evidence for semantic priming. The "priming" that's mostly being discussed in the comment and blog post it's replying to, on the other hand, is macro-behavioral priming, for lack of a better term: priming significantly affecting complex physical or social behaviors. Things like "seeing old-age-related words makes you walk slower" or "holding a hot vs cold beverage for a few seconds before an interview radically changes your opinion of the interviewer". The evidence here is... well, that's a lot of what the non-replicability fuss is about.
DanCarvajal 9y ago
Thought a little too fast there.
jdoliner 9y ago
I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing. Telling them they must believe rarely accomplishes this and is endemic of the type of the scientism that has displaced real science. Of course, the thing this clown was telling us we didn't have the option of disbelieving turns out not to be true. I suppose now he's willing to grant us that option. How exactly does Kahneman expect people to distinguish "well-supported" science from not "well-supported" science when he himself is obviously wholly incapable of doing so?
- EnFinlay 9y ago
  Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. The problem is it's easy to mistake un-supported conclusions for well-supported conclusions.
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    >Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. What if I don't trust the scientists doing the work, or the larger system that they work in? What if I find the common incarnation of the entire field lacking? I do not trust much published by sociology, regardless of how many studies show results, because of the political nature of the field. On the other hand, physicist who say they found a new particle? I don't have an once of doubt (though maybe I should have a little). Part of the problem is that the very language used in sociology is crafted to reached the desired findings. Once the integrity of an entire field has been lost, what can be done to restore it?
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    Part of the way we go from "un-supported conclusions" to "well-supported conclusions" is by the optional nature of belief. Because belief is optional, the proponents actually have to go to the effort of supporting their conclusions with evidence. When believing something becomes non-optional, the incentive to do that goes out the window, and conclusions generally become weaker.
icelancer 9y ago
People are starting to learn that the vast majority of "science" are poorly-controlled white papers that get accepted and are never looked at again unless it is by a group of replication-crazed people (or what I like to call "actual scientists") reviewing conclusions drawn from decades-old papers. Discouraging replication in the tenure track is a large contributor to this. "Novelty" is literally written in the "guidelines for authors" sections of many journals. They want the newest, brightest, most headline-catching "research" to disseminate. And so do the educational institutions. No wonder why the incentives are so perverse. On top of this, most accepted research is allowed to be published without open access, open data, open peer-review history (how many rounds did it go, what were the objections, how did the researchers answer them, etc), and with the aforementioned lack of replication. It's incredibly frustrating being someone who loves science, works in the field of science, and is skeptical about the system, which used to be a prerequisite and is now looked at like luddite behavior.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  As someone who works in science what do you think is the underlying cause of this shift?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - icelancer 9y ago
    I think it's multivariate. The rise of for-profit publishers certainly plays a large role, as does tenure track limitations, the booming business of education, and just the general pushback against openness. People fear the sunlight, no matter what "science" is supposed to be about. I don't think it's any one thing or that there's an easy fix. For my part, I refuse to publish in non-OA journals and strongly prefer those who require/strongly encourage both open data and open peer review. PeerJ is one such journal which also features very fast time to first decision AND low fees. I cannot recommend them enough.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > People are starting to learn that the vast majority of "science" are poorly-controlled white papers that get accepted and are never looked at again unless it is by a group of replication-crazed people (or what I like to call "actual scientists") reviewing conclusions drawn from decades-old papers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main issue was that papers were being replicated, but the results weren't being published (especially if they were negative). These problems were always being discovered, but the record was never being corrected.
wnevets 9y ago
what is the context of this?
- richardknop 9y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I want to know full story behind this.
  - munificent 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman The irony is that Kahneman has spent a lot of time both raising awareness of the replication crisis and studying the kind of cognitive biases people often have, yet got bit by exactly that. In his defense, his comment here is, I think, a master study in what a detailed, sincere "I was wrong" should look like.
- hannob 9y ago
  Large parts of psychology research of the past couple of decades turned out to be crap. ("non-reproducible" in scientific terms, but "crap" is close enough.) Kahneman has defended much of this research in the past. But at least he's smart enough to recognize his mistakes, which cannot be said about many of his colleagues.
  - kenjackson 9y ago
    Is it limited to priming or is it a bunch of other parts of psychology too?
    - drivers99 9y ago
      There were some problems last year reproducing ego depletion despite its prominence for the last couple decades.[1][2] Personally, I run across the concept a lot in popular books and articles that I read (from before the controversy), so it presents a problem for me in whether to believe them if it's not actually true. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/end-of-ego-depletion/#.Wbg5Ouvyu5M http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/en... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_controversy_and_conflicting_meta_analyses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Bwaahahahahahahaaaaa! Dual-process theorists, repent!
- edanm 9y ago
  Does this invalidate dual process? Why?
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I find the response as interesting as the facts. For me, science is always "as far as we know..." and for others, they have created anchors based on a scientific result which makes them angry if that science is later altered. I think Kahenman's response was spot on and real. And I think by responding that way he gives meaning and life to the scientific process of constantly questioning and reviewing and trying to improve. So much about a person is evident when you challenge their beliefs. There is a range of responses but I find people who respond with "help me understand how you arrived at your [conflicting] result" get to better results than people who respond with "if you believe that [conflicting] result then you must not understand what I said, here let me explain it again in simpler terms for you." The latter don't do as well and don't have as much impact.
yyyyip 9y ago
Honestly, the fake Nobel prize for economics really diminishes the credibility of the Nobel prizes and science in general. I like economics, have studied it and follow it, but it does not deserve to be placed alongside the hard sciences where actual irrefutable progress is occuring.
- VHRanger 9y ago
  Name two economics Nobel winners you disagree their awarding and the reason why they don't merit it
- gideon_b 9y ago
  Nobel prizes are awarded for Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, Medicine, and Economics. Cultural progress does not hinge on advances in hard science and the Nobel prize is wise to understand that. Failing to recognize the impact of literature, peace and economics on our society is a failure to understand the entire purpose of the award.
  - yyyyip 9y ago
    I think economics itself is very important for society. I just don't think economists add much to the field. Peter Nobel, a human rights lawyer and great grandson of Alfred Nobel explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation". So often I read some bullshit article with a headline touting the author as being a nobel prize winner, and it is always the economics prize. It debases the achievements of other nobel prize winners, both in hard science and in literature/peace. Even Hayek himself was against the Nobel prize for economics because: "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."
hanoz 9y ago
I was just about to embark on "Thinking, Fast and Slow" as my next commuting audio book. Ought I not to bother?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kyberias 9y ago
  You should definitely bother.
- scranglis 9y ago
  Honestly, it only gets richer in the context of this comment from Kahneman. The core of the book (parts III and IV) don't rely on priming or other small N studies.
- justin66 9y ago
  > Ought I not to bother? Does the act of intellectual honesty displayed on that blog, and the concomitant discovery that the author is a fallible human being, make you more or less inclined to read a work that was rather widely pronounced to be brilliant?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Sure, but be prepared to be skeptical. A lot of Kahneman's work rests on these kinds of studies, or on things that, on reflection, call to mind this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/169/ https://xkcd.com/169/ That is, they involve questions which were designed to communicate one thing while secretly "really asking about" another thing, so that the questioner could then shout "Ah-HA! Your biases caused you to misinterpret that!"
- Angostura 9y ago
  This question is asked at the bottom of the linked comments, with an interesting answer from the blog author.
tonystubblebine 9y ago
Pretty interesting commentary on failed papers behind Medium's paywall here: https://medium.com/@jhreha/most-psychology-research-is-bs-73d4793b4dc6 https://medium.com/@jhreha/most-psychology-research-is-bs-73... The focus of the article is on failed replication attempts in Psychology. The gist: * The famous failed studies are famous because of characteristics of the media, mainly the media loves quick fixes. "Just doing this one tiny thing once will produce this massive change." * A common sense reason that small interventions don't produce massive psychological changes: imagine if everyone you knew was changing personalities all the time. It would be chaos.
- ktta 9y ago
  What the hell? Medium is soft-blocking articles now?
  - tonystubblebine 9y ago
    Oh, you missed that? Medium went on a whole crusade against ad-supported content and then built a metered paywall and are sharing that revenue with the authors. I think it's good and could tell you a lot more about it because I've written for their new program and had one of the first publications to join.
    - ktta 9y ago
      Interesting. I thought it was more of a Quora like login to see anything model(but I think Quora has since removed it), which was why I was surprised. I can't really find a fault with the current model of Quora, but for some reason $5/month sounds a bit high.
      - ktta 9y ago
        correction: "...current model of Medium"
        tonystubblebine 9y ago
SubiculumCode 9y ago
I'd like to say that most of cognitive psychology does not suffer the issues so frequently reported in the news by social-psychology research..but this is wrong. Too many neuroimaging studies have n<25. To this affliction, my own research has luckily been relatively immune. Developmental studies need large Ns to track age-related trajectories, and most of my graduate research has N's greater than 100...for which I am grateful to my advisor and NIH.
Aron 9y ago
Biases in the bias literature? How delicious.
will_be_no_ai 9y ago
