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Here'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

Here'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 ago
I'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 ago
  Big part seems to be that statistics often isn't properly taught to students, which then muddle through it when writing papers.
- golemiprague 9y ago
  It'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.
- ramblerman 9y ago
  You are conflating research with practice. Most computer engineers are programming and can get away with not being up to speed with calculus/stats. As can most practicing psychologists (to a much greater degree). Phd computer scientists doing research are typically not 'weak' at maths.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
taeric 9y ago
I think you are giving the fields of engineering and physics too much credit here. Not the least because you are assuming that engineers and scientists are by default good at math. Math is hard. Pretty much period. Often, you can trick yourself into forgetting how hard it is. More, you can assume that mastery of something that takes high math to describe, somehow indicates mastery of the high math. Consider juggling as an easy example, can be very complicated to explain what is happening, yet I don't think it would be wise to assume that all jugglers are good at higher math. Even if the ones you find are.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Dr Feynman would agree: The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Yes Mathematics is hard. I don't think being good at juggling makes you any better at describing the dynamics of juggling, nor the physiological characteristics that enable it. Regarding Feynman (comment below), yes it is very important not to fool yourself, but knowing mathematics well makes it easier not to fool yourself.
  - taeric 9y ago
    But does it? Or is it just that the people you know that don't fool themselves happen to be good at math? :) The juggling example was supposed to be an obvious example of people doing something that takes complicated math to analyze. I'm asserting it is not much different to many engineering jobs. Nor do I think that most physicists have a terribly strong intuition for math. I confess to not having numbers to back this. :(
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  Math and physics can describe juggling, but that description is not what helped discover juggling - holding a few balls in your hand suffices for that. Engineering and physics on the other hand to be math derived fields. In other words, the processes involved are sufficiently complex to be beyond the scope of even a rather clever human's intuition. Of course you might argue of success by mimicry, yet mimicry becomes exponentially more difficult as the complexity of a problem increases, to the point that I think we can all but disregard it for meaningful applications of engineering and most natural sciences.
k3d 9y ago
> 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. This seems like a pretty wild claim to me- what is your basis for it?
- posterboy 9y ago
  I agree, this is pretty wild, but I also agree with the sentiment. Having studied physics I might be biased, so help me out here, please. Name one scientist from the 20th century more popular than Einstein, groups and abstract ideas are OK, too. PS: "most successful" is ambiguous. Success is not really comparable. You can have many small successes, revolutions in fields that today feel like common knowledge and not scientific at all, and many nameless contributors. Medicin, chemistry, and many interdisciplinary fields. Fixating on a single field only to argue in the end that all other fields are basically just subfields of ... metamatics, is funny, but missing the point. There is a large perceived disconnect between the natural sciences and "others". That's the real problem OP was pointing out, I guess.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    Science is a popularity contest now?
  - k3d 9y ago
    I do not generally measure the effective "success" of a scientist by their brand name recognition.
  - ordu 9y ago
    It is certainly aviability heruistic[1]. You need no external help to see it, just try to remember 5 physicists and 5 psychologists and compare efforts it takes. Someone to compare with Einstein? Freud. This guy is no less known to public, and influenced society maybe even more, by breaking taboos around sexual desires. Moreover, he shaped all the modern psychology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
bluetwo 9y ago
> "Not many psychologists are very good at maths" Proof?
- cmplxconjugate 9y ago
  As a general response, I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK). During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics), therefore, you could argue they are not fully trained in 'maths'. A completely anecdotal experience: During my undergraduate (MPhys) I lived in halls with about 20 psychologists. I remember one night during the second year (of 4) they all had a huge celebration. The reason for the celebration was that they had had their last ever maths exam of the undergraduate. I remember one girl proclaimed "Thank god, I've never have to do any maths ever again!". She was met with a roar of support... I couldn't help but cringe thinking about the necessity of statistics in their future research.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    >I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK)... During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics) Because the math is easier, and all you need is statistics. As the article states, the problem is, it seems even that lower bar isn't being met.
  - meow1032 9y ago
    As someone who studied Psychology and CS, and is somewhat good at math, it's not necessarily a bad thing that psychology students don't take a lot of math. I'd say maybe 10% of students who take psychology actually go on to do anything with research. Most of my friends in psychology are now counsellors, social workers, occupational therapists etc., and are good at their jobs, and this would not change if they had to take multivariate calculus. At the same time, I do think psychological research would benefit if the people performing that research were better trained in math (actually when I say math, I specifically mean statistics and linear algebra). I think the problem is that psychology is so broad that it can't possibly do a good job at catering to all these different concerns. Even at the graduate level, in order to become a clinical psychologist, you have to do a lot of research. The scientist-clinician model sounds good, but in practice I found that a lot of people who just didn't care about research were doing research. I found the same thing with medical students who were doing research to pad their resumes. I also think that you can't just take a physicist or mathematician and plop them in psychology and start fixing everything. The problems often require a ton of theory, are really expensive to test, and the data quality is often terrible (because of human error, measurement error etc). Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
