I'm a Rutgers alumni, and seeing your posts makes me a bit sad I never ventured into the psych department past 101.
Curious on if you ever found yourself talking with any of the other "internet famous" professors, like Brittany Cooper or James Livingston. I imagine the day to day life of professors is pretty quiet and insular, so it doesn't seem likely.
Thanks. The Psych Dept at RU is quite good (in many ways) but let's just say I am ... unique. Met Livingston. Liked him and found him a very sympathetic person. Never met Cooper and would probably avoid her if I had the opportunity.
Brilliant! I feel I should write my positionality statement. They do not ask for them in chemistry yet, but I am sure it will soon come. Many chemistry journals are already asking to specify your pronouns, race, disabilty status, etc as a part of the submission process.
This is a great piece, Lee, I enjoyed every word of it. But here's a shorter version.
Social Science is not science. It's scientism. Social Science can never establish causation, only correlation. Social Science cannot produce anything that even remotely resembles Newton's Laws of Motion - which Einstein showed were not "true" but they remain damned useful to this day. The replication problem in Social Science will never be solved because you can't step into the same river twice. The entire edifice of Social Science is built on false premises, perpetuated by a corrupt academic system joined at the hip with a corrupt publishing system. Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? :)
Heh. Lots of truth there. I have a very narrow disagreement with "can't establish causation." We run experiments. Not counting p-hacking and selective reporting, I think they can establish causation, at least within the narrow confines of the experiment. Then the issues become:
1. Is it replicable
2. Was it interpreted correctly?
3. How generalizable is it?
All of those can create vast swamps of muddy problems for even tight causal research. If you are on Twitter, I recommend following Julia Rohrer (@dingding_peng). She is the single best social sci methodsy type I know about the difficulties, but not quite impossibility, of establishing cause in social science work.
I love this damn thing. Read it aloud to wifey, flipping the iPad to show her all the graphics and now I’m half laughed out, half tired out. Positionality, puh! I always had to state my position on the “compass” with respect to my privilege and power in St. Paul schools in the 2010s, as well as make a mission statement to the Dept of Education how I was doing in owning my white privilege. All of this is akin to pivoting in a gunner turret constantly to shoot before being shot out of the sky in war. Sheeshush Chrisht. Sharing! Thank you, Theo
Regarding the replication issue - As Joe Heinrich's WEIRDest People book shows, US undergrads are are representative of US undergrads, and NOT humanity as a whole. The concern about VERY limited applicability to others exists in addition to any funny business with which results are reported and which are not.
When I was in grad school in the 90's I don't recall "Pre-registration" being a thing - One collected however many samples were dictated by one's experimental design (& used all of them in the analysis).
Heh. The undergrads in research aren't even representative of undergrads. They are usually intro psych students at a particular U, not some random sample of undergrads in the country, or even at that school. But even they are usually not selected at random from intro psych students, so those in any given study aren't representative of even intro psych students at that U.
Pre-registration is a huge improvement, because it makes it much harder (tho not impossible) to engage in the type of selective reporting highlighted here. It also makes it much harder (again, tho not impossible) for researchers to make compelling sounding stories up after collecting the data and pretending it was all a priori hypothesis testing.
Absolutely wonderful and brilliant! Thank you!
Judaism isn't a race or ethnicity
This is awesome Lee. Thanks for sharing.
I'm a Rutgers alumni, and seeing your posts makes me a bit sad I never ventured into the psych department past 101.
Curious on if you ever found yourself talking with any of the other "internet famous" professors, like Brittany Cooper or James Livingston. I imagine the day to day life of professors is pretty quiet and insular, so it doesn't seem likely.
Thanks. The Psych Dept at RU is quite good (in many ways) but let's just say I am ... unique. Met Livingston. Liked him and found him a very sympathetic person. Never met Cooper and would probably avoid her if I had the opportunity.
Brilliant! I feel I should write my positionality statement. They do not ask for them in chemistry yet, but I am sure it will soon come. Many chemistry journals are already asking to specify your pronouns, race, disabilty status, etc as a part of the submission process.
This is a great piece, Lee, I enjoyed every word of it. But here's a shorter version.
Social Science is not science. It's scientism. Social Science can never establish causation, only correlation. Social Science cannot produce anything that even remotely resembles Newton's Laws of Motion - which Einstein showed were not "true" but they remain damned useful to this day. The replication problem in Social Science will never be solved because you can't step into the same river twice. The entire edifice of Social Science is built on false premises, perpetuated by a corrupt academic system joined at the hip with a corrupt publishing system. Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? :)
Heh. Lots of truth there. I have a very narrow disagreement with "can't establish causation." We run experiments. Not counting p-hacking and selective reporting, I think they can establish causation, at least within the narrow confines of the experiment. Then the issues become:
1. Is it replicable
2. Was it interpreted correctly?
3. How generalizable is it?
All of those can create vast swamps of muddy problems for even tight causal research. If you are on Twitter, I recommend following Julia Rohrer (@dingding_peng). She is the single best social sci methodsy type I know about the difficulties, but not quite impossibility, of establishing cause in social science work.
I love this damn thing. Read it aloud to wifey, flipping the iPad to show her all the graphics and now I’m half laughed out, half tired out. Positionality, puh! I always had to state my position on the “compass” with respect to my privilege and power in St. Paul schools in the 2010s, as well as make a mission statement to the Dept of Education how I was doing in owning my white privilege. All of this is akin to pivoting in a gunner turret constantly to shoot before being shot out of the sky in war. Sheeshush Chrisht. Sharing! Thank you, Theo
Regarding the replication issue - As Joe Heinrich's WEIRDest People book shows, US undergrads are are representative of US undergrads, and NOT humanity as a whole. The concern about VERY limited applicability to others exists in addition to any funny business with which results are reported and which are not.
When I was in grad school in the 90's I don't recall "Pre-registration" being a thing - One collected however many samples were dictated by one's experimental design (& used all of them in the analysis).
Heh. The undergrads in research aren't even representative of undergrads. They are usually intro psych students at a particular U, not some random sample of undergrads in the country, or even at that school. But even they are usually not selected at random from intro psych students, so those in any given study aren't representative of even intro psych students at that U.
Pre-registration is a huge improvement, because it makes it much harder (tho not impossible) to engage in the type of selective reporting highlighted here. It also makes it much harder (again, tho not impossible) for researchers to make compelling sounding stories up after collecting the data and pretending it was all a priori hypothesis testing.