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The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0312 9y agohttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7006.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7006.pdf Such an amusing read!
- ukulele 9y ago> If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. I cannot fathom how honest, intelligent people end up thinking they've "solved" for something like happiness or flourishing in a mathematically meaningful way. And to 4 decimal places!
- lionsdan 9y agoIs that still the default precision displayed in Excel?
- hinkley 9y agoI am just picturing someone haranguing a person for dropping them from 2.92 to 2.90 and ‘ruining everything.’
- hammock 9y agoYou should watch Black Mirror s3e1 "Nosedive"!!
- WalterSear 9y agoLook, Puppy dog, Birthday, Fun at the beach. Are we cool now?
- yters 9y agoBy that logic, if someone has 3 happy moments and then kills themselves they are one of the happiests people who has ever lived.
- naasking 9y agoOnly if you could successfully argue that anyone would kill themselves in those circumstances. I won't hold my breath.
- yters 9y agoWho wouldn't want to be the happiest person to ever live? That seems to be a happy moment in itself.
- naasking 9y agoBecause there's the possibility of being even happier. Just because we're happy, doesn't mean we're not greedy.
- yters 9y agoAha! So a better happiness equation is both cumulative and a ratio. If G is the cumulative number of good moments and B is bad moments, happiness is (rounding the happiness ratio to 3): happiness = (G/B-3)*G = G^2/B-3G Seems there could be a physics of happiness from this equation.
- lulmerchant 9y agoMy own (non-scientific) opinion is related to this. In my experience, resistance to negative emotions is a much more crucial ingredient to happiness. As I’ve been gradually maturing during my life, I think the biggest improvement is that I’m quite emotionally stable. Small and unimportant things don’t bother me much at all, which really helps when it comes to leading a happy and fulfilling life. Especially as negative experiences are supposed to have a greater impact that positive ones.
- emmelaich 9y agoHere's the nub of it: > "Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist." It's amazing -- well not at all amazing really! -- that the most successful people in any scientific field come from an engineering and physics background. One of my favourite quotes is from Kelvin: > I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." And ... mentioning Kelvin is a nice segue to this quote from the article: > "Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology." Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is!
- tensor 9y agoI've seen plenty of computer science students who struggle with math, and even among those who the number who understand statistics is embarrassingly small. Meanwhile, here on HN you have dozens of "computer engineers" arguing that the maths and theory in their own field isn't important. I wouldn't be so quick to pull generalizations about what disciplines have better scientists.
- detaro 9y agoBig part seems to be that statistics often isn't properly taught to students, which then muddle through it when writing papers.
- golemiprague 9y agoIt's not important for a lot of programming jobs but is important for research, same in psychology, it is not important for being a therapist in most cases but is important to doing research. I had to develop some simulation for psychology research, it is not only that a lot of them don't know statistics, it is also the way they collect data and interpret it, it is simply not scientific in the most basic common sense of the word scientific. Nobody manage to repeat or recreate those "researches", not that anybody is trying. Those "sciences" are one big joke especially because they are so feminised that there are not enough people there with basic logic capabilities, innovation or creativity. Good luck finding the next Freud or Jung, it will be as hard as finding any important open source project created by a woman. They should incentivised men to leave STEM and go to psychology if they want this science to move forward in any way.
- Maybestring 9y ago>"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology." Well this statement still stands.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoI don't understand, what is the special status of 0C?
- equanimitivity 9y agoNeither are special
- whatshisface 9y agoWell, the irony is that it isn't very special, and neither is the positivity ratio. So the "just like" statement turned out to be true after all. ( A nxor B == not A nxor not B )
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- trendia 9y agoThe author is confused. 0C is special to us because it is the freezing point of water, but that doesn't really make it special within thermodynamics -- it's just the freezing point of some arbitrary substance at an arbitrary pressure (ATP). 0C isn't even the only freezing point of water -- if you add impurities or change the pressure, you can change the freezing point! Maybe 0K (Kelvin) is special, since that implies zero gas entropy, but 0C doesn't have any magical properties.