WalterSear 9y ago
> "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 worse: IME in grad school, the field is politicized beyond reason. It was a very depressing realization.
- trendia 9y ago
  Are you referring to the field's own internal politics (e.g. preference to psychological doctrine or against, e.g. BF Skinner), or are you referencing American government politics? (e.g. like Democrat or Republican)
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    Internal politics - both within the field and within the department. - The main focus of my advisor was a life-or-death struggle with a researcher at distant university over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin - utterly inconsequential, self-justifying research and counter-research that ultimately served nothing more than to keep the 'publish-or-perish' wolf from the door. Just enough math was involved to keep it from being sociology. - A grad student with an engineering background was dismissed for discretely pointing out that the measurement tools for one professor's lab's flagship experiment series were an order of magnitude too inaccurate for the measurements they were being used to perform. This was commonplace - another was warned for pointing out (privately, not in public) that requiring us to pass all our submitted papers through TurnitIn was also signing over our legal rights to anything we submitted as part of our coursework (which could potentially cause publication problems)
yters 9y ago
How does Kelvin quantitatively show that only quantitative claims count as true knowledge?
- dietrichepp 9y ago
  Kelvin is making a philosophical claim about scientific knowledge. There is no contradiction here.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  You're overstating Kelvin's claim. He doesn't say it is the only way to true knowledge.
johnchristopher 9y ago
> Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is! I am sorry if I give the impression of nitpicking but I live in a Celsius world and zero c is special because it means water freezes. (and snow instead of rain)
- andlier 9y ago
  Zero Kelvin is still a different league of special scientifically speaking.
- cdancette 9y ago
  It's special in our human world, but not in thermodynamics / physics. Water is just a molecule like all the others, it's not special. Whereas 0K is the absolute minimum temperature, so that's a really special value!
  - johnchristopher 9y ago
    I'd say water freezing is still interesting thermodynamics/physics :). (But I agree 0K is another kind of mark)
- dan-0 9y ago
  I see where your coming from here, and by all means 0 °C is more significant than say 0 °F. But water freezing at 0 °C is far less "special" than everything freezing at 0 K
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  Sheesh, people... is the downvote really necessary ?
mietek 9y ago
> Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is! I agree that Fredrickson is grasping for relevance. However, 0 °C is special to water-based lifeforms. 0 °C is defined as 273.15 K, or the temperature at which the three phases of water are in a thermodynamic equilibrium — at a pressure of 1 atm, or 1 standard atmosphere. The degree Celsius is defined as equal to the kelvin, so the Celsius scale is a shifted version of the Kelvin scale. https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/kelvin.html https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/kelvin.html https://www.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=10&RES=4 https://www.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=10&R...
- RachelF 9y ago
  Actually, to off-topic nitpick, the triple point of pure water is at 0.01°C (273.16K), not 0°C
- leereeves 9y ago
  Isn't 0.01 °C the triple point of water (the temperature at which the three phases of water are in a thermodynamic equilibrium)? The triple point is a better standard and is used now, but it's not exactly 0 °C because that was defined by calling the melting point of water 0 °C.
- ars 9y ago
  > 0 °C is special to water-based lifeforms. Only those who happen to live at exactly 1 atmosphere of pressure. And ordinary (unpurified) water doesn't freeze at exactly 0 anyway.
RachelF 9y ago
> "Not many psychologists are very good at maths," Most social scientists are not that good at maths. It used to be mostly harmless before they started dabbling in experimental science involving statistics. A bigger problem is Economists; many of whom are also bad at maths, but litter their articles with formulas anyway, to add some pseudo-intellectual rigour.
- lowkeyokay 9y ago
  Economist here. I completely agree
miles 9y ago
While Kelvin claimed that "when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind", it is interesting to note that he also maintained that "I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism." https://books.google.com/books?id=kdm9nmAkKvIC&pg=PA1103&lpg=PA1103&dq=“I+believe+that+the+more+thoroughly+science+is+studied,+the+further+does+it+take+us+from+anything+comparable+to+atheism.”&source=bl&ots=33AobRJPbj&sig=3WxnJNg8m-3nZhaITkN9eB5HQ3w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifotrYzdPZAhVOzGMKHaOOCO0Q6AEIWTAJ#v=onepage&q=“I%20believe%20that%20the%20more%20thoroughly%20science%20is%20studied%2C%20the%20further%20does%20it%20take%20us%20from%20anything%20comparable%20to%20atheism.”&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=kdm9nmAkKvIC&pg=PA1103&lpg...
davidp 9y ago
I have a friend who is a linguistics professor at a major public university, and she has complained to me about some of the projects she's been involved with where her fellow researchers really are not good at math. Among other things, there's a lot of confusion about statistical significance, and how and when it's calculated. There are people out there, especially in the cognitive and social sciences, who think it's OK to run an experiment to gather some data, and then look for statistically significant trends in the data and draw whatever conclusions they can. They're p-hacking and they don't even know they're doing it; they think it's science. And the people judging their papers sometimes think the same thing. How do you fix a field like this? This issue lies at the root of the reproducibility problem. The example someone gave about an undergrad cheering (that she didn't have to do any more math) points at one of the causes.

