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"The veneer of mathematics and complexity science – a culturally-powerful yet poorly-understood science – allowed many people to believe a very improbable thing
by sizzle 8y ago
"The veneer of mathematics and complexity science – a culturally-powerful yet poorly-understood science – allowed many people to believe a very improbable thing: that a simple model from fluid dynamics could explain the influence of love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, joy, culture, time, geography, war, famine, birth, etc. etc. on human behaviour. It also suggests a degree of gullibility in the academy: researchers were willing to accept the claims of the papers because they didn’t understand the maths. Worse, of course, is the implication that people simply don’t critically read the papers that they cite."
Pretty much sums up the reproducibility problem of studies in the field of Psychology.
- steakknife 8y agoNo, it doesn't at all. The reproducibility issue in psychology has mostly to do with p-hacking, which is a very specific abuse of legitimate statistical analysis in which statistical significance is brute-forced and cherry-picked (rendering it no longer significant), and is often applied to otherwise sound experiments and hypotheses. The paper in question is literally gibberish.