- dsubburam 9y agoInterestingly, unlike the boiling point, the melting point is not that dependent on the atmospheric pressure: for a wide range around 100kPa, it stays at 0C [1]. [1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point
- ChrisSD 9y agoAn amateur who did the work. He was doing a relevant degree and collaborated with people with more experience or expertise in relevant fields. That's how you provide useful critique of scientific theories.
- nanis 9y ago95% of published papers are bullst and you know it the moment you read the abstract. The problem is having the time and energy along with a healthy disregard for the gatekeepers on your academic path to keep pursuing this. That's why it usually takes an outsider to publicize this stuff.
- blt 9y agoIn my field (robotics, ML) many papers are not interesting or overstate the consequences of the result, but I wouldn't go as far as to say 95% are bullshit.
- hinkley 9y agoWhen I think about how most papers are written by a student, with credit given to their professor, and I think of what a mess is code written by developers the same age as those grad students... It’s amazing we get as much right as we do. And I know we are getting things right because I have a phone in my pocket that has surmounted thousands upon thousands of puzzles in physics and chemistry over the last twenty years to do what it does.
- empath75 9y agoI’d wager that most papers in most fields are bullshit, but it doesn’t matter because no one reads them or bothers to attempt applying them or building on them.
- mianos 9y agoDidn't you mean to say 95.274% ?
- nicolas314 9y agoReminds me that 47.72% of all statistics are completely made up.
- stareatgoats 9y ago> "Each of them appeared to quote and promote one another, creating a virtuous circle of recommendation." There should be a word for this - is there? It runs like a red thread in all sorts of dubious endeavors in the public sphere.
- soneca 9y agoself-congratulatory ring?
- vasilipupkin 9y agoCircle jerk?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bsenftner 9y agoIn literary circles the term is "log rolling". That term seems to be less popular today to refer to public figures endorsing one another, but in literary critiques it is still used.
- stareatgoats 9y agoThanks for the term! Yes, in literature and in other culture areas is exactly where I've seen it most often too, and it has become a pet peeve. It is conceivably more harmful in science (not to mention politics) however. Harder to spot though.
- Someone 9y agoCitation cartel (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049...). Basically, the equivalent of a webring (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring), but stealthy and on steroids.
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- Myrmornis 9y agoWhen are we as a society going to clearly point out that psychology and related disciplines are not science, and that young people shouldn’t confuse them with science?
- thisiszilff 9y agoProbably never given how broad the field of psychology is. The demarcation line probably runs somewhere through the field, but to separate the two sides between science and not science is an open problem. Hell, it cosmology and evolution also suffer from similar problems, but those fields are far less controversial.
- upvotinglurker 9y agoYes. As a psych major in college, I was astonished to find that the same major included, say, quantifying the changes in neurons in rat brains after rats were exposed to specific stimuli, and empirically unmoored speculation about supposed universal desires to have sex with one's mother.
- Myrmornis 9y agoI deserve the downvotes: of couse you can measure whatever you like and conduct a valid analysis of the data and that's science. But given the extraordinary prominence of quackery in 20th century psychology and psychiatric medicine, including the grotesque over-application of psychiatric drugs to young people suffering from feelings that can and should be treated more traditionally, I do think it would be best to step back and completely excise the fields as they exist from what we call science, and start afresh.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sghi 9y agoIt's great that this has been picked up recently, it's something I've been following along with for a while. If anyone is interested, James Heathers runs a podcast called Everything Hertz (https://twitter.com/hertzpodcast https://twitter.com/hertzpodcast) with Dan Quintana and Nick has been a guest on it - it's well worth listening to if you're interested in science full stop. These guys aren't researchers in my area of interest but the topics they cover are interesting and done very entertainingly!
- NPMaxwell 9y agoTypically in U.S. psychology majors, statistics is required and is taken in the Spring of the student's senior year. I've been playing with the idea of having statistics be the second course (after intro) in a psychology major so that all other courses could build on the students' quantitative understanding.