tensor 9y ago

I'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 ago
Big part seems to be that statistics often isn't properly taught to students, which then muddle through it when writing papers.
golemiprague 9y ago
It'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.
ramblerman 9y ago
You are conflating research with practice. Most computer engineers are programming and can get away with not being up to speed with calculus/stats. As can most practicing psychologists (to a much greater degree). Phd computer scientists doing research are typically not 'weak' at maths.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

taeric 9y ago

I think you are giving the fields of engineering and physics too much credit here. Not the least because you are assuming that engineers and scientists are by default good at math. Math is hard. Pretty much period. Often, you can trick yourself into forgetting how hard it is. More, you can assume that mastery of something that takes high math to describe, somehow indicates mastery of the high math. Consider juggling as an easy example, can be very complicated to explain what is happening, yet I don't think it would be wise to assume that all jugglers are good at higher math. Even if the ones you find are.

hinkley 9y ago
Dr Feynman would agree: The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
emmelaich 9y ago
Yes Mathematics is hard. I don't think being good at juggling makes you any better at describing the dynamics of juggling, nor the physiological characteristics that enable it. Regarding Feynman (comment below), yes it is very important not to fool yourself, but knowing mathematics well makes it easier not to fool yourself.
- taeric 9y ago
  But does it? Or is it just that the people you know that don't fool themselves happen to be good at math? :) The juggling example was supposed to be an obvious example of people doing something that takes complicated math to analyze. I'm asserting it is not much different to many engineering jobs. Nor do I think that most physicists have a terribly strong intuition for math. I confess to not having numbers to back this. :(
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
Math and physics can describe juggling, but that description is not what helped discover juggling - holding a few balls in your hand suffices for that. Engineering and physics on the other hand to be math derived fields. In other words, the processes involved are sufficiently complex to be beyond the scope of even a rather clever human's intuition. Of course you might argue of success by mimicry, yet mimicry becomes exponentially more difficult as the complexity of a problem increases, to the point that I think we can all but disregard it for meaningful applications of engineering and most natural sciences.