In the face of generalized malfeasance across all domains, peoples faith in climate change will remain. Surely, that science must be the one that is correct?
- 31reasons 9y ago
  Dr Harvey and Irma are replicating that science for you.
  - mahile 9y ago
    how silly is that!
  - will_be_no_ai 9y ago
    I wasn't really trying to be that much of a smartass. When you read the parent article and a couple of others that have been posted recently dealing with replication problems; it makes you wonder if we have facts to enact sweeping societal change. When Bill Nye starts calling for burning of the heretics: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-open-criminal-charges-jail-time-climate-c/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-ope... I wonder if fact or emotion is guiding us here. Does a couple of hurricanes prove this? For those with faith it does. Congrats.
Bucephalus355 9y ago
I really hope this comment gets found. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book in 2009 called "Bright-Sided" that was incredibly devastating critique (if you managed to hear about it) about Positive Psychology. I finished the book a week ago, and I say this as someone who really likes (and still does) Tony Robbins, but it's scary stuff. The most horrifying part, although not too unexpected, is a conference near the end packed with Positive Psychology PhD students chomping at the bit to get the sweet sweet consulting jobs in the various global cities around the world, and Martin Seligman, the head of the American Psychology Association (APA), having to subtly hint that it's all a bubble, and these students realizing they might have been lied to. I should also say that she has many concerns with Martin Seligman, another researcher of somewhat similar success to Kahneman. In defense of all these people though, with the cuts to research funding over the years what else could they have done? A deeper point here is the general failure of Psychology. Karen Horney, a tremendously talented psychotherapist from the 1930s, argues that true psychology is more sociology than psychology. In general this focus on the mind, on the internal, is 1). a very Western style of thinking (specifically Calvinism who were obsessed with deep introspection) and 2). Has only accelerated over the years as positive self-help think asks people to retreat further and further into the mind as a defense to deal with lower incomes, lower economic mobility, or Facebook-incited jealously.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  You might find the works of Thomas Szasz to be of interest. His viewpoints are very similar to the ones you have mentioned in regards to psychiatry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
- mmirate 9y ago
  > In general this focus on the mind, on the internal Layman here. Upon seeing a black box that performs tasks that are otherwise intractable, isn't it all-but-natural to desire to crack the box open and figure out how it works? (n.b. the inability to artificially replicate the human mind's full capabilities, is one of the few reasons we continue to tolerate the many failings of the human form and mind.)
- knguyen0105 9y ago
tryitnow 9y ago
Kudos to Kahneman for owning his mistake. That's the right sort of behavior to model for younger generations of scholars. I aspire to this level of self-awareness, accountability and integrity.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Sure. Though maybe he could say it a little louder than just a comment on a random blog post. Just a thought
  - Lon7 9y ago
    To be fair, the "train-wreck" the blog comments on was predicted by Kahneman himself back in 2012. In fact, as shown in the article, he was personally urging researchers to question and check if the priming research studies were actually correct. But you are right. I still see his book cited all the time in popular media. He should be much more vocal about what he got wrong.
beefman 9y ago
"I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. ... I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them..." -Daniel Kahneman
0xbear 9y ago
And that is why, whenever you hear that "science is settled" on something, you know for sure you're talking to a politician or/and a charlatan.
hrasyid 9y ago
Curious, if replicability of science research is so messed up, how come real technological progress seems to be happening at all? (e.g. devices, drugs)
- claytonjy 9y ago
  Varies widely by field. Fields whose studies have inherently small sample sizes and low power, like psychology, are more susceptible to poor conclusions. That's before we even talk about the culture surrounding different fields. Take a random study from physics and another from social psychology; the physics study will generally be a much higher-powered study, botching the stats will have a smaller effect on the conclusion, and the practitioners themselves are, arguably, better statisticians anyways.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Physics/Math/CS also has the arxiv which is a notorious battleground to test your ideas in the open (a very good thing).
    - hrasyid 9y ago
      how does it work?
    - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
      Biology too: http://www.biorxiv.org http://www.biorxiv.org
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  replicability issues are mostly in psych and economics. devices and drugs rely on physics and chem/biology which are highly replicable. it's obvious how physics is replicable as anyone can drop an object and measure how long it takes to fall.. etc
  - hrasyid 9y ago
    Is drug biology really easily replicable? I mean, people can't just find hundreds of sick people who are willing to be random-tested by some random drug, right?
forapurpose 9y ago
Many commenters seem to be relating this post to the Reproducibility Project, which showed problems with reproducing around 100 psychology studies. It's important to understand the real conclusions of that project, which is not at all that 'only a small number of studies are accurate'. Strictly on the basis of significance — a statistical measure of how likely it is that a result did not occur by chance — 35 of the studies held up, and 62 did not. (Three were excluded because their significance was not clear.) The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies. Yet very few of the redone studies contradicted the original ones; their results were simply weaker.[0] Also, as one person pointed out in the same article: Dr. Schwarz, who was not involved in any of the 100 studies that were re-examined, said that the replication studies themselves were virtually never evaluated for errors in design or analysis.[0] And finally, that's how science is supposed to work. Research isn't a hard conclusion but an argument in a long debate:[1] But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works. Science is not a body of facts that emerge, like an orderly string of light bulbs, to illuminate a linear path to universal truth. Rather, science (to paraphrase Henry Gee, an editor at Nature) is a method to quantify doubt about a hypothesis, and to find the contexts in which a phenomenon is likely. Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path — the wonderfully twisty path — of scientific discovery. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-scien... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not...
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  Failure to replicate at that rate was an alarm bell indicating that studies were less robust and reproducible than previously assumed. It's not entirely "normal" science, as a high rate of failure in replication can be a symptom of publication bias and everything else mentioned in "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
  - 9y ago
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
As an engineer I don't really understand how the effect of these bad studies can be such a big deal. Doesn't science build off other science? When one scientist takes the conclusion of another study for granted (Example that X drug is effective), and then tries to build off of it with their own study (testing if A or B delivery method is more effective), doesn't it become obvious fairly quickly the second study is based on a bad conclusion of the first study? And if the author of the second study calls out the author of the first study, this type of Peer Review could be almost as effective as having more Peer Reviewed literature or study replication, which is what everyone is asking for.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
  > Doesn't science build off other science? When one scientist takes the conclusion of another study for granted (Example that X drug is effective), and then tries to build off of it with their own study (testing if A or B delivery method is more effective), doesn't it become obvious fairly quickly the second study is based on a bad conclusion of the first study? Indeed. In fact, this is extremely common in biology. It’s possible that some fields need to confront the replication crisis (psychology, for example, is frequently cited and the subject of the OP), but I really don’t see this in my field.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    What I've seen in bio research is that inconsistent results are always chalked up to some difference in the methods.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  > And if the author of the second study calls out the author of the first study The "if" there is one big problem. What seems to have happened instead, in some fields, is that studies that would challenge the results of existing ones simply don't get published. This is partly a result of scientists self-censoring ("I must have done something wrong") and partly a result of journals not accepting papers that challenge "established science". But also, again for some fields, the assumption that other scientists build on the existing work may not be true. The worst-case scenario is when someone does a study, the results are widely trumpeted and applied to the real world, no one keeps track of how they actually perform in the real world (which may be difficult to do anyway, in fields like social psychology), and no one bothers doing any more studies in the area because it's "settled science"...
victor106 9y ago
Whatever you think about DK the fact that someone of his stature would admit when an error was made not just a small one but something as big as this. That in and of itself is something worth applauding.
- anitil 9y ago
  It speaks volumes that he'd personally respond like this. It shows how much he cares about his research as opposed to being 'right'
  - ec109685 9y ago
    How is owning up to a mistake something to be specifically applauded? He is a very distinguished scientist with a huge amount of published work. It is far easier for him to own up to a mistake than a fledgling scientist just getting started. He has far less to "lose". Admitting mistakes should be normal behavior for everyone.
    - quiteawhile 9y ago
      >Admitting mistakes should be normal behavior for everyone Agreed. But it isn't, and applauding it is a way to provide moral incentive to those who might otherwise stay quiet.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Well, except he just mumbled it out in a comment on some blog post. Saying it in this fashion is having it both ways, I think. All the air of intellectual honesty AND all the book sales! If he just leaves it at this, and the book is still sold the same and he doesn't broadcast this message any further than a blog comment, what has he really said?
rgejman 9y ago
While I agree with Kahneman that it is easy to fool yourself by looking at studies with small sample size, the recent focus on reproducing existing research is, to my mind, misguided. It is extremely difficult to perform experiments exactly the same, even within one lab, much less between many different labs. For a good example of this, see this fascinating description of how several labs tried to standardize the way they handle c. elegans (worms) to identify compounds which extended the life of the animals: http://www.nature.com/news/a-long-journey-to-reproducible-results-1.22478 http://www.nature.com/news/a-long-journey-to-reproducible-re... While some effort to standardize is important, it also waste a lot of time setting up a specific set of experimental conditions that may not have much resemblance to the conditions that obtain in the real world. In my opinion, we learn much more by taking someone's existing result, thinking through the consequences and then designing well-powered experiments that probe the assumptions, mechanisms and applicability of the result. With critical eyes and diverse systems, we won't fool ourselves. One more note: if this topic interests you, please read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If you are unfamiliar with the book, I guarantee it will completely change how you think about science as a human endeavour and make you much more comfortable with the existence of long periods of time where science just gets some things wrong.
