How a middle aged CS major debunked a classic positive psychology finding (2013)

https://narratively.com/nick-brown-smelled-bull/

by jvanderbot • 4 years ago

432 278 4 years ago

dekhn5• 4 years ago

Falsifying large parts of the extant literature is trivial.

dang5• 4 years ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dekhn5• 4 years ago

https://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/08/the-reproducibility...

“In the last year, problems in reproducing academic research have drawn a lot of public attention, particularly in the context of translating research into medical advances. Recent studies indicate that up to 70% of research from academic labs cannot be reproduced, representing an enormous waste of money and effort,” said Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange’s co-founder and CEO. “In my experience as a researcher, I found that the problem lay primarily in the lack of incentives and opportunities for validation—the Reproducibility Initiative directly tackles these missing pieces.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... "Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."

but I didn't really need to add that to make my comment any better.

300bps• 4 years ago

Wikipedia has a good tl;dr:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio

Later in 2013, the critical positivity ratio aroused the skepticism of Nick Brown, a graduate student in applied positive psychology, who felt that the paper's mathematical claims underlying the critical positivity ratio were fundamentally flawed.[6] Brown collaborated with physicist Alan Sokal and psychologist Harris Friedman on a re-analysis of the paper's data. They argued that Fredrickson and Losada's paper contained "numerous fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors", as did Losada's earlier work on positive psychology, which completely invalidated their claims.[7] In their response, Hämäläinen and colleagues argued that there were no fundamental errors in the mathematics itself, but the problems relate to the interpretation and justification of the use of the model.[8] Losada declined to respond to the criticism, indicating that he was too busy running his consulting business.[6] Fredrickson wrote a response in which she conceded that the mathematical aspects of the critical positivity ratio were "questionable" and that she had "neither the expertise nor the insight" to defend them, but she maintained that the empirical evidence was solid.[9] Brown and colleagues, whose response was published the next year, maintain that there is no evidence for the critical positivity ratio.[10]

In response, American Psychologist formally retracted the mathematical modeling elements of Fredrickson & Losada's paper, including the specific critical positivity ratio of 2.9013, as invalid.

Joeboy• 4 years ago

Since TFA is quite long and has quite an annoying layout, I tried Reader View in Firefox, and it gave me a completely different article. Weird. Thanks for posting the tl;dr.

CRConrad6• 4 years ago

Yup, same here. I think it was because it's one of those "infinite scrolling" pages, where when you've scrolled down to the end of the article another begins (and the URL in the address bar has also magically changed).

Yet another reason to hate that shit.

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

I got bored. This is an article style I really don’t like, the interesting information is buried towards the end after thousands of mostly irrelevant bits of narrative which aren’t worth remembering.

I can guess the ending though, technical guy sees psychologists appropriating a well defined mathematical structure, doing some hand waving, and claiming that it applies to your everyday life in a shallow way. Guy is hero.

Yes, psychology is absolutely full of bad science and bad scientists. Lots of fields are, but particularly psychology.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Yes, psychology is absolutely full of bad science and bad scientists. Lots of fields are, but particularly psychology.

Social sciences in general are probably harder than other fields for the simple reason that it requires other people's time and effort.

A psychologist friend of mine once dropped the line "we know a lot about how university students view the world" when discussing the replication crisis. I think that while simplifying things quite a bit, it is very apt.

Edited for coffee

tgv• 4 years ago

If the latter were true, I'd be surprised. It's obviously a quip about using students as subjects for credits, but the average psychology study reveals very little about students. After all, it's how they got convinced psi exists (Bem, 2011).

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

It's more than that, people who aren't really interested in science or the math required to do good science are attracted to the "social sciences" in a much higher degree. People who are unqualified to do analyses are publishing papers and those papers are getting published with the approval of their peers who are similarly likely to be unqualified.

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

A related concept which is just a bit broader is WEIRD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic dominate the participants in psychology studies, even when they're not just psychology undergrads encouraged to participate in research.

