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It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or invalid. Personally, I see this blanket dismissal as one of the blind spots of our othe

It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or invalid. Personally, I see this blanket dismissal as one of the blind spots of our otherwise intelligent community. Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail?

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
Psychology is like trying to debug a program with nearly zero tools, not even a reliable ‘printf(..)’. I don’t think it’s ego-stroking so much as it is just frustration at the seemingly intractable complexity of human behaviour.
- ModernMech 7y ago
  > trying to debug a program with nearly zero tools, not even a reliable ‘printf(..)’. That's called kernel development (from scratch) :P
BurningFrog 7y ago
There are surely many valid ones. Problem is, right now you can't tell which they are.
naasking 7y ago
> It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or invalid. Not ALL, but the replication crisis has demonstrated that at least 2/3 of such studies can't be replicated. If you had a communication channel where 2/3 of your packets failed to deliver, I'd say a statement like "this channel isn't reliable" is very justified.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  That's 2/3rd of medical research paper where the standards are the highest. I'd be shocked if the rate was only a mere 66% everywhere else. You'd have to be a fool to take on faith anything published today that wasn't replicated, hopefully more than once.
  - naasking 7y ago
    According to [1], replication rates in psychology varied from 23% to 38%. Social psychology was around 25%, while the more rigourous cognitive psychology was around 50%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
weberc2 7y ago
Dismissal ("that's not true") is different than skepticism ("I can't trust this to be true"). You're "ego" quip is not very charitable of this community--a more likely and more charitable interpretation is that people don't trust the fields that fail to reproduce, especially those fields that appear to be more interested in advancing an agenda than research (e.g., all of the drama around the implicit association test and it's alleged ability to predict racism, etc).
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > You're "ego" quip is not very charitable of this community And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences. I'd prefer a more substantial discussion of the findings or paper at hand rather than to just bring up the replication crisis anytime any psychological finding is mentioned on HN. I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever. This tends to produce responses that earn us clever points with the least effort possible. We've heard about the replication crisis a thousand times, we've heard about the Gell Mann effect. Neither of these alone constitute a substantive argument against a particular scientific paper or piece of journalism. I'm waiting for someone to write a bot to post Gell Mann and Replication Crisis replies to every newspaper article or psychology paper. Maybe someone already has...
  - weberc2 7y ago
    > And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences. Credibility doesn’t depend on the relative difficulty of proving out truth claims. We don’t owe Psychology or Sociology blind faith because their claims are (arguably) more difficult to confirm than harder sciences. You may well be bored of hearing about the replication crisis—you’re entitled to your opinion, but the low quality of the field of psychology is pretty relevant to the topic. > I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever. Apparently so are psychologists :) (kidding, I have lots of respect for psychologists and other researchers even if the fields themselves are prone to drawing bad conclusions)
tripzilch 7y ago
> Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail? Just the "lol math is hard and statistics is annoying" crowd. Honestly the thing that pisses me off most about psychology students is how only a tiny fraction of them understands and gets the actual importance of hard statistics to their field. But instead, it's almost accepted to trash the statistics courses as just these boring hurdles to get past by. And it's still cool to suck at math.

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

Psychology is like trying to debug a program with nearly zero tools, not even a reliable ‘printf(..)’. I don’t think it’s ego-stroking so much as it is just frustration at the seemingly intractable complexity of human behaviour.

ModernMech 7y ago
> trying to debug a program with nearly zero tools, not even a reliable ‘printf(..)’. That's called kernel development (from scratch) :P

BurningFrog 7y ago

There are surely many valid ones. Problem is, right now you can't tell which they are.

naasking 7y ago

> It's a kind HN received wisdom that all psychology studies are false or invalid. Not ALL, but the replication crisis has demonstrated that at least 2/3 of such studies can't be replicated. If you had a communication channel where 2/3 of your packets failed to deliver, I'd say a statement like "this channel isn't reliable" is very justified.

merpnderp 7y ago
That's 2/3rd of medical research paper where the standards are the highest. I'd be shocked if the rate was only a mere 66% everywhere else. You'd have to be a fool to take on faith anything published today that wasn't replicated, hopefully more than once.
- naasking 7y ago
  According to [1], replication rates in psychology varied from 23% to 38%. Social psychology was around 25%, while the more rigourous cognitive psychology was around 50%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...

weberc2 7y ago

Dismissal ("that's not true") is different than skepticism ("I can't trust this to be true"). You're "ego" quip is not very charitable of this community--a more likely and more charitable interpretation is that people don't trust the fields that fail to reproduce, especially those fields that appear to be more interested in advancing an agenda than research (e.g., all of the drama around the implicit association test and it's alleged ability to predict racism, etc).

gerbilly 7y ago
> You're "ego" quip is not very charitable of this community And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences. I'd prefer a more substantial discussion of the findings or paper at hand rather than to just bring up the replication crisis anytime any psychological finding is mentioned on HN. I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever. This tends to produce responses that earn us clever points with the least effort possible. We've heard about the replication crisis a thousand times, we've heard about the Gell Mann effect. Neither of these alone constitute a substantive argument against a particular scientific paper or piece of journalism. I'm waiting for someone to write a bot to post Gell Mann and Replication Crisis replies to every newspaper article or psychology paper. Maybe someone already has...
- weberc2 7y ago
  > And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences. Credibility doesn’t depend on the relative difficulty of proving out truth claims. We don’t owe Psychology or Sociology blind faith because their claims are (arguably) more difficult to confirm than harder sciences. You may well be bored of hearing about the replication crisis—you’re entitled to your opinion, but the low quality of the field of psychology is pretty relevant to the topic. > I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever. Apparently so are psychologists :) (kidding, I have lots of respect for psychologists and other researchers even if the fields themselves are prone to drawing bad conclusions)

tripzilch 7y ago

> Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail? Just the "lol math is hard and statistics is annoying" crowd. Honestly the thing that pisses me off most about psychology students is how only a tiny fraction of them understands and gets the actual importance of hard statistics to their field. But instead, it's almost accepted to trash the statistics courses as just these boring hurdles to get past by. And it's still cool to suck at math.