- nonbel 9y ago
  >"Hundreds of e-mails and many teleconferences later, we converged on a technique but still had a stupendous three-day difference in lifespan between labs. The problem, it turned out, was notation — one lab determined age on the basis of when an egg hatched, others on when it was laid." Wow... this is pretty basic info on what was measured.
- Strilanc 9y ago
  I think it's important to walk before you run. If social scientists aren't able to get compatible results from the same experiment done by two different teams, then I seriously doubt their ability to extract any relevant subtle truths about human behavior. The c. elegans story you linked is a great example of this. Getting the little details right matters. I can't imagine having any luck doing that while constantly changing the big details.
- 9y ago
davidgerard 9y ago
So, should we expect LessWrong to be amended with retraction notices across half the Sequences?
- sambe 9y ago
  Are half the sequences on LessWrong about or dependent on priming?
feelin_googley 9y ago
Latest book by Michael Lewis, "The Undoing Project", is about relationship between Kahneman and Tversky, and to an extent it discusses their research. Problem with 1980's Bargh paper and other studies is never mentioned. There is not even a hint that any of the research Kahneman relied upon was later called into question. I guess Lewis did not think it was relevant. Not sure why but I expected this controversy over replication to at least be mentioned.
mherdeg 9y ago
Just a quick plug for one of my favorite periodicals, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis: http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ . If you're worried about the "file drawer problem" JASNH might help you feel a little better about the future. Naively one would think that the scientific method -- "guess that X does Y, try it, see whether it worked" -- depends as much on people telling each other what DIDN'T work as what DID. Yet many journals will refuse to publish negative results (perhaps aside from attempts to replicate significant results). JASNH takes the opposite publication bias and gives a refreshing view into what stuff people are doing that takes up real research effort, seems to be real work, but didn't show an effect. I have no illusions that JASNH is, like, a super impactful journal -- it's online-only and accepts a weird mix of disciplines -- but it's nice to see that people are trying to do the right thing.
GedByrne 9y ago
Does any of this undermine any of Cialdini's content in his 'Pre-suation' book?
bambax 9y ago
> if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. Plausibility depends on the level of expertise one has in a given domain. Ordinary people don't have any expertise or direct experience of, say, fundamental physics, or astronomy, and so for them (us) no result is either "plausible" or "implausible". We can believe them, or not, but we can't really have an opinion on them. (That goes for climate change: you choose to either trust the experts or not, but you can't tell them that they're wrong if you yourself are not an expert). But social sciences are very different, because all humans have a pretty good understanding of human nature. Studying it is all that we do, all of the time. And so, in the domain of studying human nature, "plausibility" really means something, and the opinion of the layman isn't to be ignored, because chances are said layman is as competent as anyone. In that specific domain, results that fly in the face of the common experience should be received with great skepticism and examined and verified thoroughly.
- danharaj 9y ago
  > But social sciences are very different, because all humans have a pretty good understanding of human nature. Studying it is all that we do, all of the time. Relative to what? Anthropologists most certainly have far more expertise on human nature than anyone else. Everyone else tends to fall into a rut of essentialism where they believe that their particular, most obviously culturally specific, experiences are universal.
  - bambax 9y ago
    Not sure that anthropologists study "human nature" the way social sciences do (or should). Anthropology is the study of human cultures and customs, which probably have as much to do with accidents, chance and contingency (history) as with universal human characteristics.
    - 9y ago
perseusprime11 9y ago
Btw, this applies to your favorite leadership book. The R index on most business/leadership/management books will also be very small.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
All of this can be simply fixed. Either by journals (only publish replicated work, other papers only publish the abstract) - not likely - or create an index of tainted papers. A paper that is tainted because can't be replicated by others, also taints all papers that quote it. Index can be searched by author name. People would be much more careful what they quote. Basically without replication you do not get quoted. Without being quoted you do not get scientist karma.
tripzilch 9y ago
I really wanted to start this comment with the HN standard zero-content dick remark of "Is anyone really surprised ...", because I'm really not surprised. Except the fair comment would be, is anyone who actually bothered to look up the references and citations of some of his more bold (but oh so juicy) claims, really surprised, really? It's a typical situation of that telephone-whisper game; researchers do a test they came up with on a group of 21 students. In social psychology this is considered a reasonable sample size. From where I'm standing, this is a non-starter for doing research and calling it science. Just don't even bother. It's better to not know anything than to do it any way and catch a bias (yes like the disease it is). Stopping attributing meaning to what is essentially random data is what got us into this whole modern era of technology in the first place. It seems pretty clear by now which fields of science took that seriously and which ones preferred to instead read (meta meta) meta studies and "sit in their office, bouncing ideas of one another"[0]. But hey, I'm from computational science and we can always generate more data, which starts at sample sizes of about, oh, 10K or so? (at least) I always get the idea that these guys just wanted to sell books, filled with slightly-counterintuitive yet somehow plausible factoids. Add in the veneer of scientific credibility and you've got a very juicy best-selling combo. For people who like to feel they are scientific / rational intelligent, make it a part of their ego--something which I can totally relate to, btw, but I try to be better. A few things that stood out from Kahneman's comment that reflect his ego (even though he uses words to sound humble, he can't quite find the courage, if he could it wouldn't have gotten this far); I had to look up "file-drawer problem", turns out it is a cutesy euphemism for "publication bias". Care to guess why he doesn't use that word? He does it twice, even, so it's definitely not to add variation or flavour to his writing style. Especially when replacing the two usages of the term in context would become "severe publication bias" and "substantial publication bias undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence", which sounds really pretty damning, much more so than calling it "file-drawer problem". > first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. He likes to coin terms a lot. I know the "Law of Small Numbers" in a mathematical context where it means something entirely different. So I looked it up and it turns out to be a euphemism for a "hasty generalization fallacy", kind of the exact opposite of what he suggests here. Anyone care to check this citation? What is this magical law that allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples? It sounds beyond implausible to me. You can statistics your way around this in circles but really you can also just like, dismiss underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. > We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message. Yeah right. The real answer is "because I had books to sell, research grants to obtain and an ego to maintain". You don't need someone to write a paper about this to come to this conclusion. Of course it's harmful, how can this not be obvious? It's also, like, a MAJOR part of social psychology and similar studies because sample sizes are always stupid small. And Kahneman is an expert in this field. So apart from that he already KNEW this because he has common sense, he MUST have already internalized it because he's an expert in this field and you come across this particular bit of common sense all the time. Therefore, no, you CHOOSE to ignore that reality (not message because you were perfectly aware of this before that paper you cited). > if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. If you come from the point of view of the exact, hard sciences, like physics, math or computational science, it's kind of hard to see anything wrong with this statement, on the surface. But if you know a thing or two about social sciences and the like, the bullshit that goes on there, you know that almost everything is wrong about the above statement. Reputable journals often aren't. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world that can make someone believe. You cannot require it. And to say that "belief" is not optional is almost an oxymoron. Unless you use brainwashing. Except I'm not sure if "brainwashing" even really works because, you know, guess what fields conducted the unethical studies into it. > This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. Please don't drag climate science through the same mud as your clusterfuck of research. The hard numbers and sample sizes they have access to, are so large you'd soil your pants. > But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published. Which you KNEW is not the case, so that's not really an excuse is it. > I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. If he's so convinced that "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional", then it also holds when the scientific conclusions say the opposite, and he should DROP this belief right this instance until proper evidence is obtained. This is not belief, it's stubbornness. I mean sure, I would personally say, don't throw out the baby with the bath-water (because I also don't quite agree with the other one, science can be flawed like any human endeavour). But he only just went hard-line science on this idea, in the very same comment, and you should at least be consequent about it. I really don't think he's learned any lesson. He led his scientific beliefs be guided by ego, clouded by the idea that research proved what he wanted to be true, and he's published books filled with untruths that are out there right now. Is he going to issue retractions? Errata? Cause you know, lay people are going to read this years into the future, and believe this crap. [0] In a book by the Kahneman/Tversky/Taleb trio of juicy pop-psych writers, they described their research methodology this way. Proudly so, because what could be better science than such incredibly smart people giving the freedom to "bounce ideas of one another" ... Sorry this post is not proper science, I can't recall and properly cite what book it was :-/ I think it was Taleb talking about his buddies Kahneman and Tversky.
model_m_warrior 9y ago
Really learning about the empirical evidence and reproducibility in 'science' has been a real bummer. I was made aware via the Sokal affair and have taken keen interest since. I'd even go as far to say this is why Trump won.