k3d 9y ago

> 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. This seems like a pretty wild claim to me- what is your basis for it?

posterboy 9y ago
I agree, this is pretty wild, but I also agree with the sentiment. Having studied physics I might be biased, so help me out here, please. Name one scientist from the 20th century more popular than Einstein, groups and abstract ideas are OK, too. PS: "most successful" is ambiguous. Success is not really comparable. You can have many small successes, revolutions in fields that today feel like common knowledge and not scientific at all, and many nameless contributors. Medicin, chemistry, and many interdisciplinary fields. Fixating on a single field only to argue in the end that all other fields are basically just subfields of ... metamatics, is funny, but missing the point. There is a large perceived disconnect between the natural sciences and "others". That's the real problem OP was pointing out, I guess.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  Science is a popularity contest now?
- k3d 9y ago
  I do not generally measure the effective "success" of a scientist by their brand name recognition.
- ordu 9y ago
  It is certainly aviability heruistic[1]. You need no external help to see it, just try to remember 5 physicists and 5 psychologists and compare efforts it takes. Someone to compare with Einstein? Freud. This guy is no less known to public, and influenced society maybe even more, by breaking taboos around sexual desires. Moreover, he shaped all the modern psychology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

bluetwo 9y ago

> "Not many psychologists are very good at maths" Proof?

cmplxconjugate 9y ago
As a general response, I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK). During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics), therefore, you could argue they are not fully trained in 'maths'. A completely anecdotal experience: During my undergraduate (MPhys) I lived in halls with about 20 psychologists. I remember one night during the second year (of 4) they all had a huge celebration. The reason for the celebration was that they had had their last ever maths exam of the undergraduate. I remember one girl proclaimed "Thank god, I've never have to do any maths ever again!". She was met with a roar of support... I couldn't help but cringe thinking about the necessity of statistics in their future research.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  >I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK)... During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics) Because the math is easier, and all you need is statistics. As the article states, the problem is, it seems even that lower bar isn't being met.
- meow1032 9y ago
  As someone who studied Psychology and CS, and is somewhat good at math, it's not necessarily a bad thing that psychology students don't take a lot of math. I'd say maybe 10% of students who take psychology actually go on to do anything with research. Most of my friends in psychology are now counsellors, social workers, occupational therapists etc., and are good at their jobs, and this would not change if they had to take multivariate calculus. At the same time, I do think psychological research would benefit if the people performing that research were better trained in math (actually when I say math, I specifically mean statistics and linear algebra). I think the problem is that psychology is so broad that it can't possibly do a good job at catering to all these different concerns. Even at the graduate level, in order to become a clinical psychologist, you have to do a lot of research. The scientist-clinician model sounds good, but in practice I found that a lot of people who just didn't care about research were doing research. I found the same thing with medical students who were doing research to pad their resumes. I also think that you can't just take a physicist or mathematician and plop them in psychology and start fixing everything. The problems often require a ton of theory, are really expensive to test, and the data quality is often terrible (because of human error, measurement error etc). Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/

WalterSear 9y ago

> "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 worse: IME in grad school, the field is politicized beyond reason. It was a very depressing realization.

trendia 9y ago
Are you referring to the field's own internal politics (e.g. preference to psychological doctrine or against, e.g. BF Skinner), or are you referencing American government politics? (e.g. like Democrat or Republican)
- WalterSear 9y ago
  Internal politics - both within the field and within the department. - The main focus of my advisor was a life-or-death struggle with a researcher at distant university over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin - utterly inconsequential, self-justifying research and counter-research that ultimately served nothing more than to keep the 'publish-or-perish' wolf from the door. Just enough math was involved to keep it from being sociology. - A grad student with an engineering background was dismissed for discretely pointing out that the measurement tools for one professor's lab's flagship experiment series were an order of magnitude too inaccurate for the measurements they were being used to perform. This was commonplace - another was warned for pointing out (privately, not in public) that requiring us to pass all our submitted papers through TurnitIn was also signing over our legal rights to anything we submitted as part of our coursework (which could potentially cause publication problems)

yters 9y ago

How does Kelvin quantitatively show that only quantitative claims count as true knowledge?

