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Why aren't we cleaning house? If the social sciences are roughly comparable to Enron then shouldn't they suffer the same fate?

CrazyStat 3y ago
It’s like a country where bribery is endemic. Everybody’s used to it, it’s just the way things work. It’s very hard to stamp that out.
verall 3y ago
Enron left millions of people without power while poor social sciences research convinced millions of people that priming is real. They're both wrong but I'm not sure they're so comparable
mcphage 3y ago
Because if we did we’d have to admit just how little real information we know in so many fields. We want to think that (as a culture) we’ve got it all just about figured out.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Most study outcomes have a political cause connected to them, even if that wasn't the author's intent. Those movements want these study outcomes to give their cause legitimacy and the membership of such movements often have a large amount of overlap with those employed in social science academia. It's little different than petrol companies that either fund or amplify studies with outcomes that benefit their business.
nonameiguess 3y ago
Because all social sciences are not "roughly comparable to Enron." Hacker News is getting a bit ridiculous with the utter disdain shown for sciences and academia. The problem identified by the parent of this post is a problem of incentives that are misaligned with what we as a larger society want out of basic research. But every energy company had the same incentives as Enron. Not every energy company published fraudulent financial statements. Poor replicability of social sciences is multifactorial. To some extent, what they're studying is a moving target that is not all that amenable to scientific methods, which tend to assume static reductionist laws dictating system behavior. The dynamics of how fundamental forces dictate everything from gravity to covalent molecular bonding don't change from culture to culture as well as over time as trends. When you're studying human behaviors and preferences, I'm sure some of it is governed by more or less immutable eternal laws, but some of it is semi-random diffusion of learned trends and what is true today of one group of people may not be true of any other group or even the same group at some later point in time. Some of it is statistical illiteracy and not understanding the limitations of the techniques you're applying. Some of it is outright fraud. There is also interplay between those two because outright fraud is facilitated by peer reviewers not having the statistical maturity to be able to detect it.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  > Hacker News is getting a bit ridiculous with the utter disdain shown for sciences and academia. Just to be clear, nobody actually said the social sciences are roughly equivalent to Enron. I used Enron as a hyperbolic example to emphasize that there are reasons for poor behavior other than lack of education. I was not implying that academic fraud is at the same level as Enron fraud, and after rereading what I wrote I’m comfortable with how I worded it. > But every energy company had the same incentives as Enron. Not every energy company published fraudulent financial statements. Accountants and corporate executives have substantial disincentives against publishing fraudulent financial statements, like going to jail. Academics mostly do not have similar disincentives against abusing statistics. There have been a few high profile embarrassments, but for the most part even people who are widely known to have p-hacked their way to dozens of questionable publications are still sitting comfortably in their tenured professorships.
Ancapistani 3y ago
We are! While there are definitely still papers being published as a result of p-hacking (intentionally or not), psychology has been undergoing a renaissance in this area for a few years now. See the "Reproducibility Project: Psychology": https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ In short, there is a movement to validate past results, starting with those most influential in the field. A lot of progress has been made in that area. Other fields are involved, as well: https://osf.io/collections/rpcb/discover https://osf.io/collections/rpcb/discover

CrazyStat 3y ago

It’s like a country where bribery is endemic. Everybody’s used to it, it’s just the way things work. It’s very hard to stamp that out.

verall 3y ago

Enron left millions of people without power while poor social sciences research convinced millions of people that priming is real. They're both wrong but I'm not sure they're so comparable

mcphage 3y ago

Because if we did we’d have to admit just how little real information we know in so many fields. We want to think that (as a culture) we’ve got it all just about figured out.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Most study outcomes have a political cause connected to them, even if that wasn't the author's intent. Those movements want these study outcomes to give their cause legitimacy and the membership of such movements often have a large amount of overlap with those employed in social science academia. It's little different than petrol companies that either fund or amplify studies with outcomes that benefit their business.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Because all social sciences are not "roughly comparable to Enron." Hacker News is getting a bit ridiculous with the utter disdain shown for sciences and academia. The problem identified by the parent of this post is a problem of incentives that are misaligned with what we as a larger society want out of basic research. But every energy company had the same incentives as Enron. Not every energy company published fraudulent financial statements. Poor replicability of social sciences is multifactorial. To some extent, what they're studying is a moving target that is not all that amenable to scientific methods, which tend to assume static reductionist laws dictating system behavior. The dynamics of how fundamental forces dictate everything from gravity to covalent molecular bonding don't change from culture to culture as well as over time as trends. When you're studying human behaviors and preferences, I'm sure some of it is governed by more or less immutable eternal laws, but some of it is semi-random diffusion of learned trends and what is true today of one group of people may not be true of any other group or even the same group at some later point in time. Some of it is statistical illiteracy and not understanding the limitations of the techniques you're applying. Some of it is outright fraud. There is also interplay between those two because outright fraud is facilitated by peer reviewers not having the statistical maturity to be able to detect it.

CrazyStat 3y ago
> Hacker News is getting a bit ridiculous with the utter disdain shown for sciences and academia. Just to be clear, nobody actually said the social sciences are roughly equivalent to Enron. I used Enron as a hyperbolic example to emphasize that there are reasons for poor behavior other than lack of education. I was not implying that academic fraud is at the same level as Enron fraud, and after rereading what I wrote I’m comfortable with how I worded it. > But every energy company had the same incentives as Enron. Not every energy company published fraudulent financial statements. Accountants and corporate executives have substantial disincentives against publishing fraudulent financial statements, like going to jail. Academics mostly do not have similar disincentives against abusing statistics. There have been a few high profile embarrassments, but for the most part even people who are widely known to have p-hacked their way to dozens of questionable publications are still sitting comfortably in their tenured professorships.

Ancapistani 3y ago

We are! While there are definitely still papers being published as a result of p-hacking (intentionally or not), psychology has been undergoing a renaissance in this area for a few years now. See the "Reproducibility Project: Psychology": https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ In short, there is a movement to validate past results, starting with those most influential in the field. A lot of progress has been made in that area. Other fields are involved, as well: https://osf.io/collections/rpcb/discover https://osf.io/collections/rpcb/discover