819 points by skmurphy 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Summmary: explains context and background for a comment left by Kahneman https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc... "I accept the basic conclusions of this blog. To be clear, I do so (1) without expressing an opinion about the statistical techniques it employed and (2) without stating an opinion about the validity and replicability of the individual studies I cited. What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. [...] My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me, but the argument only holds when all relevant results are published." [Edit/add] Kahneman also outlined an approach to address concerns in 2012 in an open letter in Nature see https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppinfoFile/Kahneman%20Letter.pdf https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppin... [linked from https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...] which was apparently ignored by the priming researchers.

rhizome 9y ago
are you quoting from something?
- dang 9y ago
  We've added quotation marks to disambiguate that.
- SapphireSun 9y ago
  Daniel Kahneman responded to this blog in the comments section.
- skmurphy 9y ago
  yes I put the link first before the quote https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
felon123 9y ago
He goes on to say that he still believes actions can be primed. I believe that chapter on priming Has been widely cited and used in practice. For example, law enforcement agencies use the ideology behind priming whenever they run a sting operation, and clearly believe it actually works. Look at the new prevalence of terrorism, gun, Drug, and rape stings.

JadeNB 9y ago

Is the article meant to be a link to Kahneman's comment https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc... that you quote elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228754)? It seems weird for it to be a link to this article itself.

dang 9y ago
We've linked the submission to the relevant URL so hopefully that will be clearer now.

criddell 9y ago

> This does not mean that we can trust the published results, but it does suggest that some of the published results might be replicable in larger replication studies with more power to detect small effects. At the same time, the graph shows clear evidence for a selection effect. So, there might be a priming effect but the studies that Kahneman used don't necessarily show that? Is that right?

