5 ms·

Many details of this particular experiment made me greatly reduce my confidence and interest in social science. I was trained up in quantitative biology- and w

by dekhn 2y ago

Many details of this particular experiment made me greatly reduce my confidence and interest in social science. I was trained up in quantitative biology- and when I look at studies like this, I see a long list of "things that could go wrong, leading the investigator to falsely conclude their hypothesis is true". But in this case, I think the investigator actually didn't care enough about doing high quality research- they simply started with a moral belief/value judgement and ran an experiment and chose to interpret the results to support their "hypothesis". And the nature of social science is such that it's really hard to truly run an "honest experiment".

swatcoder 2y ago
You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason, and many of us grew up with a categorical understanding of a difference between "hard" material sciences like physics and chemistry and "soft" sciences like social sciences and many subdomains of biology and medicine. But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound. It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.
- tash9 2y ago
  True but there has been a movement towards replicating these high profile findings in the soft sciences. Hopefully that will gain more traction as a lot of the "newsworthy" studies are forced to get retracted after failing to replicate.
- newaccount74 2y ago
  > people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  PSA: There's also a severe replication crisis in the hard sciences. The high horse is not well warranted.
  - chairhairair 2y ago
    Completely false equivalence. The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people: 1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe. 2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field. 3. Social scientists playing defense.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      What exactly do you think are the foundations of modern psychology? Serious question. There are tons of non-replicable findings way, way further down the stack than psychology, and those tend to have a lot more relying on them than psychology/sociology studies. If you're upset about scientific validity, consider directing your ire to where problems are more likely to actually hurt people -- the "hard sciences." Nice ad hominem but I'm none of those things. I work in clinical trials, one of the few areas where we actually do have to know things, and a very good empirical demonstration of exactly how incredibly difficult that is.
      - elliotto 2y ago
        I'm curious to hear your perspective on the validity of psychology / psychiatry / sociology as someone adjacent to the field. I am a hard science maths / data science guy, but unlike a lot of my peers I have a great interest in softer reasoning (philosophy, ethics, political science etc). But I am constantly disappointed by how tainted by ideology psychology and psychiatry feel (and economics, but this is a different discussion). Do you think that psychology and psychiatry are held to the same rigour as harder sciences and should be considered as valid?
- treflop 2y ago
  Did the public ever read published papers until recently? I can’t imagine most people having access to any publications until the Internet and late 90s at minimum. My local library did not exactly have access to journals either. I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    University libraries still get hardcopies of monthly journals. Maybe back in the day a downtown central branch might have as well.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  > You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different. I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled (because as you say most of the time it's basically impossible). I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc. It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled Yeah, it is so strange when people say we should listen to the scientists, we shouldn't since scientists make all these much stronger claims than the data supports. Instead we should listen to the data, see what it says, rather than the scientists who did the studies. And it is really important to note that the data doesn't necessarily say what the study author says it does. Edit: Above is for social sciences, since they lack robust results. In the hard sciences were we have a lot more robust results it makes more sense to listen to those who know those results, that doesn't have to be scientists though could be experts like engineers etc.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      There's no rubrik for grading scientific correctness. Just because controlling variables is more difficult doesn't mean we should abandon the scientific method and just talk out of our asses.
- consteval 2y ago
  The reality is social sciences are inherently more complex because they are higher-level problem spaces. Biology in merely a stepping stone to psychology, like assembly to modern Java. Assembly is simple, understanding how the JVM works is hard. Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.
bena 2y ago
Hell, even the "Dunning Kruger effect" is a misapplication of statistics. The effect shows up even with randomly generated samples. Because there are floors and ceilings to the data. If you're low, you can only guess so much further down, so you're likely to overestimate your ability. If you're high, you can only guess so much further up, so you're likely to underestimate your ability.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
superposeur 2y ago
Yes, the devil always seems to be in the details in psychology experiments. Were the experimenters giving subtle cues to the child, and was this simply a test at how deftly the child picked up these cues? What was the exact wording of the “deal” offered to the child and would a wording change alter the results? Was the experiment conducted at a time of food scarcity or abundance? What were the prevailing cultural norms of how a child “ought” to behave? Would the results change if average child age was 6 months older or younger when experiment was conducted? What was in the drinking water and the air and the paint at the testing site? (With strong claims in the literature that all these are correlated with measures such as average population IQ!) In the face of all these potential confounders, more statistics and controls seem necessary than, say, in a physics collider experiment on electrons (each electron possessing exactly two characteristics, location and spin, and all such electrons behaving identically regardless of location or time). Yet, even in this setting of simplicity and reproducibility, physicists have still found it necessary to establish a stringent, five-sigma threshold for discovery — 3 sigma anomalies come and go. Such a stringent threshold is unthinkable in psychology due to practical considerations. Ergo, it’s hard for to see how psychology can become a reliable empirical science.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  I'm not really disagreeing, but the 5-sigma rule is there because the hypothesis is not formulated before you run the experiment. If you make the hypothesis first, 3-sigma is quite enough. Many physics experiments do exactly that, but famous high-energy ones don't. (That said, not having an hypothesis beforehand was very common in psychology before the 21st century.)
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    This is one of those rules of thumb that don’t make any sense to me as someone who works with data in the field. You conduct the same exact experiment with the same conditions and same data and get the same result. But whether you speculate on a hypothesis before or after suddenly changes the significance threshold with no actual change in the underlying data or method? Did you cast some ancient spell when you came up with the hypothesis or something?
paulcole 2y ago
I mean let’s get real. This particular experiment is pretty irrelevant to how you feel. There’s nothing that could be done in social science that you wouldn’t be skeptical of and want to dislike.
watwut 2y ago
I have read from BOTH psychologists and sociologists criticizing this concrete experiment for years. It was popular among internet crowd of fancying themselves as "cool nerd kids" who play experts on everything. But if you read more boring write ups by actual scientists, they complained for years.
linearrust 2y ago
> Many details of this particular experiment made me greatly reduce my confidence and interest in social science. There is a reason why many scientists diplomatically classify social "science" as a soft science. Less diplomatically minded scientists like Feynmann call it pseudoscience.

