5 ms·

> It's researchers accurately reporting their findings In a low-confidence, hedged way. A "good" article has the balls to come in with a real question, and use

by sdwr 3y ago

> It's researchers accurately reporting their findings In a low-confidence, hedged way. A "good" article has the balls to come in with a real question, and use statistics as tools to answer it. If the answer is messy or nuanced, so be it, but at least try. Leading with the methods used and prior studies etc. etc. is the data equivalent of cowering behind cover.

crazygringo 3y ago
A hundred times no. Science and economics isn't about having big swinging balls, and thank god it's not. It's about slow, incremental progress towards understanding. Yes, being low-confidence and hedged at first because that's truthfully accurate. Methods and prior studies place your work into context. The idea that this is "cowering behind cover" is completely incorrect. Science, and the social sciences, aren't sports competitions to win the championship -- and again, thank god they're not. It's not that you're supposed to be swinging for the fences or else you're worthless -- what a counterproductive idea. It's about slowly building up knowledge.
- yourapostasy 3y ago
  > It's about slowly building up knowledge. In other words, if one doesn't care for the grind hip deep in the nuance for years, decades, even centuries, then don't look for a TikTok'ified revelation in science, and wait for the swing the fences headlines in the mainstream news. Flashes of leaps forward in science are exceedingly rare; we don't say "on the shoulders of giants" for nothing, those giants are the towering innumerable generations that came before us, it is utterly humbling to see how long basic technologies like mastering control of fire took to spread across the world [1]. I see this outsized appetite for the easy button in a lot of programmers as well. There comes a time when one will have to grind through small shavings of parsimoniously-parceled out pico packets of understanding to progress in one's engineering maturity evolution. Categorically denying that by demanding there is an easy-quick-simple way or the ones doing the grinding are somehow character deficient is to close off one possible way to grow. Our work is already challenging enough, so I'm always open to any way to grow myself, though YMMV and one could even do better closing off that avenue to grow for all I know. Just to perform junior-level programming acceptably well takes a stupendous amount of grinding that most non-programmers cannot fathom doing themselves through interacting with software, though many will happily grind just as much if not more at other pursuits. I cannot for example, fathom watching so much sports that I can quote on-demand specific games and winning shots/goals on specific days by specific players. And yet, there is an NBA star who is a walking encyclopedia of every game they've ever played in their NBA career, who not only knows winning shots but from where on the court, who was covering them, the relative position of nearby players, who they were, etc. The amount of grind to get into the game so to speak are penny-ante table stakes compared to the grind the pros put in. There are more such personal eras of grinding to accomplish successive levels of mastery in these pursuits, and programming is no exception in my personal experience. This isn't some personal character issue, it is a cognitive bias (or two or more depending upon how you look at it) causing us to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. Projection Bias [2] and Planning Fallacy [3] are my favorites to explain this effect. [1] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans][Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human... of fire by early humans - Wikipedia]] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy
davidcuddeback 3y ago
Wow, no. Just no. That's not how research is done. What you're describing sounds more like writing a clickbait article than writing a research paper. Writing a research paper in that manner would damage the researcher's credibility. A good research paper does lead with a discussion of related research and methodology and is careful to not accidentally make unfounded conclusions. In fact, some papers will include a "threats to validity" section, which I think is a good exercise in skepticism.

by sdwr 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

A hundred times no. Science and economics isn't about having big swinging balls, and thank god it's not. It's about slow, incremental progress towards understanding. Yes, being low-confidence and hedged at first because that's truthfully accurate. Methods and prior studies place your work into context. The idea that this is "cowering behind cover" is completely incorrect. Science, and the social sciences, aren't sports competitions to win the championship -- and again, thank god they're not. It's not that you're supposed to be swinging for the fences or else you're worthless -- what a counterproductive idea. It's about slowly building up knowledge.

yourapostasy 3y ago
> It's about slowly building up knowledge. In other words, if one doesn't care for the grind hip deep in the nuance for years, decades, even centuries, then don't look for a TikTok'ified revelation in science, and wait for the swing the fences headlines in the mainstream news. Flashes of leaps forward in science are exceedingly rare; we don't say "on the shoulders of giants" for nothing, those giants are the towering innumerable generations that came before us, it is utterly humbling to see how long basic technologies like mastering control of fire took to spread across the world [1]. I see this outsized appetite for the easy button in a lot of programmers as well. There comes a time when one will have to grind through small shavings of parsimoniously-parceled out pico packets of understanding to progress in one's engineering maturity evolution. Categorically denying that by demanding there is an easy-quick-simple way or the ones doing the grinding are somehow character deficient is to close off one possible way to grow. Our work is already challenging enough, so I'm always open to any way to grow myself, though YMMV and one could even do better closing off that avenue to grow for all I know. Just to perform junior-level programming acceptably well takes a stupendous amount of grinding that most non-programmers cannot fathom doing themselves through interacting with software, though many will happily grind just as much if not more at other pursuits. I cannot for example, fathom watching so much sports that I can quote on-demand specific games and winning shots/goals on specific days by specific players. And yet, there is an NBA star who is a walking encyclopedia of every game they've ever played in their NBA career, who not only knows winning shots but from where on the court, who was covering them, the relative position of nearby players, who they were, etc. The amount of grind to get into the game so to speak are penny-ante table stakes compared to the grind the pros put in. There are more such personal eras of grinding to accomplish successive levels of mastery in these pursuits, and programming is no exception in my personal experience. This isn't some personal character issue, it is a cognitive bias (or two or more depending upon how you look at it) causing us to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. Projection Bias [2] and Planning Fallacy [3] are my favorites to explain this effect. [1] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans][Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human... of fire by early humans - Wikipedia]] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

davidcuddeback 3y ago

Wow, no. Just no. That's not how research is done. What you're describing sounds more like writing a clickbait article than writing a research paper. Writing a research paper in that manner would damage the researcher's credibility. A good research paper does lead with a discussion of related research and methodology and is careful to not accidentally make unfounded conclusions. In fact, some papers will include a "threats to validity" section, which I think is a good exercise in skepticism.