huac 9y ago
Yes. Essentially there is some qualitative evidence that there is a priming effect, but the quantitative evidence is insufficient given the sample sizes collected by the cited studies.
jerf 9y ago
"So, there might be a priming effect but the studies that Kahneman used don't necessarily show that? Is that right?" Perhaps more importantly, there still might not be. Part of the problem is that priming isn't a binary thing, but a range. Some uses of things that could be described as priming are so well established that even if they are not "science", they are certainly engineering, inasmuch as marketers successfully use them routinely. On the other hand, studies that seem to show that if you flash words of negative connotation faster than they can be consciously read (or possibly even consciously seen), pictures conforming to stereotypes associated with those words are slightly more quickly recognized may turn out to be bunk they intuitively are after all. (Note that I'm not saying they're bunk because our intuition says they are. But contrary to what seems to be a somewhat popular belief, it is in fact possible for our intuition to be correct. It's one of those things where you only ever hear about where it's wrong, precisely because that is in some sense news. It's right quite often, moreso for one trained on existing science.) Personally I'd say this is one of those cases where the recent Nature proposal to up the standard of significance from 0.05 to 0.005 would probably have been helpful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15192610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15192610 If implemented it wouldn't solve everything instantly, but it would certainly raise the bar on this sort of side track being taken.

felon123 9y ago

The more interesting question to ask is since there is such strong evidence of priming, how far should law enforcement agencies go in there own efforts to prime an individual into committing a crime(a la stings} are there any lines that shouldn't be crossed?

mattnewport 9y ago
You seem to have rather missed the point of the comment, which is that the evidence for priming turns out not to be strong at all. In fact, it is so weak that the effect may not actually exist.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  furthermore, priming has nothing to do with the situation that the person is mentioning

new299 9y ago

For those who like me didn't know what "priming" is in this context: "Priming is a theory in which an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus (i.e., perceptual pattern) influences the response to another stimulus. ... For example, NURSE is recognized more quickly following DOCTOR than following BREAD." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

bzbarsky 9y ago
To be clear, the DOCTOR/NURSE example is an example of "semantic priming" as mentioned near the end of the blog comment. There's decent experimental evidence for semantic priming. The "priming" that's mostly being discussed in the comment and blog post it's replying to, on the other hand, is macro-behavioral priming, for lack of a better term: priming significantly affecting complex physical or social behaviors. Things like "seeing old-age-related words makes you walk slower" or "holding a hot vs cold beverage for a few seconds before an interview radically changes your opinion of the interviewer". The evidence here is... well, that's a lot of what the non-replicability fuss is about.

DanCarvajal 9y ago

Thought a little too fast there.

jdoliner 9y ago

I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing. Telling them they must believe rarely accomplishes this and is endemic of the type of the scientism that has displaced real science. Of course, the thing this clown was telling us we didn't have the option of disbelieving turns out not to be true. I suppose now he's willing to grant us that option. How exactly does Kahneman expect people to distinguish "well-supported" science from not "well-supported" science when he himself is obviously wholly incapable of doing so?

EnFinlay 9y ago
Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. The problem is it's easy to mistake un-supported conclusions for well-supported conclusions.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  >Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. What if I don't trust the scientists doing the work, or the larger system that they work in? What if I find the common incarnation of the entire field lacking? I do not trust much published by sociology, regardless of how many studies show results, because of the political nature of the field. On the other hand, physicist who say they found a new particle? I don't have an once of doubt (though maybe I should have a little). Part of the problem is that the very language used in sociology is crafted to reached the desired findings. Once the integrity of an entire field has been lost, what can be done to restore it?
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  Part of the way we go from "un-supported conclusions" to "well-supported conclusions" is by the optional nature of belief. Because belief is optional, the proponents actually have to go to the effort of supporting their conclusions with evidence. When believing something becomes non-optional, the incentive to do that goes out the window, and conclusions generally become weaker.

icelancer 9y ago

People are starting to learn that the vast majority of "science" are poorly-controlled white papers that get accepted and are never looked at again unless it is by a group of replication-crazed people (or what I like to call "actual scientists") reviewing conclusions drawn from decades-old papers. Discouraging replication in the tenure track is a large contributor to this. "Novelty" is literally written in the "guidelines for authors" sections of many journals. They want the newest, brightest, most headline-catching "research" to disseminate. And so do the educational institutions. No wonder why the incentives are so perverse. On top of this, most accepted research is allowed to be published without open access, open data, open peer-review history (how many rounds did it go, what were the objections, how did the researchers answer them, etc), and with the aforementioned lack of replication. It's incredibly frustrating being someone who loves science, works in the field of science, and is skeptical about the system, which used to be a prerequisite and is now looked at like luddite behavior.

jdoliner 9y ago
As someone who works in science what do you think is the underlying cause of this shift?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- icelancer 9y ago
  I think it's multivariate. The rise of for-profit publishers certainly plays a large role, as does tenure track limitations, the booming business of education, and just the general pushback against openness. People fear the sunlight, no matter what "science" is supposed to be about. I don't think it's any one thing or that there's an easy fix. For my part, I refuse to publish in non-OA journals and strongly prefer those who require/strongly encourage both open data and open peer review. PeerJ is one such journal which also features very fast time to first decision AND low fees. I cannot recommend them enough.
Chaebixi 9y ago
> People are starting to learn that the vast majority of "science" are poorly-controlled white papers that get accepted and are never looked at again unless it is by a group of replication-crazed people (or what I like to call "actual scientists") reviewing conclusions drawn from decades-old papers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main issue was that papers were being replicated, but the results weren't being published (especially if they were negative). These problems were always being discovered, but the record was never being corrected.

wnevets 9y ago

what is the context of this?

richardknop 9y ago
My thoughts exactly. I want to know full story behind this.
- munificent 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman The irony is that Kahneman has spent a lot of time both raising awareness of the replication crisis and studying the kind of cognitive biases people often have, yet got bit by exactly that. In his defense, his comment here is, I think, a master study in what a detailed, sincere "I was wrong" should look like.
hannob 9y ago
Large parts of psychology research of the past couple of decades turned out to be crap. ("non-reproducible" in scientific terms, but "crap" is close enough.) Kahneman has defended much of this research in the past. But at least he's smart enough to recognize his mistakes, which cannot be said about many of his colleagues.
- kenjackson 9y ago
  Is it limited to priming or is it a bunch of other parts of psychology too?
  - drivers99 9y ago
    There were some problems last year reproducing ego depletion despite its prominence for the last couple decades.[1][2] Personally, I run across the concept a lot in popular books and articles that I read (from before the controversy), so it presents a problem for me in whether to believe them if it's not actually true. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/end-of-ego-depletion/#.Wbg5Ouvyu5M http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/en... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_controversy_and_conflicting_meta_analyses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Bwaahahahahahahaaaaa! Dual-process theorists, repent!

edanm 9y ago
Does this invalidate dual process? Why?

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I find the response as interesting as the facts. For me, science is always "as far as we know..." and for others, they have created anchors based on a scientific result which makes them angry if that science is later altered. I think Kahenman's response was spot on and real. And I think by responding that way he gives meaning and life to the scientific process of constantly questioning and reviewing and trying to improve. So much about a person is evident when you challenge their beliefs. There is a range of responses but I find people who respond with "help me understand how you arrived at your [conflicting] result" get to better results than people who respond with "if you believe that [conflicting] result then you must not understand what I said, here let me explain it again in simpler terms for you." The latter don't do as well and don't have as much impact.

yyyyip 9y ago

Honestly, the fake Nobel prize for economics really diminishes the credibility of the Nobel prizes and science in general. I like economics, have studied it and follow it, but it does not deserve to be placed alongside the hard sciences where actual irrefutable progress is occuring.