by dekhn 2y ago

swatcoder 2y ago

You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason, and many of us grew up with a categorical understanding of a difference between "hard" material sciences like physics and chemistry and "soft" sciences like social sciences and many subdomains of biology and medicine. But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound. It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.

tash9 2y ago
True but there has been a movement towards replicating these high profile findings in the soft sciences. Hopefully that will gain more traction as a lot of the "newsworthy" studies are forced to get retracted after failing to replicate.
newaccount74 2y ago
> people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.
llamaimperative 2y ago
PSA: There's also a severe replication crisis in the hard sciences. The high horse is not well warranted.
- chairhairair 2y ago
  Completely false equivalence. The entire foundations of modern Psychology are wobbling. In order for the same to be true for the hard sciences we would need to be failing to replicate experiments which hinge on germ theory, atomic theory, the standard model, etc. Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people: 1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe. 2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field. 3. Social scientists playing defense.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    What exactly do you think are the foundations of modern psychology? Serious question. There are tons of non-replicable findings way, way further down the stack than psychology, and those tend to have a lot more relying on them than psychology/sociology studies. If you're upset about scientific validity, consider directing your ire to where problems are more likely to actually hurt people -- the "hard sciences." Nice ad hominem but I'm none of those things. I work in clinical trials, one of the few areas where we actually do have to know things, and a very good empirical demonstration of exactly how incredibly difficult that is.
    - elliotto 2y ago
      I'm curious to hear your perspective on the validity of psychology / psychiatry / sociology as someone adjacent to the field. I am a hard science maths / data science guy, but unlike a lot of my peers I have a great interest in softer reasoning (philosophy, ethics, political science etc). But I am constantly disappointed by how tainted by ideology psychology and psychiatry feel (and economics, but this is a different discussion). Do you think that psychology and psychiatry are held to the same rigour as harder sciences and should be considered as valid?
treflop 2y ago
Did the public ever read published papers until recently? I can’t imagine most people having access to any publications until the Internet and late 90s at minimum. My local library did not exactly have access to journals either. I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  University libraries still get hardcopies of monthly journals. Maybe back in the day a downtown central branch might have as well.
darby_nine 2y ago
> You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different. I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled (because as you say most of the time it's basically impossible). I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc. It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > The non-scientific aspect is that conclusions are drawn even when the variables haven't been controlled Yeah, it is so strange when people say we should listen to the scientists, we shouldn't since scientists make all these much stronger claims than the data supports. Instead we should listen to the data, see what it says, rather than the scientists who did the studies. And it is really important to note that the data doesn't necessarily say what the study author says it does. Edit: Above is for social sciences, since they lack robust results. In the hard sciences were we have a lot more robust results it makes more sense to listen to those who know those results, that doesn't have to be scientists though could be experts like engineers etc.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    There's no rubrik for grading scientific correctness. Just because controlling variables is more difficult doesn't mean we should abandon the scientific method and just talk out of our asses.
consteval 2y ago
The reality is social sciences are inherently more complex because they are higher-level problem spaces. Biology in merely a stepping stone to psychology, like assembly to modern Java. Assembly is simple, understanding how the JVM works is hard. Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.

