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from the I-don't-want-knowledge-I-want-certainty dept.
Jeremy P. Shapiro, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, has an article on The Conversation about one of the main cognitive errors at the root of science denial: dichotomous thinking, where entire spectra of possibilities are turned into dichotomies, and the division is usually highly skewed. Either something is perfect or it is a complete failure, either we have perfect knowledge of something or we know nothing.
Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.
This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.
Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.
[...] In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”
Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.
I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.
Dr. David "Orac" Gorski has further commentary on the article. Basically, science denialism works by exploiting the very human need for absolute certainty, which science can never truly provide.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:36AM (53 children)
You think? I guess it's possible that a lot of folks can't look at a methodology and spot glaringly wrong fuck-ups or intentional deception while I can. Even with a head cold and a belly full of nyquil I'm a shitload smarter than average but I prefer to assume people just make idiotic decisions as opposed to actually being idiots. The latter would necessarily lead to fond thoughts on eugenics.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:07AM (17 children)
I think if you subjected yourself to a game of "spot the retracted paper" you'd find to epistemological humility.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @06:25AM (16 children)
Almost no bad science is retracted.
I don't think people quite realize the scope of the replication crisis. [wikipedia.org] One journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is quite highly regarded within the field and constantly makes headlines on sites such as the New York Times, or social media - because of its headlines confirming all sorts of rather extreme ideological biases. For instance: 'Why High-Class People Get Away With Incompetence' [nytimes.com], brought to you by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
That journal has a replication success rate of 23%. In other words, if you took any given study in the article and said it was bunk, you'd be right 77% of the time. All replication efforts across the entire field of social psychology had a replication rate of 25%. In my opinion psychology, and without any doubt social psychology, is modern day astrology. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the interaction of groups of people results in persistent patterns of behavior that can be generalized in any meaningful way. Why do we believe this? Well why did we believe that when you were born had persistent effects on your behaviors and interactions? So long as the things you say don't sound completely wrong and at least occasionally hold true in some situations, it's hard to call them completely wrong. It can't all just be coincidences, can it? Surely, they just need refinement...
Suffice to say that science today is in quite bad shape. This makes this post, written by a psychologist, all quite ironic in so many ways. The first is that it claims the problem of "science denialism" is one of dichotomous thinking while, presumably without intended irony, implies "science denialism" to be dichotomous. Apparently you must "believe in" all science, or no science? One can only imagine why a psychologist might hope to frame the issue as such... He then next appeals to social psychological research to support his argument. Beautiful!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @06:38AM (14 children)
As an addendum to this, this [phys.org] is a list of articles from the esteemed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that made their way onto phys.org. [soylentnews.org]
- Women CEOs judged more harshly than men for corporate ethical failures
- Researchers confirm that people judge entire groups of people based on the performance of its 'first member'
- White people struggle to perceive emotion on black people's faces
- Love your job? Someone may be taking advantage of you
- Looks matter when it comes to success in STEM
And much much undoubtedly unreplicable [click/race/sex/class]baiting. It's real tough to figure out why people have lost faith in science, isn't it? As an aside most of these articles have comparable articles on the NYTimes or other sensationalizing outlets. Phys.org is quite an excellent resource. I'm only referencing them since they provide the ability to sort publications by journal, which makes it easy to see what the replication looks like, without the necessity of bypassing paywalls.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:23PM (13 children)
I love it, "because I disagree with what the evidence says, it must be bad evidence" is exactly why I don't trust you dumbfucks to judge a goddamn thing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:53PM (8 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:10PM (7 children)
Ah yes, more completely untrue things you "know". Exactly what evidence of p-hacking do you find in The first listed paper [apa.org].
Their methodology section for the first experiment has two independent variables, very reasonable for the hypothesis they were testing, and two dependent variables. That's quite reasonable. Especially for a p0.01
They only sample once. With a large population. The effect size for the interaction effect was dramatic, 1 point on a five point scale.
Exactly what evidence do you have that it incorporates p-hacking besides the fact that it challenges your shitty worldview?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:24PM (6 children)
No mention of how many questions were asked or the significance of the alleged results.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:07PM (5 children)
That's quite a large sample size for so few discrete variables, and that's not p-hacking. You said "p-hacking", not "the analysis had subjective inputs, which I find objectionable for reasons vague and unstated reasons".
One is fraud, the other is you objecting to basically sound methodology.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:01PM (4 children)
Each question would be at least one discrete variable.