VHRanger 9y ago
Name two economics Nobel winners you disagree their awarding and the reason why they don't merit it
gideon_b 9y ago
Nobel prizes are awarded for Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, Medicine, and Economics. Cultural progress does not hinge on advances in hard science and the Nobel prize is wise to understand that. Failing to recognize the impact of literature, peace and economics on our society is a failure to understand the entire purpose of the award.
- yyyyip 9y ago
  I think economics itself is very important for society. I just don't think economists add much to the field. Peter Nobel, a human rights lawyer and great grandson of Alfred Nobel explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation". So often I read some bullshit article with a headline touting the author as being a nobel prize winner, and it is always the economics prize. It debases the achievements of other nobel prize winners, both in hard science and in literature/peace. Even Hayek himself was against the Nobel prize for economics because: "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."

hanoz 9y ago

I was just about to embark on "Thinking, Fast and Slow" as my next commuting audio book. Ought I not to bother?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kyberias 9y ago
You should definitely bother.
scranglis 9y ago
Honestly, it only gets richer in the context of this comment from Kahneman. The core of the book (parts III and IV) don't rely on priming or other small N studies.
justin66 9y ago
> Ought I not to bother? Does the act of intellectual honesty displayed on that blog, and the concomitant discovery that the author is a fallible human being, make you more or less inclined to read a work that was rather widely pronounced to be brilliant?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ubernostrum 9y ago
Sure, but be prepared to be skeptical. A lot of Kahneman's work rests on these kinds of studies, or on things that, on reflection, call to mind this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/169/ https://xkcd.com/169/ That is, they involve questions which were designed to communicate one thing while secretly "really asking about" another thing, so that the questioner could then shout "Ah-HA! Your biases caused you to misinterpret that!"
Angostura 9y ago
This question is asked at the bottom of the linked comments, with an interesting answer from the blog author.

tonystubblebine 9y ago

Pretty interesting commentary on failed papers behind Medium's paywall here: https://medium.com/@jhreha/most-psychology-research-is-bs-73d4793b4dc6 https://medium.com/@jhreha/most-psychology-research-is-bs-73... The focus of the article is on failed replication attempts in Psychology. The gist: * The famous failed studies are famous because of characteristics of the media, mainly the media loves quick fixes. "Just doing this one tiny thing once will produce this massive change." * A common sense reason that small interventions don't produce massive psychological changes: imagine if everyone you knew was changing personalities all the time. It would be chaos.

ktta 9y ago
What the hell? Medium is soft-blocking articles now?
- tonystubblebine 9y ago
  Oh, you missed that? Medium went on a whole crusade against ad-supported content and then built a metered paywall and are sharing that revenue with the authors. I think it's good and could tell you a lot more about it because I've written for their new program and had one of the first publications to join.
  - ktta 9y ago
    Interesting. I thought it was more of a Quora like login to see anything model(but I think Quora has since removed it), which was why I was surprised. I can't really find a fault with the current model of Quora, but for some reason $5/month sounds a bit high.
    - ktta 9y ago
      correction: "...current model of Medium"
      - tonystubblebine 9y ago

SubiculumCode 9y ago

I'd like to say that most of cognitive psychology does not suffer the issues so frequently reported in the news by social-psychology research..but this is wrong. Too many neuroimaging studies have n<25. To this affliction, my own research has luckily been relatively immune. Developmental studies need large Ns to track age-related trajectories, and most of my graduate research has N's greater than 100...for which I am grateful to my advisor and NIH.

Aron 9y ago

Biases in the bias literature? How delicious.

will_be_no_ai 9y ago

In the face of generalized malfeasance across all domains, peoples faith in climate change will remain. Surely, that science must be the one that is correct?

31reasons 9y ago
Dr Harvey and Irma are replicating that science for you.
- mahile 9y ago
  how silly is that!
- will_be_no_ai 9y ago
  I wasn't really trying to be that much of a smartass. When you read the parent article and a couple of others that have been posted recently dealing with replication problems; it makes you wonder if we have facts to enact sweeping societal change. When Bill Nye starts calling for burning of the heretics: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-open-criminal-charges-jail-time-climate-c/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-ope... I wonder if fact or emotion is guiding us here. Does a couple of hurricanes prove this? For those with faith it does. Congrats.

Bucephalus355 9y ago

I really hope this comment gets found. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book in 2009 called "Bright-Sided" that was incredibly devastating critique (if you managed to hear about it) about Positive Psychology. I finished the book a week ago, and I say this as someone who really likes (and still does) Tony Robbins, but it's scary stuff. The most horrifying part, although not too unexpected, is a conference near the end packed with Positive Psychology PhD students chomping at the bit to get the sweet sweet consulting jobs in the various global cities around the world, and Martin Seligman, the head of the American Psychology Association (APA), having to subtly hint that it's all a bubble, and these students realizing they might have been lied to. I should also say that she has many concerns with Martin Seligman, another researcher of somewhat similar success to Kahneman. In defense of all these people though, with the cuts to research funding over the years what else could they have done? A deeper point here is the general failure of Psychology. Karen Horney, a tremendously talented psychotherapist from the 1930s, argues that true psychology is more sociology than psychology. In general this focus on the mind, on the internal, is 1). a very Western style of thinking (specifically Calvinism who were obsessed with deep introspection) and 2). Has only accelerated over the years as positive self-help think asks people to retreat further and further into the mind as a defense to deal with lower incomes, lower economic mobility, or Facebook-incited jealously.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
You might find the works of Thomas Szasz to be of interest. His viewpoints are very similar to the ones you have mentioned in regards to psychiatry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
mmirate 9y ago
> In general this focus on the mind, on the internal Layman here. Upon seeing a black box that performs tasks that are otherwise intractable, isn't it all-but-natural to desire to crack the box open and figure out how it works? (n.b. the inability to artificially replicate the human mind's full capabilities, is one of the few reasons we continue to tolerate the many failings of the human form and mind.)
knguyen0105 9y ago

tryitnow 9y ago

Kudos to Kahneman for owning his mistake. That's the right sort of behavior to model for younger generations of scholars. I aspire to this level of self-awareness, accountability and integrity.

whipoodle 9y ago
Sure. Though maybe he could say it a little louder than just a comment on a random blog post. Just a thought
- Lon7 9y ago
  To be fair, the "train-wreck" the blog comments on was predicted by Kahneman himself back in 2012. In fact, as shown in the article, he was personally urging researchers to question and check if the priming research studies were actually correct. But you are right. I still see his book cited all the time in popular media. He should be much more vocal about what he got wrong.

beefman 9y ago

"I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. ... I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them..." -Daniel Kahneman

0xbear 9y ago

And that is why, whenever you hear that "science is settled" on something, you know for sure you're talking to a politician or/and a charlatan.

