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I worked with Nick a few times in a previous job and he was a reviewer on a paper I wrote; he was really nice and professional, and his feedback was constructiv

• whimsicalism 5y ago
  I'm unsure what your second citation is for, they don't use the word "data thugs" but the author certainly seems annoying (although likely correct about the points they're making as far as I read). e: the parent comment has now been edited for clarity, keeping my comment for posterity
  • setgree 5y ago
    The piece is written by a member of the posse [0] who can be, as I think the above quoted piece demonstrates, somewhat abrasive [0] https://medium.com/@OmnesRes/the-circle-of-data-thug-life-815289b96c95 https://medium.com/@OmnesRes/the-circle-of-data-thug-life-81...
    • MegaButts 5y ago
      If that's considered abrasive, we've really lost out on actual communication for the sake of bullshit etiquette.
      • aidenn0 5y ago
        It is hard for me to comprehend a point of view where that article is not considered abrasive in tone. Whether or not it bothers you is another question. The tile is in all caps "THE DUMBEST FUCKING THING I’VE EVER READ" and challenges someone to a cage fight at the end. The entire rest of the article could have been honeyed sweetness (which clearly it's not), and that could be enough to call it abrasive. One person I showed it responded very favorably, commenting that the author clearly considered it "...important to get the basic points across violently vecause no one is listening to the non-violent arguments." i.e. this is abrasive, but abrasive to a purpose.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        > If that's considered abrasive, we've really lost out on actual communication for the sake of bullshit etiquette. Did we read the same article? I'm confident that we can have actual communication that is both less obnoxious and not hamstrung by "bullshit etiquette."
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• tomrod 5y ago
  I wanted to hate [1], but find myself agreeing quite a lot on Jordan's substance. Well done to the writer! What is this about data thugs and posses?
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• DantesKite 5y ago
  What’s funny is the whole field of Big Five is fundamentally a fraud because it has both correlation and dimensionality problems. And using it to describe Nick, who apparently took down another positive psychology finding, is ironically funny.
  • bumby 5y ago
    Can you share more or point to further reading? I originally came across the Big Five because a psychologist was using it to debunk the idea of "grit" as being a predictor of success. (The claim was grit was not a new concept and essentially just a repackaging of the conscientiousness Big Five trait.) It would be interesting (and another example of irony) if the Big Five itself was debunked.
    • runarberg 5y ago
      I go into many reasons why big-5 (and personality psychology in general) might be a pseudoscience in a nibling comment. Here I would like to add that what you might have seen big-5 proponents do to grit (a trait from positive psychology), other fields of psychology (such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, behavioral psychology, etc.) does to personality psychology (and psychometrics in general). I’m not aware of any debunking claims in particular, but skepticism is plenty, and the usual accusations range from pseudoscience to poor science. In my opinion the worst critics go into an alternative theory of personality traits, e.g. 7 axis instead of 5 or neurotism is actually something else etc. These are attempts to debunk big-5 and in my opinion they always fall short. It doesn’t take long for proponents of big-5 to debunk these critics as the statistics behind the theory of big 5 is solid. Personality tests are robust and they consistently yield 5 disjoint axis in cluster analysis. A better criticism goes into the foundation of the theory, attacks the fact that personality (and the personality traits) are operationally defined with little evidence they exist outside of the models. The behavior that personality tests claim to predict often have better correlation to non-personality traits, such as your brain dopamine levels, class, education or economic status, anxiety or depression, prior stimuli and response etc. Behavior is better predicted by looking at the person not how the person responds on a piece of paper. Their tests might be robust, but their science is lacking. I’m not a believer in personality traits in general, neither “grit” nor “agreeableness”. To me the findings of any psychometrician is unremarkable at best and racist at worst (See Stephen J. Gould (1996) “The Mismeasure of Man”). In a given situation how you respond is never dictated by your personality traits. If it explains any variability behavior the effect size is hardly ever significant, and if it is there are probably other factors—not measurable with questionnaire—will explain it better.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  If this generalizes, seems like someone with a graph database, some basic calculus, and an archive of papers citation data could pull the rug out from under entire disciplines, specifically ones that are informing public policy these days. These "data thugs," they seem like what we hoped hackers would be.
  • lmc 5y ago
    Not that simple, and that was something missed in the original article - not all citations are equal. You have to know the context of each. Like, it could've been 1 positive citation, and 349 calling it bullshit... or vice versa.