Enough "subjective inputs" and you're get spurious outputs just from random chance.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:49PM (3 children)
She's done the same 4 fucking measures on every one of her previous research papers, and always used the same one primary outcome measure in all of them: intent to purchase.
It's pure fantasy that you've built your sense of "knowing bad science when you see it" out of. Pure fucking fantasy.
She does subsequent studies in the same paper that affirm the original effect and do factor analysis of its causes. Now I suspect we could repeat this whole fucking for any of the studies the original Anon referenced, but the fact is that it won't matter.
You'll still be the same person tomorrow you are today, and I can't imagine this conversation is going to move you towards some reform where you try to do genuine, thorough analysis of methodologies in papers, rather than working backwards from if you like the conclusion*. It doesn't so much bother me that I've wasted so much time with this conversation, nor is it that you won't even consider for a moment what you'd actually want from analytical social psychology and couldn't even begin to describe what standards you would enforce, nor even that you're not going to acknowledge how far the goalposts have slid in just a couple posts. Those are all bog standard problems for internet argument. No, the problem is that in spite of all that, you think your casual examination instantly tells you problems, like this shit is fucking easy.
Dunning Kruger is an overplayed term, but you don't have anywhere near the meta-cognitive skills needed to tell you why your approach sucks so goddamn bad.
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:49PM
Testing for trust should not include any questions that directly influence trust; not our problem if they are too stupid to test trust in a way that can be shown not to influence the responses. Studies designed to test for trust need to be better designed so that they don't have an observer effect. Any cop / lawyer / hr droid will tell you that the questions you ask determines the answers you get .
"Ceçi n'est pas la science" (with apologies to Rene Magritte and his picture of a pipe similarly captioned) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images. [wikipedia.org]
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 15 2019, @01:22AM
Nonsense. In addition to the alleged measures, we have that the person taking the exam is male or female, and the target product has a male or female CEO. That increases to at least 16 parameters per paper (and probably a lot more than that). And you admitted there are several papers too. So odds are good even in the complete absence of any sort of correlation that we'd see one or more results at the level of 0.01 significance and quite a few at the 0.05 significance - even in the absence of systemic bias.
Further, there are many questions behind those four measures. That greatly increases the actual number of parameters in this study.
Not at all, though the change over the course of a day is usually slight.
It doesn't bother me either that you've wasted time. What bothers me is the less than a quarter of such papers are reproducible. p-hacking is one of the mechanisms for making this happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @09:24AM
Naw. AC here, I benefited from your insight. I may/not be able to bring that improvement in myself back around to bear at soylent, but there's a nonzero chance, in which case you floated all these soyboats a bit higher.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:56PM (3 children)
Imagine we were discussing an issue, and I decided to cite something from a site where you knew 77% of what was published on the site was fake or, at the minimum, inaccurately represented. Would you think I was concerned about the legitimacy of what was said, or would you think that I was referencing it because it confirms my biases - truthfulness be damned? How then do you not see the irony in suggesting that declaring most of what is said on a site is fake is a generally more valid position than clinging on the 23% that may be accurate?
And that is a big maybe. The reason is that replication doesn't mean a study is accurate. It simply means that they probably didn't make up or p-hack their data. It says absolutely 0 about the logic or hypothetical validity of what is said. And while such things would ideally be filtered out in peer review, the numerous hoaxes, to which social science journals in particular are especially vulnerable, show that they're happy to publish things that are intentionally nonsensical so long as it seems to confirm the editor and/or reviewers' biases. So the percent of generally reliable and meaningful studies on that site is going to be a subset of the 23% that pass even the most primitive method of testing them.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @06:54PM (2 children)
I think 77% fake or inaccurate would be a big deal, and the fact that you're being so fucking bullshit right now is why ignoring you is a good idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 15 2019, @01:24AM (1 child)
So is 77% fake or inaccurate a big deal to you?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday November 15 2019, @01:47AM
It's undeniably the case.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @02:16AM
The three cornerstones of science are
1: Predictability - Makes predictions
2: Repeatability - If I say that if you do A + B + C you get D you should be able to repeat the experiment
3: Falsifiability
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:09AM (28 children)
And very, very humble, as well! If only we could possibly fathom how deeply humble the TMB is! He is so humble, he can slam a revolving door! Lightning comes out his eyes, and Fireballs come out his arze! And boy, does he know science, because he dropped out of community college!