- nanis 9y agoHaving taught the topic for almost a decade, I know that both among undergrad and grad students, Stats is viewed as a roadblock by most. In addition, most people who teach the topic, don't want to teach it, so they do it in the easiest way possible: Compute this number, look up this table, tell me if the result is "significant" ... "There, you get an A. One less obstacle on your path to becoming the best doctor, the best journalist, the best I-banker, the best consultant, the best of everything ... To bad you don't know what this all means at all." Edited to add: Also, I can't bring myself to forget the positive reception Sam Wang got here for absolutely meaningless statistical statements. But, again, most people see Stats as providing the tools with which to make such statements so they can be popular.
- bsenftner 9y agoStatistics is barely complex math, hardly more than Algebra formulas one plug in numbers. The theory behind the formulas are the foundations of logic, so the idea that even any significant fraction of professional psychologists do not understand statistics is damning of their their profession. That is similar to accountants being bad at addition and subtraction! Astounding.
- nagVenkat 9y agoThe "Amateur" is a PhD student now and has lot of citations on his google scholar. I am happy for him to have such a good impact on the field even though he started late. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&hl=en
- trendia 9y agoIt seems he has found his niche: finding flags in Psychology papers. His most recent publications are refutations of other papers: * No Evidence That Twitter Language Reliably Predicts Heart Disease: A Reanalysis of Eichstaedt et al.(2015a) * Through a womb, darkly: Methodological problems in a recent study of fetal visual perception * Emodiversity: Robust predictor of outcomes or statistical artifact?
- taneq 9y agoSounds like he's directly addressing the lack of replication that we bemoan so much.
- trendia 9y agoI've always thought that English / many other humanities departments learned to avoid much of the controversy that plagued Psychology departments by simply avoiding any data altogether. If Fredericks and Losada had written nearly the same thing, using the same evidence but without the fancy maths, it would no doubt be accepted and lauded within English departments. Any attempts to fight it could be battled in the same way the humanities departments responded to Sokal in the 90's: by derriding him as "a pedant, a literalist and a cultural imperialist".
- hackbinary 9y agoI do not think your argument fair. In fact I find it disappointing. Some things lend themselves to collecting numbers and figures and measurements, and other things quite simply do not. Philosophy, history, literature, and human languages are what first come to my mind as important fields of study that have significant impact on our outlook on the universe, but we can't scientifically measure them. Indeed it is philosophical thought and ideas that underpin our modernity. Moreover, much of our collective advancement is in significant peril because 'the arts' have been devalued so much. (Although William H. Miller just donated a significant sum to the John Hopkins philosophy department since he felt his degree in philosophy made him so successful.) What you go on to speak of in your second paragraph is the art of rhetoric, and ironically you have unwittingly engaged in the very sort of ad hominem attack which you are complaining that you think that liberal arts scholars would use to defend their position. An ad hominem attack is a classic logical fallacy and that is something that I suggest you research.
- trendia 9y ago> Philosophy, history, literature, and human languages My claim was that some fields avoid data altogether so that they can't really be "disproved", only disagreed with. But in these cases, there are rigorous approaches that rely on data: e.g. analytic philosophy, rigorous history, linguistics, etc. and those approaches generally have a large impact. In linguistics, Chomsky made such a huge impact on human languages because he had developed a rigorous grammar and was able to find counterexamples to many of the existing hypotheses. Chomsky had made testable hypotheses, which could only be backed up or disproven by rigorously studying human languages. And the most recent counterexamples to his grammar (e.g. that some languages lack subordinate clauses) augment rather than disprove it. Similarly, advances in philosophy largely came from rigorous approaches -- Russell's attempts to formalize logic (and somewhat subsequent failure) resulted in Wittgenstein's formalization of the relationship to language, which had a huge impact on subsequent philosophy.
- roywiggins 9y agoFun fact, one of the big guys in positive psychology accidentally inspired the Bush torture program, which was similarly based on scientific-sounding nonsense. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-psychology-justified-torture/amp https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-psy...
- AlexCoventry 9y agoThat's like saying that our understanding of respiratory anatomy inspired water boarding. I'm glad New Yorker has improved its journalistic standards a little since then.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- radicalbyte 9y agoTo be completely honest, the whole field of psychology is pseudoscience. It's devoid of critical thinking. You just have to look at the people it attracts. It's the dunces' choice. There's a reason why a PhD in Psychology isn't worth a lot.
