3 ms·
I'd argue there was to some extent. I mean psych has always had issues, but it seems from the late 1800's to the mid 1970's would characterize the golden age. D
by kneebonian 3y ago
I'd argue there was to some extent. I mean psych has always had issues, but it seems from the late 1800's to the mid 1970's would characterize the golden age. During this time science that produced results and was verifiable and reproducible experienced a huge boom. In part because during this time period almost every nation on earth got involved at some point in a life or death struggle which turns to do a pretty good job at cutting through science that doesn't hold water when it's the difference between your country winning and your countrymen being slaughtered.
As proof of this most of the open question in fundamental physics are the same ones that were open at the time of Einstein's death.
- eru 3y agoMy null hypothesis for that golden age from late 1800s til mid-1970s is that they just found all the low hanging fruit? See https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/17/the-alzheimer-photo/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/17/the-alzheimer-photo/ for background. Compare also how even second rate people could do first rate work in the last fifteen years by applying deep learning to new domains. You mention that war has a certain tendency to cut through bullshit. Ideally, market competition also does some of that. See https://gwern.net/backstop https://gwern.net/backstop for a more general exploration: > I suggest interpreting phenomenon as multi-level nested optimization paradigm: many systems can be usefully described as having two (or more) levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming group selection perspective.