    • motohagiography 5y ago
      Indeed, the beauty of using a graph is you can see the direct citations, and then secondary and teritiery ones and then pull apart the clusters to see if there is any opportunity to pull on mathematical threads. A query like, given paper X, show papers that cite it, papers that cite those, and then ones that cite both. Cycles in the graph might show citation rings as well (as I think has happened in the past), but this would be a challenge for young people to apply their high school calculus skills to verifying claims in social science research. A breadth first search across papers using citations selects which paths you want to do your depth first validation on. We do the same thing in vulnerability research with software dependencies, and picking a bad-math vuln in a discipline and tracing its impact though, or picking clusters of tightly dependent research and finding vulns in them seems like an opportunity for an enterprising outsider who never wants a job from any of these people.
      • tunesmith 5y ago
        How can a citation ring happen if papers are written one after another?
        • smaddox 5y ago
          Preprints. It happens quite often in deep learning papers, these days.
• fhood 5y ago
  Hahaha, it is a bit of a catch-22 though isn't it. In debunking a paper like this you have to understand that your are cutting away the foundation that people built their careers on, and you may be fundamentally damaging their academic trajectory. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just that being a bit of an asshole probably helps.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    Hopefully this will make future scientists more wary of building their careers on a foundation of shaky work that could disappear - and thus engage more critically.
  • eru 5y ago
    Maybe. But as a matter of strategy, it also helps to appear kind. (If nothing else, that way your criticism cuts deeper.)
    • native_samples 5y ago
      There's a time for kindness, and then there's a time for brutal honesty. The Nick Brown story does usually feature another person who was too kind and ended up regretting it: In his email, Guastello included a list of errors he had found in Fredrickson and Losada’s application of the math. “Ironically,” he wrote, “I did send American Psychologist a comment on some of the foregoing points, which they chose not to publish because ‘there wasn’t enough interest in the article.’ In retrospect, however, I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of any positive features of the original article.” So. The people in the end who brought the problem to light were people like Sokal, who freely use terms like "bullshit" to describe what Losada and Fredrickson did. And the people who tried to be polite and kind and balance out their criticism with the positives, were blown off and got nowhere.
      • eru 5y ago
        I don't think you have to balance out your criticism. But you can stay polite and keep attacking the work only.
• pdonis 5y ago
  > being kind when delivering pointed critiques helps a difficult pill go down While I am sympathetic to this, I think it fails to recognize a very important thing that we expect, or at least should expect, from people who claim to be doing science: that every scientist is responsible for sanity checking their own work before making any claims based on it. As Richard Feynman said, your first duty as a scientist is to not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. That means every scientist needs to be an expert in whatever fields are relevant to the work they're doing. If a scientist is going to make claims based on some purported correspondence between human psychology and fluid dynamics, they need to be an expert, not just in human psychology, but also in fluid dynamics; and if they're not, they need to not make the claims, no matter how enthusiastic they are about them. And the scientists who published the claims that Nick and his colleagues debunked were not experts in fluid dynamics, and knew it, yet they chose to publish anyway. And that kind of thing, if science as an institution is going to be trustworthy, cannot be handled by kind words when delivering pointed critiques. It has to be labeled as what it is: not just being mistaken, but being scientifically dishonest, by making claims that you do not have the expertise to make. In a sane world, scientists who did that would be stripped of the label "scientist", the same way we disbar dishonest lawyers or revoke the medical licenses of dishonest doctors. At the very least, it justifies language that does not include kind words, but the opposite. I have no problem with using kind words when calling out a scientist who is just mistaken. But I don't think kind words are called for when a scientist knowingly publishes claims that they don't have the expertise to evaluate for themselves.
  • nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    I thought I was going insane before reading your comment. This world is such a nightmare to live in. Honestly, the idea that this guy even discovered something is just as ridiculous as the fact that the ruse had gone on for as long as it did. The only real story here is about the work that wasn’t done to begin with.
  • karaterobot 5y ago
    > ... I don't think kind words are called for when a scientist knowingly publishes claims that they don't have the expertise to evaluate for themselves. But, until you can establish beyond all reasonable doubt that that is what happened, you should be polite because there is a chance you are the one who is wrong. Then, after you have established it beyond reasonable doubt, you should be polite because trying to destroy someone will only make them dig in and fight you til the bitter end. And, because it's the right thing to do. You can be kind and tenacious, and forceful, and not take no for an answer. I think that's what the original commenter was implying.
• monksy 5y ago
  > its prominent characters, as you might expect, have reputations for being interpersonally difficult [1]. Collectively they've been labeled "data thugs" [2] and accused of "methodological terrorism" [3] Ahh the "everyone I don't agree with/like are nazis" trope.
• mathattack 5y ago
  I suspect he would come after the lack of rigor in models like Big 5 personality factors. :-)