- whitepoplar 9y agoThis is harsh, but true.
- meow1032 9y agoOne thing I'm confused about is why most of the criticism has come on the Positive Affect paper and not the original "The complex dynamics of high performance teams" paper, which the most of the math is drawn from.
- joelthelion 9y agoIt's too bad the field of positive psychology is left to people like this, because it asks useful questions and would benefit a lot from serious research.
- thaumaturgy 9y agoSigh. "British semi-retired network engineer educated in mathematics at Cambridge finds mathematical flaw in popular psychology paper and enlists Alan Sokal's help to debunk it." Sure wish folks would quit sucking on the "amateur vs. the establishment" teat. That aside, this was a fun read, and I think it's another example of why scientific progress in the future is going to have to be more multidisciplinary than it has been in the past.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago> Sure wish folks would quit sucking on the "amateur vs. the establishment" teat. I think it's an awesome narrative. What do you dislike about it?
- sha666sum 9y agoThere's a lot of pseudoscience out there like flat earthism, homeopathy, dowsing and what not. The belief that "the establishment" is ignorant and narrow-minded and could be proven wrong by a determined individual willing to challenge those beliefs is what enables these beliefs in the first place. Skepticism and curiosity are healthy, driving forces of science that can be taken too far to lose touch with reality.
- biofox 9y agoThe problem I have with it is that it helps to legitimize the view that an uneducated person's opinions and intuitions are more valid than expertise. In the current political climate, it's dangerous to continue stoking that narrative. As the parent said, the guy was hardly an amateur, but an antivaxer/global warming denier/etc. will view it as confirmation that establishment science is corrupt.
- posterboy 9y ago"uneducated" is committing to the same fallacy that you are trying to argue against. Part of the current political climate is precisely about the lack of information, arguments etc. You might call that a concern of education, but the real problem is learning, which is a far broader problem than supervised education.
- internetman55 9y agoA common topic I see is the surfeit of trained scientists, and how many of them are unable to find employment in their field (professor or other acceptably remunerative research position). Maybe many of these guys out there are simply not good enough to do science, and we should raise the bar for entry to these training programs if so many of their graduates fundamentally misunderstand the mathematics their analyses rely upon.
- Bucephalus355 9y agoIt’s interesting how positive psychology is coming under attack from all directions, and I think reflects many of the shortcomings that have been festering in the field. From the very liberal / progressive side, Barbara Ehrenreich (author of “Nickel and Dimed”) has been making the case for the last 10 years that positive psychology is simply the last ditch effort of capitalists to “maintain morale” while Western living standards triumphantly continue their 5th decade in decline. From a conservative side, a lot of religious leaders have made the case that positive psychology is simply an attempt by secularists/humanists to dethrone the notion of morals, suffering (a big thing in Christianity) etc. and put human pleasure as the highest of all goals.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- IanCal 9y ago> while Western living standards triumphantly continue their 5th decade in decline. Are living standards really lower continually over the last 50 years? At least in the UK I think that absolute poverty is down over a shorter time, median household incomes at up significantly, life expectancy is up. What's continually gone down?
- throwawayjava 9y agoAll of those things for white men, at least since 2008. Which you can read either way (oy, I must have karma to burn?). On the one hand, the anti-capitalist left in the US has historically had a contingent with racial undertones. On the other hand, literally every other group's station was improved at least in part through government mechanisms (equal protection under law, civil rights, etc.) rather than market mechanisms.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoBy the way, it turns out people have been fucking all along and that there actually aren't any black or white people. Never were. Someone made the whole thing up and it got a wee bit out of hand. Thought you might like to know, as it might save you an awful lot of time and worry.
- ironSkillet 9y agoMy wife is working on a PhD in psychology (she intends to do clinical work) and after hearing about the mathematical "training" they receive in order to do research, I was astonished at the lack of rigour. One personal anecdote stands out. Myself being a professional statistician, she would sometimes come to me for help with her assignments. On one assignment, her professor had misunderstood one particular statistic and had given then a problem that wasn't well defined. I helped her craft a polite email to her professor explaining the ambiguity and asking for a resolution. The professor got extremely defensive and did not answer the question, and none of her colleagues realized that the question was incorrect either. And don't get me started on the conclusions they draw from the smallest of trials... /rant Sorry.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoI hear that this is a joke, but it ought to be a real course: https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/everything-is-fucked-the-syllabus/ https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/everything-is-fucke...