bena 2y ago

Hell, even the "Dunning Kruger effect" is a misapplication of statistics. The effect shows up even with randomly generated samples. Because there are floors and ceilings to the data. If you're low, you can only guess so much further down, so you're likely to overestimate your ability. If you're high, you can only guess so much further up, so you're likely to underestimate your ability.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

superposeur 2y ago

Yes, the devil always seems to be in the details in psychology experiments. Were the experimenters giving subtle cues to the child, and was this simply a test at how deftly the child picked up these cues? What was the exact wording of the “deal” offered to the child and would a wording change alter the results? Was the experiment conducted at a time of food scarcity or abundance? What were the prevailing cultural norms of how a child “ought” to behave? Would the results change if average child age was 6 months older or younger when experiment was conducted? What was in the drinking water and the air and the paint at the testing site? (With strong claims in the literature that all these are correlated with measures such as average population IQ!) In the face of all these potential confounders, more statistics and controls seem necessary than, say, in a physics collider experiment on electrons (each electron possessing exactly two characteristics, location and spin, and all such electrons behaving identically regardless of location or time). Yet, even in this setting of simplicity and reproducibility, physicists have still found it necessary to establish a stringent, five-sigma threshold for discovery — 3 sigma anomalies come and go. Such a stringent threshold is unthinkable in psychology due to practical considerations. Ergo, it’s hard for to see how psychology can become a reliable empirical science.

marcosdumay 2y ago
I'm not really disagreeing, but the 5-sigma rule is there because the hypothesis is not formulated before you run the experiment. If you make the hypothesis first, 3-sigma is quite enough. Many physics experiments do exactly that, but famous high-energy ones don't. (That said, not having an hypothesis beforehand was very common in psychology before the 21st century.)
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  This is one of those rules of thumb that don’t make any sense to me as someone who works with data in the field. You conduct the same exact experiment with the same conditions and same data and get the same result. But whether you speculate on a hypothesis before or after suddenly changes the significance threshold with no actual change in the underlying data or method? Did you cast some ancient spell when you came up with the hypothesis or something?

paulcole 2y ago

I mean let’s get real. This particular experiment is pretty irrelevant to how you feel. There’s nothing that could be done in social science that you wouldn’t be skeptical of and want to dislike.

watwut 2y ago

I have read from BOTH psychologists and sociologists criticizing this concrete experiment for years. It was popular among internet crowd of fancying themselves as "cool nerd kids" who play experts on everything. But if you read more boring write ups by actual scientists, they complained for years.

linearrust 2y ago

> Many details of this particular experiment made me greatly reduce my confidence and interest in social science. There is a reason why many scientists diplomatically classify social "science" as a soft science. Less diplomatically minded scientists like Feynmann call it pseudoscience.