3 ms·

There seems to be a trend of Very Smart People with no experience whatsoever in a given field, reading some article somewhere, pulling out R and some graphing s

by zzzeek 14y ago

stfu 14y ago
NO! I absolutely resent that idea that "science" should only be something for the experts, and everybody without a PhD should shut up about it. As long as it is just random ranting without any data, it is more than welcoming that "regular" people try to understand expert opinion and in fact challenge it. If "facts" are so clear and indisputable, than those amateur research should easily be shown as wrong. If not, amateur researcher make a highly valuable contribution. They highlight the fact, that social science, especially on social phenomenons, is (often) based on consensus. In this case here, the author makes an excellent contribution just by highlighting how easy correlation and causation can be (mis)interpreted. For example the other day I read and article published in a well regarded management journal, by authors who claim having found out that the willingness of users clicking on ads is based on the hours of sunshine per day in that region. The correlation equals causation phenomenon is quite common among social scientists who try to show how scientific their contributions are.
- eksith 14y ago
  You're right, science shouldn't just be reserved for the PhDs. But the PhD is likely to have insight and experience that will make a lot of assertions false, avenues of research redundant and generally be able to tell the different between science and not science. There's no restriction on laymen studying, researching and trying to understand new frontiers of science, however just as the PhDs don't have a monopoly on science (and as you point out, they're far from perfect), neither do lay people have a monopoly on reinterpreting reality through the misinterpretation of facts. tl;dr: You're entitled to examination of facts and to be examined for your own research. You're, however, not entitled to your own reality. Which is what happened in the article.
- zzzeek 14y ago
  > I absolutely resent that idea that "science" should only be something for the experts, and everybody without a PhD should shut up about it. making some off the cuff, armchair observations within a particular field of study (and blogging and serially promoting them to hacker news) without even making casual efforts to familiarize oneself with at least portions the vast amounts of knowledge publicly available on that field is, generously, pretty bad "science". And less generously, it's just hubris. This is not an "amateur researcher", this is someone who apparently based on posting history has a really high blogging-to-value ratio. Of course, we all have the right to be clueless. I only requested that perhaps Hacker News doesn't want to encourage a culture of armchair cluelessness and particularly someone who appears to be a serial armchair blogger/HN promoter (see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog).
dfc 14y ago
That graph did not look nice enough to come from R.
tokenadult 14y ago
There seems to be a trend of Very Smart People with no experience whatsoever in a given field, reading some article somewhere, pulling out R and some graphing software, and proclaiming "I've discovered something that nobody who actually works in the target field which I knew absolutely nothing about six hours ago ever found!". I wish those stories would stop getting posted to HN. I've seen one of these (on a different topic) posted to HN repeatedly in comments, by a variety of participants here. Really, people need to learn how to evaluate sources better here on Hacker News. That's part of being an educated person. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664
robbiep 14y ago
I feel it is the hacker mentality. People here are very intelligent but (some often) make the mistake of feeling as though their experience and success in one domain is applicable to multiple, that they are, in fact, renaissance men and women when in fact they are largely unskilled in the Domains they are attempting to analyse in depth. As someone heavily involved in medicine j see this all the time when the subject matter is something medical or biological- people really so feel that they can talk about issues of medicine and science with just the same authority as they can when otherwise discussing programming/whatever their day job is, when in fact they dont know just how much they don't know
randomdata 14y ago
I found it to be thought provoking, even if it wasn't able to form any definite conclusions. Correlation is still interesting for many reasons. Your post suggests that it has been researched before (and presumably proved to show no link), but searching Google did not yield any results for me. I, and I'm sure most everyone who has read this article, would love to look over the findings if you are able to share what you know.
- zzzeek 14y ago
  The blog post in question states in the fourth paragraph he was inspired by the recent article about "placebos and nocebos", which is "the article" I'm referring to. That is, we're reading the product of someone's short-term random curiosity. Random curiosity is a great thing but IMHO the path from random curiosity to published findings needs to have some serious experience in the middle for it to be worth our time.