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:18AM (27 children)
Dude, the lowest I've ever scored on an IQ test given by a shrink was 136 (plenty to qualify for MENSA); I'd got woken up to take it and hadn't had coffee or a cigarette yet. I average in the low 160s. Not going around all the time saying that average people are three times as far below me mentally as they are above retards is plenty humble, especially when they're talking shit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:26AM (11 children)
Ah, he went full "MUH IQ!"
Definitely trolling
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:38AM (10 children)
Nah, I just really, factually am that much smarter than most folks. If you think it's enjoyable, I have a pretty good idea where you'd fall.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:06AM (4 children)
Learn to troll bub, and get that dyslexia looked into.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:02PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:25AM (2 children)
Or it was a troll, and TMB has been hooked by his IQ. which has got to hurt. khallow, as everyone knows, is very bad at judging these things.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:10AM
Nope. When I troll, butthurt spreads far and wide. That shit's just the truth.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 15 2019, @01:22AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:39AM (4 children)
It's apparent that you are a legend in your own mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:57AM (1 child)
At the same time, the posts of TMB display a constant and troubling lack of awareness of basic concepts. He may be "smart", but he definitely is "stupid". Only such a "brilliant" libertarian could fail to understand the function of society, the need to share risk, and contribute based on ability to do so. Evidently he does so in his personal life, what with the Church conversion, but is unable to make the step to abstract thought, and the notion of Social Justice. Too bad, we will have to tax him all the same, and tax him more for being stupid, in spite of his "High IQ".
[Note, they tested my IQ once. Broke the scale. And I killed everyone in the testing center, so no one would ever know. So I am smarter than you, TMB, just pray you never have to find out.]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:12AM
Sucks to be you then. It's miserable as hell at 160 until you get your zen on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:19PM
For some reason I am reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-LTRwZb35A [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:17AM
Not especially. There're plenty of people out there as smart or smarter than I am just by sheer population numbers. NCommander's one of them. Besides which, it doesn't make me a better human being, happier, richer, better hung, or anything else but smarter. It's no different than saying "I'm very tall". That's nice and all but it's mostly just annoying unless it's currently relevant, like when you need to reach something on the top shelf.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:18AM (10 children)
Sorry, but I qualified for Mensa too, and I'm not impressed either by your argument or by them. The group I was a member for for awhile had some of the most opinionated idiots I ever met. Of course, calling them idiots is invalid, as they had IQ tests to prove that they weren't, but the arguments they got into showed that they were.
The thing is, if you're opinionated you tend to use your intelligence to prove your opinions correct regardless of the evidence. So, yeah, idiot is the wrong word, but what's the right one. Bigot isn't correct, because it has invalid connotations, and generally these arguments would be about something quite abstruse. I think some of them did it intentionally for the entertainment value they got out of it. But they'd land on an opinion about something and develop proofs that the most inherently absurd positions were correct. You can get the same kind of argument on a less refined level in arguments between true believers in various political systems.
And, no, you can't look at an experiment in an unfamiliar subject and know whether it's correct or not. You *may* be able to tell that it's wrong. Mistakes in arithmetic are pretty obvious, e.g. But usually you can't.
P.S.: Natural experiments in medicine over sufficiently large populations for a sufficient period of time are strongly indicative of valid results, and if you did them on purpose of really shoddy ethics. Quinine for malaria came out of that kind of "experiment".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:51AM
If you're so smart, why did you join Mensa?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:13AM (1 child)
Idiot is a correct word. Ignorant is someone that doesn't know the facts. But an idiot is someone that knows that facts but chooses to ignore the facts because they know better. I've been an idiot many times - I've given good advice to others but then chose to ignore that advice as I'm "smarter than that". And no, I wasn't smarter than that. I only should have listened to my own advice.
You can't divorce yourself from reality. The more you try, the harder the back slap.
The main issue with medicine is that medicine doesn't happen in a vacuum. For example, there is always the double-blind experiment used as a standard where the result can often be "indistinguishable from placebo". The problem is that the placebo-effect is real. You see that in the anti-depressant studies all the time. Medicine doesn't work because effect same as placebo. But the problem is that medicine has ignored that placebo actually works in many situations. Mind over body - it's not just a saying.