TameAntelope4• 4 years ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this article was about twice as long as it needed to be.

I will throw out there that, despite all of the flaws and issues with Psychology as a field of science, it does seem like everyone involved, mostly, did the right thing here. I did skim it, but I didn't really see anyone do anything other than have sour grapes over how it went down, so I feel like this article and situation generally is a good example of a flawed system working out; deferring to truth over ego and orthodoxy.

Some groups would have circled the wagons to protect against this outsider, but that's not what ultimately happened here. Good!

p_j_w• 4 years ago

This is an article style I really don’t like, the interesting information is buried towards the end after thousands of mostly irrelevant bits of narrative which aren’t worth remembering.

This sort of journalism is something I find extremely frustrating. Honestly, I don't care about pretty much anything in the entire section about Brown meeting Wiseman. That whole thing could've been a single paragraph with no valuable information lost. Maybe this is just because we're in the ADHD age, but I couldn't read it because of all of this extraneous information.

MaxBarraclough• 4 years ago

Agreed. You're not the only one who dislikes having their time wasted by that kind of writing.

A bit masochistic, but here's my 'favourite' example of this kind of writing, shamefully from none other than the BBC. [0]

See how long it takes you figure out what on Earth they're on about. Also, see how long it takes you to realise the title is an outright lie.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

This isn't an instant gratification issue, the details which pad this article just aren't very relevant to the point or the title. The life story and mundane details of this man's life don't, or barely, support the main point of the article which is how he debunked and got retracted a well-known paper in a field which wasn't originally his. I might want to read a biography of Albert Einstein, but the biography of this guy just isn't remarkable.

It's the same issue with SEO recipe articles where before the actual recipe there's an inane story about going to the beach with the family dog and finding a starfish before finally getting to the point about fish tacos, or whatever. If the article had been fine details about a few of the ingredients or sourcing them or preparation techniques down to specifics, sure, that would make sense; but if I ask you what time it is and you start telling me about how your grandfather served in WWII I'll probably be a little annoyed.

aesyondu• 4 years ago

Agreed. I read through two sections (chapters?) before internally screaming "Get to the point".

Immediately went to the comment section to find a TLDR. This one helped me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30247456

Scarblac• 4 years ago

This is a good quote:

“One could describe a team’s interactions as ‘sparky’ and conﬁdently predict that their emotions would be subject to the same laws that govern the dielectric breakdown of air under the inﬂuence of an electric ﬁeld. Alternatively, the interactions of a team of researchers whose journal articles are characterized by ‘smoke and mirrors’ could be modeled using the physics of airborne particulate combustion residues, combined in some way with classical optics"

derbOac5• 4 years ago

To be honest I think this story is overplayed a bit. I've heard of that tipping point idea before, or the positive to negative ratio thing, but I think most in the field didn't take it more seriously than an observation that couples, groups, etc that function well are more positive and supportive.

It's good to call this stuff out but part of the reason no one else did is because outside of a certain subsubfield no one took it that seriously.

robwwilliams• 4 years ago

You may well be right, but this is too casual an approach toward what purports to be science in a nominally good journal. Modern science is amazingly well insulated from “in-house” criticism after the review process. As a result crap can flourish. We need more data/analyst wasps.

munificent• 4 years ago

I strongly disagree with this take.

The whole point of science is to acquire knowledge that eventually gets communicated outside of the scientific body producing it. If the papers never leave the ivory tower, or never lead to other papers that do, it's just navel gazing.

When a scientific community has a chunk of their work that everyone in the tower knows is bullshit but never gets corrected, that metadata doesn't leave the ivory tower. What happens instead is that papers like this flutter out the window, get picked up by journalists who don't have access to tribal knowlege, and then get spread wide and far. The information appears legitimate because it did come from a trusted scientific body. It just had the necessary context that it's actually bullshit left off.