hrasyid 9y ago

Curious, if replicability of science research is so messed up, how come real technological progress seems to be happening at all? (e.g. devices, drugs)

claytonjy 9y ago
Varies widely by field. Fields whose studies have inherently small sample sizes and low power, like psychology, are more susceptible to poor conclusions. That's before we even talk about the culture surrounding different fields. Take a random study from physics and another from social psychology; the physics study will generally be a much higher-powered study, botching the stats will have a smaller effect on the conclusion, and the practitioners themselves are, arguably, better statisticians anyways.
- icelancer 9y ago
  Physics/Math/CS also has the arxiv which is a notorious battleground to test your ideas in the open (a very good thing).
  - hrasyid 9y ago
    how does it work?
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
    Biology too: http://www.biorxiv.org http://www.biorxiv.org
oculusthrift 9y ago
replicability issues are mostly in psych and economics. devices and drugs rely on physics and chem/biology which are highly replicable. it's obvious how physics is replicable as anyone can drop an object and measure how long it takes to fall.. etc
- hrasyid 9y ago
  Is drug biology really easily replicable? I mean, people can't just find hundreds of sick people who are willing to be random-tested by some random drug, right?

forapurpose 9y ago

Many commenters seem to be relating this post to the Reproducibility Project, which showed problems with reproducing around 100 psychology studies. It's important to understand the real conclusions of that project, which is not at all that 'only a small number of studies are accurate'. Strictly on the basis of significance — a statistical measure of how likely it is that a result did not occur by chance — 35 of the studies held up, and 62 did not. (Three were excluded because their significance was not clear.) The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies. Yet very few of the redone studies contradicted the original ones; their results were simply weaker.[0] Also, as one person pointed out in the same article: Dr. Schwarz, who was not involved in any of the 100 studies that were re-examined, said that the replication studies themselves were virtually never evaluated for errors in design or analysis.[0] And finally, that's how science is supposed to work. Research isn't a hard conclusion but an argument in a long debate:[1] But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works. Science is not a body of facts that emerge, like an orderly string of light bulbs, to illuminate a linear path to universal truth. Rather, science (to paraphrase Henry Gee, an editor at Nature) is a method to quantify doubt about a hypothesis, and to find the contexts in which a phenomenon is likely. Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path — the wonderfully twisty path — of scientific discovery. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-scien... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not...

pc2g4d 9y ago
Failure to replicate at that rate was an alarm bell indicating that studies were less robust and reproducible than previously assumed. It's not entirely "normal" science, as a high rate of failure in replication can be a symptom of publication bias and everything else mentioned in "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- 9y ago

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

As an engineer I don't really understand how the effect of these bad studies can be such a big deal. Doesn't science build off other science? When one scientist takes the conclusion of another study for granted (Example that X drug is effective), and then tries to build off of it with their own study (testing if A or B delivery method is more effective), doesn't it become obvious fairly quickly the second study is based on a bad conclusion of the first study? And if the author of the second study calls out the author of the first study, this type of Peer Review could be almost as effective as having more Peer Reviewed literature or study replication, which is what everyone is asking for.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
> Doesn't science build off other science? When one scientist takes the conclusion of another study for granted (Example that X drug is effective), and then tries to build off of it with their own study (testing if A or B delivery method is more effective), doesn't it become obvious fairly quickly the second study is based on a bad conclusion of the first study? Indeed. In fact, this is extremely common in biology. It’s possible that some fields need to confront the replication crisis (psychology, for example, is frequently cited and the subject of the OP), but I really don’t see this in my field.
- nonbel 9y ago
  What I've seen in bio research is that inconsistent results are always chalked up to some difference in the methods.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> And if the author of the second study calls out the author of the first study The "if" there is one big problem. What seems to have happened instead, in some fields, is that studies that would challenge the results of existing ones simply don't get published. This is partly a result of scientists self-censoring ("I must have done something wrong") and partly a result of journals not accepting papers that challenge "established science". But also, again for some fields, the assumption that other scientists build on the existing work may not be true. The worst-case scenario is when someone does a study, the results are widely trumpeted and applied to the real world, no one keeps track of how they actually perform in the real world (which may be difficult to do anyway, in fields like social psychology), and no one bothers doing any more studies in the area because it's "settled science"...

victor106 9y ago

Whatever you think about DK the fact that someone of his stature would admit when an error was made not just a small one but something as big as this. That in and of itself is something worth applauding.

anitil 9y ago
It speaks volumes that he'd personally respond like this. It shows how much he cares about his research as opposed to being 'right'
- ec109685 9y ago
  How is owning up to a mistake something to be specifically applauded? He is a very distinguished scientist with a huge amount of published work. It is far easier for him to own up to a mistake than a fledgling scientist just getting started. He has far less to "lose". Admitting mistakes should be normal behavior for everyone.
  - quiteawhile 9y ago
    >Admitting mistakes should be normal behavior for everyone Agreed. But it isn't, and applauding it is a way to provide moral incentive to those who might otherwise stay quiet.
whipoodle 9y ago
Well, except he just mumbled it out in a comment on some blog post. Saying it in this fashion is having it both ways, I think. All the air of intellectual honesty AND all the book sales! If he just leaves it at this, and the book is still sold the same and he doesn't broadcast this message any further than a blog comment, what has he really said?

rgejman 9y ago

While I agree with Kahneman that it is easy to fool yourself by looking at studies with small sample size, the recent focus on reproducing existing research is, to my mind, misguided. It is extremely difficult to perform experiments exactly the same, even within one lab, much less between many different labs. For a good example of this, see this fascinating description of how several labs tried to standardize the way they handle c. elegans (worms) to identify compounds which extended the life of the animals: http://www.nature.com/news/a-long-journey-to-reproducible-results-1.22478 http://www.nature.com/news/a-long-journey-to-reproducible-re... While some effort to standardize is important, it also waste a lot of time setting up a specific set of experimental conditions that may not have much resemblance to the conditions that obtain in the real world. In my opinion, we learn much more by taking someone's existing result, thinking through the consequences and then designing well-powered experiments that probe the assumptions, mechanisms and applicability of the result. With critical eyes and diverse systems, we won't fool ourselves. One more note: if this topic interests you, please read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If you are unfamiliar with the book, I guarantee it will completely change how you think about science as a human endeavour and make you much more comfortable with the existence of long periods of time where science just gets some things wrong.

nonbel 9y ago
>"Hundreds of e-mails and many teleconferences later, we converged on a technique but still had a stupendous three-day difference in lifespan between labs. The problem, it turned out, was notation — one lab determined age on the basis of when an egg hatched, others on when it was laid." Wow... this is pretty basic info on what was measured.
Strilanc 9y ago
I think it's important to walk before you run. If social scientists aren't able to get compatible results from the same experiment done by two different teams, then I seriously doubt their ability to extract any relevant subtle truths about human behavior. The c. elegans story you linked is a great example of this. Getting the little details right matters. I can't imagine having any luck doing that while constantly changing the big details.
9y ago

davidgerard 9y ago

So, should we expect LessWrong to be amended with retraction notices across half the Sequences?

sambe 9y ago
Are half the sequences on LessWrong about or dependent on priming?

feelin_googley 9y ago

Latest book by Michael Lewis, "The Undoing Project", is about relationship between Kahneman and Tversky, and to an extent it discusses their research. Problem with 1980's Bargh paper and other studies is never mentioned. There is not even a hint that any of the research Kahneman relied upon was later called into question. I guess Lewis did not think it was relevant. Not sure why but I expected this controversy over replication to at least be mentioned.

mherdeg 9y ago

Just a quick plug for one of my favorite periodicals, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis: http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ . If you're worried about the "file drawer problem" JASNH might help you feel a little better about the future. Naively one would think that the scientific method -- "guess that X does Y, try it, see whether it worked" -- depends as much on people telling each other what DIDN'T work as what DID. Yet many journals will refuse to publish negative results (perhaps aside from attempts to replicate significant results). JASNH takes the opposite publication bias and gives a refreshing view into what stuff people are doing that takes up real research effort, seems to be real work, but didn't show an effect. I have no illusions that JASNH is, like, a super impactful journal -- it's online-only and accepts a weird mix of disciplines -- but it's nice to see that people are trying to do the right thing.

