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Many Published Psychology Results are Hogwash

posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the lies-damn-lies-and-statistics dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Science is a messy, error fraught business, which is why reproducibility is so essential. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be one of psychology's strong suits, according to a massive analysis published yesterday in Science.

A years-long effort to reproduce more than 100 psychology studies across three leading journals paints a pretty dismal picture. When re-tested by independent research psychologists, the conclusions of more than 60 studies on personality, relationships, learning, and memory, turned out to be far less whelming. Strongly significant findings often became weaker, while weakly significant findings became non-existent.

http://gizmodo.com/a-lot-of-published-psychology-results-are-bullshit-1727228060

[Source]: The New York Times

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:47PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:47PM (#229806) Journal

    Not sure where that number came from, but still.

    He's trying to align more with the classics than with Sturgeon [wikipedia.org].

    "ninety percent of everything is crap."
    ...
    "I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms

    From the same page and as a word of caution for those disgusted by 80% crap of everything:

    A similar adage with a slightly different percentage appears in Rudyard Kipling's The Light that Failed, published in 1890. "Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake."

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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