5 ms·

By your dichotomy, Physics seems closer to Psychology than math. Why aren't there replication crises in Physics? My answer is that there always has been-- it's

By your dichotomy, Physics seems closer to Psychology than math. Why aren't there replication crises in Physics? My answer is that there always has been-- it's just that they get resolved quick. The problem with Psych is that it is SLOW

raverbashing 5y ago
Because it is "trivially" easier to do a better experiment in Physics (money aside, of course) Psychology will always have ethic, sample size and cultural/time/space constraints. Your "psychology experiment" done with Mechanical Turk is more an exercise on sampling bias than anything else And they keep running into "replication failures" because they fail to account for that and try to chase the illusion that it is possible to have a perfect controlled environment in psych. They can't, and they're only fooling themselves they can.
gpt5 5y ago
No - both you and the OP miss the real problem. The problem with Psych is that you can't really experiment on humans in a meaningful way. Animal studies for example don't suffer the same replication problems as psych.
- kalimanzaro 5y ago
  Well perhaps if animal studies were primarily concerned with investigating the interaction of reason and emotion in animals there might just well be :)
- bildung 5y ago
  > The problem with Psych is that you can't really experiment on humans in a meaningful way While absolutely valid this isn't the only problem: One other complication is that conclusions from experimental studies often don't apply to the real world, i.e. people behave differently in experimental settings. Thus in any case you can either have good control over confounding varables but very limited scope (experimental studies) or bad control over the setting but the ability to observe real live behavior (field studies). But it gets worse: Two people with identical behaviour can have quite different motivations and thus identical observable behaviour can result in quite different consequences. I.E. 5 hours a day playing games can be both healthy behavour or an addiction/a means of suppressing thoughts or memories, depending on the person. So you'll always have that massive confounder called the mind, in every setting. Which means you have to inspect the mind itself, which only works indirectly, i.e. by interacting with the person, asking questions, trying to find out the motivation behind a particular action. And the person often doesn't really know, because a particular decision probably wasn't chosen consciously.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I've literally been experimented on and it was meaningful. The problem, in my view is low sample sizes, poor selection[0], hyper dimensional confounding data, and low rates of application. With math, comp sci, or physics reality hits you in the face when you start to actually use it to build rockets or what have you. [0] Guess when I was experimented on? Of course it was during university and of course I'm a white english speaker that lives in North America.
scoofy 5y ago
There are replication problems in physics: http://astrobiology.com/2020/10/no-phosphine-in-the-atmosphere-of-venus.html http://astrobiology.com/2020/10/no-phosphine-in-the-atmosphe... The entire point of the replication crisis is that we should expect statistical anomalies to occur, and the problem is that anomalous results are wildly more likely to be published. Which is why you probably hear about evidence of life on Venus but not about calibration issues. It’s just generally easier and more problematic to do experiments testing framework boundaries in sciences with more variables like medicine, or anything to do with behavior.
ConceptJunkie 5y ago
I would assume that with physics, unlike psychology, or anything that involves biology, is that it's generally much easier to eliminate variables. Testing a new drug, for instance, is very difficult because there are about a billion chemical processes going on in the human body (or whatever body is being tested), and trying to distill the effects of adding one more, and making sure that the effects are correctly attributable to the right causes is something we can almost certainly never know 100%. This kind of thing certainly happens in physics, and we can see results like neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light until they are corrected, but it's usually much easier to isolate the processes of interest in a physics experiment than in a biological system, or at least easier to eliminate most extraneous effects.

raverbashing 5y ago

Because it is "trivially" easier to do a better experiment in Physics (money aside, of course) Psychology will always have ethic, sample size and cultural/time/space constraints. Your "psychology experiment" done with Mechanical Turk is more an exercise on sampling bias than anything else And they keep running into "replication failures" because they fail to account for that and try to chase the illusion that it is possible to have a perfect controlled environment in psych. They can't, and they're only fooling themselves they can.

gpt5 5y ago

No - both you and the OP miss the real problem. The problem with Psych is that you can't really experiment on humans in a meaningful way. Animal studies for example don't suffer the same replication problems as psych.

kalimanzaro 5y ago
Well perhaps if animal studies were primarily concerned with investigating the interaction of reason and emotion in animals there might just well be :)
bildung 5y ago
> The problem with Psych is that you can't really experiment on humans in a meaningful way While absolutely valid this isn't the only problem: One other complication is that conclusions from experimental studies often don't apply to the real world, i.e. people behave differently in experimental settings. Thus in any case you can either have good control over confounding varables but very limited scope (experimental studies) or bad control over the setting but the ability to observe real live behavior (field studies). But it gets worse: Two people with identical behaviour can have quite different motivations and thus identical observable behaviour can result in quite different consequences. I.E. 5 hours a day playing games can be both healthy behavour or an addiction/a means of suppressing thoughts or memories, depending on the person. So you'll always have that massive confounder called the mind, in every setting. Which means you have to inspect the mind itself, which only works indirectly, i.e. by interacting with the person, asking questions, trying to find out the motivation behind a particular action. And the person often doesn't really know, because a particular decision probably wasn't chosen consciously.
3pt14159 5y ago
I've literally been experimented on and it was meaningful. The problem, in my view is low sample sizes, poor selection[0], hyper dimensional confounding data, and low rates of application. With math, comp sci, or physics reality hits you in the face when you start to actually use it to build rockets or what have you. [0] Guess when I was experimented on? Of course it was during university and of course I'm a white english speaker that lives in North America.

scoofy 5y ago

There are replication problems in physics: http://astrobiology.com/2020/10/no-phosphine-in-the-atmosphere-of-venus.html http://astrobiology.com/2020/10/no-phosphine-in-the-atmosphe... The entire point of the replication crisis is that we should expect statistical anomalies to occur, and the problem is that anomalous results are wildly more likely to be published. Which is why you probably hear about evidence of life on Venus but not about calibration issues. It’s just generally easier and more problematic to do experiments testing framework boundaries in sciences with more variables like medicine, or anything to do with behavior.

ConceptJunkie 5y ago

I would assume that with physics, unlike psychology, or anything that involves biology, is that it's generally much easier to eliminate variables. Testing a new drug, for instance, is very difficult because there are about a billion chemical processes going on in the human body (or whatever body is being tested), and trying to distill the effects of adding one more, and making sure that the effects are correctly attributable to the right causes is something we can almost certainly never know 100%. This kind of thing certainly happens in physics, and we can see results like neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light until they are corrected, but it's usually much easier to isolate the processes of interest in a physics experiment than in a biological system, or at least easier to eliminate most extraneous effects.