Every scientific community has an obligation to ensure that the papers they publish and advocate actually mean what they say they mean. If nothing else, because not doing that ultimately tarnishes the brand and undermines the trustworthiness of that community.

naasking5• 4 years ago

The founders of that field got tens of millions of dollars for continuing that bunk research. You don't think that funding could have been used better?

FabHK2• 4 years ago

Overplayed? It jeopardises the entire edifice of that subfield, and by extension psychology itself, if it is not vigorously disowned.

Sokal said it well (from the article):

“For me, the real question is not about Fredrickson or Losada or Seligman,” Sokal says. “It’s about the whole community. Why is it that no one before Nick—and I mean Nick was a first semester part-time Master’s student, at, let’s be honest, a fairly obscure university in London who has no particular training in mathematics—why is it that no one realized this stuff was bullshit? Where were all the supposed experts?”
“Is it really true that no one saw through this,” he asks, “in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?”

oneepic• 4 years ago

How can you call the guy a CS major? He was a grad student in psychology, right?

jvanderbot5• 4 years ago

"The married father of two had graduated from Cambridge University in 1981 with a degree in computer science, and spent most of his career as an IT networks operator at an international organization in Strasbourg, France."

Pretty early in the article.

ineedasername2• 4 years ago

Yes, but the context was also with that person as a current student, which was not in CS, and his CS background didn't have much bearing on what he discovered. It would have been just as relevant to say "Father of two debunked..."

A better title would have been "New Student in APS debunks core finding in the field."

mywittyname2• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who hates the phrase, " __ major"? One can "major" in a subject for all of three weeks. It's not some indicator of any sort of knowledge. At least the phrase, "___ graduate" implies that they at least learned enough to be issued a degree.

menage• 4 years ago

It's also not a phrase that you'd use of someone with a degree from Cambridge University, or I think any UK university.

duxup4• 4 years ago

It seems weird this theory’s backbone was just some random person who contacted someone and said something like “hey I have math that says you’re right” and it just takes off from there. Until some other rando checks it out of curiosity…

consumer451• 4 years ago

I think you have just described the open source code review model.

edit: and science in general?

duxup4• 4 years ago

-PR approved “Rando said it looks good “-

wheelinsupial• 4 years ago

Do you mean this quote:

"A Chilean business-consultant named Marcial Losada, 'who had begun to dabble in what had become his passion: mathematical modeling of group behavior,' sent her an out-of-the-blue email."

The article seems to ignore it, but Losada had a PhD in social and organizational psychology from the U of Michigan [1].

[1] http://losada.socialpsychology.org/

jvanderbot5• 4 years ago

TL;DR

Nick Brown was a 50y/o CS/IT employee who wanted to cross-train to human resources and wanted "evidence-based stuff". He encountered lots of fantastic positive psychology claims that were being accepted wholesale as "quantitative". He traced the math behind a critical one back to a computational fluid dynamics paper, which the debunkees had used equations from with no context. (allegedly because of the use of "Flow" in positive psychology!)

He cold emailed professors asking for feedback, wrote a 3000 word critique, got help from a mathematician and psychologist in smoothing the writeup, and ultimately got it published in a top journal and the offending results recognized as flawed. The general crusade continues along with co-crusaders Sokal and Friedman.

The result in question was the legendary 3-1 positive to negative tipping point between flourishing individuals and languishing ones.

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

TL;DR: Most psych research results are garbage. Some make millions for the authors. Here's yet another example.

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

Some make millions for Authors who take those papers and cite them in popular psych books. The actual authors of the papers are rarely, if ever, making millions.

newsbinator• 4 years ago

A key bit I pulled out:

It seemed a case of numbers fudging. In a valid fluid dynamics problem, the numbers plugged into the equation must correlate to the properties of the fluid being studied. But in attempting to draw an equivalence between the physical flow of liquids and the emotional “flow” of human beings, Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.

dang5• 4 years ago

I remember past threads about this but can't find them. Anyone?