Lab experiments on animals, there is just an effect discovered that made last century of pain experiments questionable at best.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:04PM
When it comes to Mensa, it disproves the saying that there's a sucker born every minute - if it were true , their world membership would be much much higher . It probably proves that as soon as money is involved people become less stupid in their behaviour . To apply it to the trust study would require following up on people to see if later on their actual purchase behaviour matches their response to the survey with the loaded questions . My bet is people would do more research before spending money, unlike, say, voting.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:26PM (4 children)
Mensa IQ tests have very few dimensions as compared to real life.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:13PM (3 children)
Hey! I'll have you know my ability to rapidly test rearrangements of letters against a substantive, if incomplete, vocabulary is a crucial life skill that is definitely causal with life success and not an correlation with an unrelated shared root cause!
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:33PM (2 children)
There are some very real negative correlations between high scores on Mensa-like tests and what would typically be called "real-life success."
Company I worked for did a 2 day offsite psych profile evaluation prior to promoting anyone into management. Like 50 other management hopefuls, I figured: what the hell let 'em pay for it and see what comes out. I came, I saw, I performed above average (for existing management personnel within the company, who - themselves - performed well above general population average) in all areas, and also turned in a score on their logical analysis test consistent with my GRE, highest they had ever seen.
How many of those 50 other management candidates were promoted before me? The world will never know, I left the company a year later - but at least 15 of the other hopefuls were tapped and promoted with 30% raises during that year. Rather than stick around a company run by a dumb frat boy [businessinsider.com] I took a position with a smaller company, 20% salary bump and relocation to somewhere I'd rather live.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:02PM (1 child)
Anecdotes aside, I'm not a fan of how we use IQ, but the research finding that it has correlation with success in health and career is substantive enough that you cannot really say the opposite like that.
The problem I have with the subjective interpretation of that (i.e. that it's causal and being "smarter" in terms of working memory and visio-spatial skills) is entirely with the number of further assumptions that are made and immediately taken for granted by the mighty buzzard types, especially in light of contradictory evidence and non-confirmatory findings.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:55PM
I guess it can be a question of: what level of "success" do you aspire to? IQ at 2SD+ above the mean, correlates with "success" above average - matches with my limited ability to directly observe the world (few thousand examples, probably less than 0.1% sample size for US residents.) If you're looking to break into the 1% club, not so much IQ based anymore - no matter how high.
I was just musing about working memory and recall speed this morning - recall speed is at least roughly related to "skill" or at least proficiency/fluency. My recall speed for some things is insanely fast, others well below average, and any attempt to test and quantify this is going to be fraught with Heizenberg-like uncertainty.
Like Socrates, Coach Butterworth is hard to refute: https://encuruj.com/tag/bad-news-bears/ [encuruj.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:25AM (1 child)
I gave it a check out too. A bigger bunch of tools I have never met. Even in humanities courses in college.
The word you're looking for is "wrong". There are things intelligence helps with but in philosophy it mostly just opens up a hell of a lot more new and interesting ways to be wrong.
Oh but you absolutely can with as hilariously obvious as many of these guys make it. You might not be able to say whether their methodology was shitty because of bias or because of idiocy but it's been easy as hell to spot cocktacularly bad methodologies in many areas for a good long while.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @07:02PM
You think they're tools?
Must be a really nice group of people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 14 2019, @09:49AM (2 children)
You may be highly intelligent, but that doesn't mean you are smart. It just means you are good at solving logical puzzles.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:30PM (1 child)
Indeed. To be honest I'm amazed anyone still gives any credence to IQ tests, I thought they were debunked years ago as being an inaccurate and incomplete measure of just one aspect of a human intelligence, which is far too broad and complex to be captured in a 2-3 digit number.
But I guess if you've spent a lifetime building your sense of self worth on the foundation of your "high score" then it would be very hard to accept that it is largely meaningless.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:27AM
I think you need to look up the word "debunked". It does not mean "a bunch of idiots were incorrectly using this test to measure things it did not test". For what it measures, it's aces.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @09:00AM
136 on the Cattell is under 2 stdev, so, your statement isn't necessarily correct.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:25AM (3 children)
Your fabulousness is exceeded only by your modesty, eh? :)
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:27AM (2 children)
And the size of my penis, yes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday November 15 2019, @02:47AM (1 child)
As a fellow 160er, I understand. :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyYuLQ7_Ws [youtube.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @03:33AM
160mm is nothing to be ashamed of, but it isn't that big.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:39AM (1 child)
And I suppose you have irrefutable pseudoscientific proof to show that?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:28AM
Feel free to perform your own Pepsi Challenge next time I'm under the weather.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.