dietrichepp 9y ago
Kelvin is making a philosophical claim about scientific knowledge. There is no contradiction here.
emmelaich 9y ago
You're overstating Kelvin's claim. He doesn't say it is the only way to true knowledge.

johnchristopher 9y ago

> Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is! I am sorry if I give the impression of nitpicking but I live in a Celsius world and zero c is special because it means water freezes. (and snow instead of rain)

andlier 9y ago
Zero Kelvin is still a different league of special scientifically speaking.
cdancette 9y ago
It's special in our human world, but not in thermodynamics / physics. Water is just a molecule like all the others, it's not special. Whereas 0K is the absolute minimum temperature, so that's a really special value!
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  I'd say water freezing is still interesting thermodynamics/physics :). (But I agree 0K is another kind of mark)
dan-0 9y ago
I see where your coming from here, and by all means 0 °C is more significant than say 0 °F. But water freezing at 0 °C is far less "special" than everything freezing at 0 K
johnchristopher 9y ago
Sheesh, people... is the downvote really necessary ?

mietek 9y ago

> Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is! I agree that Fredrickson is grasping for relevance. However, 0 °C is special to water-based lifeforms. 0 °C is defined as 273.15 K, or the temperature at which the three phases of water are in a thermodynamic equilibrium — at a pressure of 1 atm, or 1 standard atmosphere. The degree Celsius is defined as equal to the kelvin, so the Celsius scale is a shifted version of the Kelvin scale. https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/kelvin.html https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/kelvin.html https://www.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=10&RES=4 https://www.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=10&R...

RachelF 9y ago
Actually, to off-topic nitpick, the triple point of pure water is at 0.01°C (273.16K), not 0°C
leereeves 9y ago
Isn't 0.01 °C the triple point of water (the temperature at which the three phases of water are in a thermodynamic equilibrium)? The triple point is a better standard and is used now, but it's not exactly 0 °C because that was defined by calling the melting point of water 0 °C.
ars 9y ago
> 0 °C is special to water-based lifeforms. Only those who happen to live at exactly 1 atmosphere of pressure. And ordinary (unpurified) water doesn't freeze at exactly 0 anyway.

RachelF 9y ago

> "Not many psychologists are very good at maths," Most social scientists are not that good at maths. It used to be mostly harmless before they started dabbling in experimental science involving statistics. A bigger problem is Economists; many of whom are also bad at maths, but litter their articles with formulas anyway, to add some pseudo-intellectual rigour.

lowkeyokay 9y ago
Economist here. I completely agree

miles 9y ago

While Kelvin claimed that "when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind", it is interesting to note that he also maintained that "I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism." https://books.google.com/books?id=kdm9nmAkKvIC&pg=PA1103&lpg=PA1103&dq=“I+believe+that+the+more+thoroughly+science+is+studied,+the+further+does+it+take+us+from+anything+comparable+to+atheism.”&source=bl&ots=33AobRJPbj&sig=3WxnJNg8m-3nZhaITkN9eB5HQ3w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifotrYzdPZAhVOzGMKHaOOCO0Q6AEIWTAJ#v=onepage&q=“I%20believe%20that%20the%20more%20thoroughly%20science%20is%20studied%2C%20the%20further%20does%20it%20take%20us%20from%20anything%20comparable%20to%20atheism.”&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=kdm9nmAkKvIC&pg=PA1103&lpg...

davidp 9y ago

I have a friend who is a linguistics professor at a major public university, and she has complained to me about some of the projects she's been involved with where her fellow researchers really are not good at math. Among other things, there's a lot of confusion about statistical significance, and how and when it's calculated. There are people out there, especially in the cognitive and social sciences, who think it's OK to run an experiment to gather some data, and then look for statistically significant trends in the data and draw whatever conclusions they can. They're p-hacking and they don't even know they're doing it; they think it's science. And the people judging their papers sometimes think the same thing. How do you fix a field like this? This issue lies at the root of the reproducibility problem. The example someone gave about an undergrad cheering (that she didn't have to do any more math) points at one of the causes.