Edit: the list so far - thanks caaqil and setgree! I feel like there were still others, if anyone can find them...

Nick Brown Smelled Bull (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791302 - June 2015 (1 comment)

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515822 - March 2018 (213 comments)

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085639 - Feb 2015 (15 comments)

setgree4• 4 years ago

inter alia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515822

caaqil• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085639

froh• 4 years ago

And it's a long detailed read about the genesis of this paper:

The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23855896/

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

His Twitter account: https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen

Seems he does a lot of this data policing stuff. Neat.

The funny thing is that a lot of people go around saying "yeah, engineers go around thinking they can just walk into field X and study it without context". Yup. They do, and they can.

Another article https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...

derbOac5• 4 years ago

Sometimes they can and sometimes they can't. Works like that for all kinds of crossovers, and probably should happen more often than it does.

I can think of plenty of times CS has benefitted from psychology too, or is reinventing the wheel.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

Haha, yes. I'm just a big fan of people trying. I'm also a big fan of anti-gatekeeping.

dogleash• 4 years ago

that a lot of people go around saying "yeah, engineers go around thinking they can just walk into field X and study it without context".

That's sorta the point of a degree in the sciences rather than going to a vocational school, right?

It's amusing that people find it arrogant. It is that they're showing a level of competence we're all claiming and maybe only pretending to have? Is it "swim in your own lane" union-style isolation? Is it sneering at nerds for not having the good sense to shut it? Is it inflated egos that still think the things they learned in undergrad were hard?

at-fates-hands2• 4 years ago

> The funny thing is that a lot of people go around saying "yeah, engineers go around thinking they can just walk into field X and study it without context"

I have a degree in Anthropology and transitioned into UX Research. 90%+ of what you do is observation in both fields. Most of the engineers and math people I've met are horrendously bad at observing behavior.

In some fields, its just a different set of skills engineers are not capable of applying very well.

setgree4• 4 years ago

I worked with Nick a few times in a previous job and he was a reviewer on a paper I wrote; he was really nice and professional, and his feedback was constructive and incisive.

The movement he's part of is fundamentally disagreeable (in the 'big five' sense [0]), and some of its prominent characters, as you might expect, have reputations for being interpersonally difficult [1]. Collectively they've been labeled "data thugs" [2] and accused of "methodological terrorism" [3], which is why I think Nick's fundamental goodness is an especially valuable asset. We'd gain a ton of social value from certain reforms to the scientific research apparatus, and, IMO, being kind when delivering pointed critiques helps a difficult pill go down. That's different than pulling your punches; it just means staying focused on the thing you actually want to change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[1] https://medium.com/@OmnesRes/the-dumbest-fucking-thing-ive-e...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-data-thugs-out-...

[3] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-h...

whimsicalism2• 4 years ago

I'm unsure what your second citation is for, they don't use the word "data thugs" but the author certainly seems annoying (although likely correct about the points they're making as far as I read).

e: the parent comment has now been edited for clarity, keeping my comment for posterity

setgree4• 4 years ago

The piece is written by a member of the posse [0] who can be, as I think the above quoted piece demonstrates, somewhat abrasive

[0] https://medium.com/@OmnesRes/the-circle-of-data-thug-life-81...

tomrod• 4 years ago

I wanted to hate [1], but find myself agreeing quite a lot on Jordan's substance. Well done to the writer!

What is this about data thugs and posses?

DantesKite• 4 years ago

What’s funny is the whole field of Big Five is fundamentally a fraud because it has both correlation and dimensionality problems.

And using it to describe Nick, who apparently took down another positive psychology finding, is ironically funny.

bumby3• 4 years ago

Can you share more or point to further reading? I originally came across the Big Five because a psychologist was using it to debunk the idea of "grit" as being a predictor of success. (The claim was grit was not a new concept and essentially just a repackaging of the conscientiousness Big Five trait.)

It would be interesting (and another example of irony) if the Big Five itself was debunked.