GedByrne 9y ago

Does any of this undermine any of Cialdini's content in his 'Pre-suation' book?

bambax 9y ago

> if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. Plausibility depends on the level of expertise one has in a given domain. Ordinary people don't have any expertise or direct experience of, say, fundamental physics, or astronomy, and so for them (us) no result is either "plausible" or "implausible". We can believe them, or not, but we can't really have an opinion on them. (That goes for climate change: you choose to either trust the experts or not, but you can't tell them that they're wrong if you yourself are not an expert). But social sciences are very different, because all humans have a pretty good understanding of human nature. Studying it is all that we do, all of the time. And so, in the domain of studying human nature, "plausibility" really means something, and the opinion of the layman isn't to be ignored, because chances are said layman is as competent as anyone. In that specific domain, results that fly in the face of the common experience should be received with great skepticism and examined and verified thoroughly.

danharaj 9y ago
> But social sciences are very different, because all humans have a pretty good understanding of human nature. Studying it is all that we do, all of the time. Relative to what? Anthropologists most certainly have far more expertise on human nature than anyone else. Everyone else tends to fall into a rut of essentialism where they believe that their particular, most obviously culturally specific, experiences are universal.
- bambax 9y ago
  Not sure that anthropologists study "human nature" the way social sciences do (or should). Anthropology is the study of human cultures and customs, which probably have as much to do with accidents, chance and contingency (history) as with universal human characteristics.
  - 9y ago

perseusprime11 9y ago

Btw, this applies to your favorite leadership book. The R index on most business/leadership/management books will also be very small.

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago

All of this can be simply fixed. Either by journals (only publish replicated work, other papers only publish the abstract) - not likely - or create an index of tainted papers. A paper that is tainted because can't be replicated by others, also taints all papers that quote it. Index can be searched by author name. People would be much more careful what they quote. Basically without replication you do not get quoted. Without being quoted you do not get scientist karma.

tripzilch 9y ago

I really wanted to start this comment with the HN standard zero-content dick remark of "Is anyone really surprised ...", because I'm really not surprised. Except the fair comment would be, is anyone who actually bothered to look up the references and citations of some of his more bold (but oh so juicy) claims, really surprised, really? It's a typical situation of that telephone-whisper game; researchers do a test they came up with on a group of 21 students. In social psychology this is considered a reasonable sample size. From where I'm standing, this is a non-starter for doing research and calling it science. Just don't even bother. It's better to not know anything than to do it any way and catch a bias (yes like the disease it is). Stopping attributing meaning to what is essentially random data is what got us into this whole modern era of technology in the first place. It seems pretty clear by now which fields of science took that seriously and which ones preferred to instead read (meta meta) meta studies and "sit in their office, bouncing ideas of one another"[0]. But hey, I'm from computational science and we can always generate more data, which starts at sample sizes of about, oh, 10K or so? (at least) I always get the idea that these guys just wanted to sell books, filled with slightly-counterintuitive yet somehow plausible factoids. Add in the veneer of scientific credibility and you've got a very juicy best-selling combo. For people who like to feel they are scientific / rational intelligent, make it a part of their ego--something which I can totally relate to, btw, but I try to be better. A few things that stood out from Kahneman's comment that reflect his ego (even though he uses words to sound humble, he can't quite find the courage, if he could it wouldn't have gotten this far); I had to look up "file-drawer problem", turns out it is a cutesy euphemism for "publication bias". Care to guess why he doesn't use that word? He does it twice, even, so it's definitely not to add variation or flavour to his writing style. Especially when replacing the two usages of the term in context would become "severe publication bias" and "substantial publication bias undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence", which sounds really pretty damning, much more so than calling it "file-drawer problem". > first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. He likes to coin terms a lot. I know the "Law of Small Numbers" in a mathematical context where it means something entirely different. So I looked it up and it turns out to be a euphemism for a "hasty generalization fallacy", kind of the exact opposite of what he suggests here. Anyone care to check this citation? What is this magical law that allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples? It sounds beyond implausible to me. You can statistics your way around this in circles but really you can also just like, dismiss underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. > We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message. Yeah right. The real answer is "because I had books to sell, research grants to obtain and an ego to maintain". You don't need someone to write a paper about this to come to this conclusion. Of course it's harmful, how can this not be obvious? It's also, like, a MAJOR part of social psychology and similar studies because sample sizes are always stupid small. And Kahneman is an expert in this field. So apart from that he already KNEW this because he has common sense, he MUST have already internalized it because he's an expert in this field and you come across this particular bit of common sense all the time. Therefore, no, you CHOOSE to ignore that reality (not message because you were perfectly aware of this before that paper you cited). > if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. If you come from the point of view of the exact, hard sciences, like physics, math or computational science, it's kind of hard to see anything wrong with this statement, on the surface. But if you know a thing or two about social sciences and the like, the bullshit that goes on there, you know that almost everything is wrong about the above statement. Reputable journals often aren't. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world that can make someone believe. You cannot require it. And to say that "belief" is not optional is almost an oxymoron. Unless you use brainwashing. Except I'm not sure if "brainwashing" even really works because, you know, guess what fields conducted the unethical studies into it. > This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. Please don't drag climate science through the same mud as your clusterfuck of research. The hard numbers and sample sizes they have access to, are so large you'd soil your pants. > But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published. Which you KNEW is not the case, so that's not really an excuse is it. > I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. But I had books to sell, research grants to obtain etc etc > I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. If he's so convinced that "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional", then it also holds when the scientific conclusions say the opposite, and he should DROP this belief right this instance until proper evidence is obtained. This is not belief, it's stubbornness. I mean sure, I would personally say, don't throw out the baby with the bath-water (because I also don't quite agree with the other one, science can be flawed like any human endeavour). But he only just went hard-line science on this idea, in the very same comment, and you should at least be consequent about it. I really don't think he's learned any lesson. He led his scientific beliefs be guided by ego, clouded by the idea that research proved what he wanted to be true, and he's published books filled with untruths that are out there right now. Is he going to issue retractions? Errata? Cause you know, lay people are going to read this years into the future, and believe this crap. [0] In a book by the Kahneman/Tversky/Taleb trio of juicy pop-psych writers, they described their research methodology this way. Proudly so, because what could be better science than such incredibly smart people giving the freedom to "bounce ideas of one another" ... Sorry this post is not proper science, I can't recall and properly cite what book it was :-/ I think it was Taleb talking about his buddies Kahneman and Tversky.

model_m_warrior 9y ago

Really learning about the empirical evidence and reproducibility in 'science' has been a real bummer. I was made aware via the Sokal affair and have taken keen interest since. I'd even go as far to say this is why Trump won.