3 ms·

The replication crisis in psychology has been on for a solid decade now. We need to stop treating poor statistical practice as negligence and start treating it

The replication crisis in psychology has been on for a solid decade now. We need to stop treating poor statistical practice as negligence and start treating it as fraud.

amelius 5y ago
Hanlon's razor disagrees.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor I'm not arguing that these people are malicious, or that they aren't stupid. I'm arguing that we should start punishing them as if they were malicious. The default assumption should be: fraud. The fallback should be: incompetence to the point of negligence. But really we start out by treating them like frauds.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Maybe science should have a concept like "negative citations" which could help. But treating them like criminals seems a step too far.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
      I like the idea of "negative citations"
username90 5y ago
Just add a statistician to review every single paper in every field for statistical error before publication. Every journal that doesn't do this should be deemed unscientific and lose all its status. Of course this wont happen since many "scientists" got to their current position by publishing non-results using bad statistical methods. And no, this wouldn't be too expensive at all. Is it really too expensive to check that our record of human knowledge is correct? It wouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred dollars per paper, basically nothing compared to writing the paper.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  Yes, it's a tough nut to crack because so many of the people in power now are incompetent frauds. They're not stupid, though, which makes it harder... Change is happening, but slowly. I think what's going on is you can get social points by condescending to peers who don't do the causal inference well. I mean...you can be demonstrably right. The proportion of people who can see what you mean and then correctly attribute the points to you is growing.

The replication crisis in psychology has been on for a solid decade now. We need to stop treating poor statistical practice as negligence and start treating it as fraud.

amelius 5y ago

Hanlon's razor disagrees.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor I'm not arguing that these people are malicious, or that they aren't stupid. I'm arguing that we should start punishing them as if they were malicious. The default assumption should be: fraud. The fallback should be: incompetence to the point of negligence. But really we start out by treating them like frauds.
- amelius 5y ago
  Maybe science should have a concept like "negative citations" which could help. But treating them like criminals seems a step too far.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    I like the idea of "negative citations"

username90 5y ago

Just add a statistician to review every single paper in every field for statistical error before publication. Every journal that doesn't do this should be deemed unscientific and lose all its status. Of course this wont happen since many "scientists" got to their current position by publishing non-results using bad statistical methods. And no, this wouldn't be too expensive at all. Is it really too expensive to check that our record of human knowledge is correct? It wouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred dollars per paper, basically nothing compared to writing the paper.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
Yes, it's a tough nut to crack because so many of the people in power now are incompetent frauds. They're not stupid, though, which makes it harder... Change is happening, but slowly. I think what's going on is you can get social points by condescending to peers who don't do the causal inference well. I mean...you can be demonstrably right. The proportion of people who can see what you mean and then correctly attribute the points to you is growing.