by zzzeek 14y ago

stfu 14y ago

NO! I absolutely resent that idea that "science" should only be something for the experts, and everybody without a PhD should shut up about it. As long as it is just random ranting without any data, it is more than welcoming that "regular" people try to understand expert opinion and in fact challenge it. If "facts" are so clear and indisputable, than those amateur research should easily be shown as wrong. If not, amateur researcher make a highly valuable contribution. They highlight the fact, that social science, especially on social phenomenons, is (often) based on consensus. In this case here, the author makes an excellent contribution just by highlighting how easy correlation and causation can be (mis)interpreted. For example the other day I read and article published in a well regarded management journal, by authors who claim having found out that the willingness of users clicking on ads is based on the hours of sunshine per day in that region. The correlation equals causation phenomenon is quite common among social scientists who try to show how scientific their contributions are.

eksith 14y ago
You're right, science shouldn't just be reserved for the PhDs. But the PhD is likely to have insight and experience that will make a lot of assertions false, avenues of research redundant and generally be able to tell the different between science and not science. There's no restriction on laymen studying, researching and trying to understand new frontiers of science, however just as the PhDs don't have a monopoly on science (and as you point out, they're far from perfect), neither do lay people have a monopoly on reinterpreting reality through the misinterpretation of facts. tl;dr: You're entitled to examination of facts and to be examined for your own research. You're, however, not entitled to your own reality. Which is what happened in the article.
zzzeek 14y ago
> I absolutely resent that idea that "science" should only be something for the experts, and everybody without a PhD should shut up about it. making some off the cuff, armchair observations within a particular field of study (and blogging and serially promoting them to hacker news) without even making casual efforts to familiarize oneself with at least portions the vast amounts of knowledge publicly available on that field is, generously, pretty bad "science". And less generously, it's just hubris. This is not an "amateur researcher", this is someone who apparently based on posting history has a really high blogging-to-value ratio. Of course, we all have the right to be clueless. I only requested that perhaps Hacker News doesn't want to encourage a culture of armchair cluelessness and particularly someone who appears to be a serial armchair blogger/HN promoter (see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog).

dfc 14y ago

That graph did not look nice enough to come from R.

tokenadult 14y ago

There seems to be a trend of Very Smart People with no experience whatsoever in a given field, reading some article somewhere, pulling out R and some graphing software, and proclaiming "I've discovered something that nobody who actually works in the target field which I knew absolutely nothing about six hours ago ever found!". I wish those stories would stop getting posted to HN. I've seen one of these (on a different topic) posted to HN repeatedly in comments, by a variety of participants here. Really, people need to learn how to evaluate sources better here on Hacker News. That's part of being an educated person. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664

robbiep 14y ago

I feel it is the hacker mentality. People here are very intelligent but (some often) make the mistake of feeling as though their experience and success in one domain is applicable to multiple, that they are, in fact, renaissance men and women when in fact they are largely unskilled in the Domains they are attempting to analyse in depth. As someone heavily involved in medicine j see this all the time when the subject matter is something medical or biological- people really so feel that they can talk about issues of medicine and science with just the same authority as they can when otherwise discussing programming/whatever their day job is, when in fact they dont know just how much they don't know

randomdata 14y ago

I found it to be thought provoking, even if it wasn't able to form any definite conclusions. Correlation is still interesting for many reasons. Your post suggests that it has been researched before (and presumably proved to show no link), but searching Google did not yield any results for me. I, and I'm sure most everyone who has read this article, would love to look over the findings if you are able to share what you know.

zzzeek 14y ago
The blog post in question states in the fourth paragraph he was inspired by the recent article about "placebos and nocebos", which is "the article" I'm referring to. That is, we're reading the product of someone's short-term random curiosity. Random curiosity is a great thing but IMHO the path from random curiosity to published findings needs to have some serious experience in the middle for it to be worth our time.