- olivierlacan 9y agoRelated to your last point, the slow-burning controversy about P-hacking/Data Dredging:. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/ One particular favorite (used in the above): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/
- tensor_rank_0 9y agoquick question, how well does pre-registration protect against p-hacking?
- equanimitivity 9y agoP-hacking can be done by analyzing the data in different ways until a significant effect is found, and then failing to report all of the analyses done. There is no universal way to analyze data (especially what collected data to include); there are choices that are made and this leads to a “garden of forking paths” where if you look around the garden enough noise alone will give you ‘signicance’. Preregistration makes this impossible by declaring your analysis before collecting data.
- virissimo 9y ago"The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that "Your will needn't be affected by an incident unless you let it". In other words, we can be masters and not victims of fate because what we believe our capability to be determines the strength of that capability." That is absolutely not what Epictetus meant. In fact, like other Stoics, he taught his students a technique called negative visualization that is literally the opposite of positive thinking. The author couldn't have picked a worse example of an ancient precursor to positive psychology.
- bitexploder 9y agoI have read almost all of the biographies and works covering Epictetus. Just want to confirm you are correct. Stoicism at it's true core was how to react to a life that was foretold. Most stoics believed their date was predetermined but now how they dealt with it. In context, Stoicism was the cure to being dealt a rough hand by "fate". It holds up so well that many modern therapies, such as CBT, can be directly connected. Now, we of course don't think probably believe in destiny here on HN (in general). Anyway just providing some color for how off the author was. Stoics lived with death as a way to take the right course of action. E.g. if I knew this was my last day with my daughter how would I act? Could I claim to have made good choices or would I have regrets.
- sTeamTraen 9y agoI am the person featured in the Observer article (for "proof", see the account with this username on Twitter). AMA. :-)
- et1337 9y agoWhat are your thoughts on the "rest" of Frederickson's research? You seem content to debunk only Losada's math (charitably characterized as a "brain fart"), where this article seems more willing to lambast positivity research on the whole as self-serving mumbo-jumbo.
- sTeamTraen 9y agoAt the time that interview was published I didn't know too much about it. Since then I have published about 5 articles critiquing various other work from the same lab. It mostly seems very weak, but I'm not sure if it's any worse than most of research in the wider field of social psychology (and peripheral subfields that use similar underpowered research methods). For example, I have also been involved in looking at the work coming out of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab (GIYF) and much of that seems to be catastrophically bad.
- sTeamTraen 9y agoLink to the Cornell story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15351006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15351006
- hazeii 9y agoCan you give us a quick run-through of the maths that led to the 2.9013 number?
- sTeamTraen 9y agoNo, especially five years on. :-) Seriously, there's no obvious way to do this in a "quick run-through" that is quicker than what we wrote. Look at the calculations in our article on arXiv (and if necessary, look up the 1962 Lorenz article and find the relevant equations). 2.9013 is actually an abbreviation for a recurring decimal representation of a rational number(!), which on its own ought to be a sign that something is wrong.
- ouid 9y ago>"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology." I can't tell if he does or doesn't understand thermodynamics.
- jnbiche 9y agoI'm assuming she was thinking of zero degrees kelvin.
- codeulike 9y agoNice to see Sokal's name come up, he's the first person I thought of when the article outlined the obvious bullshit use of advanced maths in a psychology paper. It's amazing how far stuff like this can get within a field before someone gets round to calling it out.
- truculation 9y agoAnother physicist, David Deutsch, also does a good job in The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 12 'A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy'. I can't do it justice here but part of the problem is that we don't understand what 'happiness' is yet and therefore it's a problem how to measure it, let alone self-report it.
- bigbluedots 9y agoI read to the end of the article hoping to find out what exactly the error in the math and/or reasoning was. Apart from some vague mentions of how the "tipping point" might be influenced by other factors, there was no detail. This article is largely content-free.