HelloMcFly4• 4 years ago

the whole field of Big Five is fundamentally a fraud

Do you have more reading? The Big 5 is hardly perfect and merits critique, but to call it "fundamentally a fraud" frankly feels like the conclusion of a "topic tourist" that read 1-2 critiques and made up their mind. It's not theoretically-derived, it relies on factor analysis, its utility does not all cultures, the five traits are not fully orthogonal. I'm not here to champion it. But comparing Big 5 to Positivity Ratios or Power Posing seems hyperbolic at best, particularly given its usage in situations where validity must be demonstrated.

But I've changed my mind on a lot of things. I'm prepared to change my mind on this if you've seen or read something I haven't.

motohagiography2• 4 years ago

If this generalizes, seems like someone with a graph database, some basic calculus, and an archive of papers citation data could pull the rug out from under entire disciplines, specifically ones that are informing public policy these days. These "data thugs," they seem like what we hoped hackers would be.

lmc2• 4 years ago

Not that simple, and that was something missed in the original article - not all citations are equal. You have to know the context of each. Like, it could've been 1 positive citation, and 349 calling it bullshit... or vice versa.

native_samples8• 4 years ago

They have done but public policy doesn't respond.

For example one of the "data thugs" (James Heathers) wrote a tool that could detect impossible numbers in psych papers, like means/std devs that couldn't possibly have been the result of any allowable combination of results. Some very high percentage of papers failed, I think it was 40%.

And of course psychology isn't the worst. Epidemiology is worse than psychology. The methodological problems there are terrifying. Good luck getting public policy to even accept that it's happened, let alone do anything about it.

fhood4• 4 years ago

Hahaha, it is a bit of a catch-22 though isn't it. In debunking a paper like this you have to understand that your are cutting away the foundation that people built their careers on, and you may be fundamentally damaging their academic trajectory. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just that being a bit of an asshole probably helps.

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

Hopefully this will make future scientists more wary of building their careers on a foundation of shaky work that could disappear - and thus engage more critically.

eru8• 4 years ago

Maybe. But as a matter of strategy, it also helps to appear kind.

(If nothing else, that way your criticism cuts deeper.)

erikerikson• 4 years ago

Perhaps consider that the consideration is not "be a bit of an asshole or not" but "be considerate to every person less one or just the one"?

pdonis7• 4 years ago

being kind when delivering pointed critiques helps a difficult pill go down

While I am sympathetic to this, I think it fails to recognize a very important thing that we expect, or at least should expect, from people who claim to be doing science: that every scientist is responsible for sanity checking their own work before making any claims based on it. As Richard Feynman said, your first duty as a scientist is to not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.

That means every scientist needs to be an expert in whatever fields are relevant to the work they're doing. If a scientist is going to make claims based on some purported correspondence between human psychology and fluid dynamics, they need to be an expert, not just in human psychology, but also in fluid dynamics; and if they're not, they need to not make the claims, no matter how enthusiastic they are about them. And the scientists who published the claims that Nick and his colleagues debunked were not experts in fluid dynamics, and knew it, yet they chose to publish anyway.

And that kind of thing, if science as an institution is going to be trustworthy, cannot be handled by kind words when delivering pointed critiques. It has to be labeled as what it is: not just being mistaken, but being scientifically dishonest, by making claims that you do not have the expertise to make. In a sane world, scientists who did that would be stripped of the label "scientist", the same way we disbar dishonest lawyers or revoke the medical licenses of dishonest doctors. At the very least, it justifies language that does not include kind words, but the opposite.

I have no problem with using kind words when calling out a scientist who is just mistaken. But I don't think kind words are called for when a scientist knowingly publishes claims that they don't have the expertise to evaluate for themselves.

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

I thought I was going insane before reading your comment. This world is such a nightmare to live in.

Honestly, the idea that this guy even discovered something is just as ridiculous as the fact that the ruse had gone on for as long as it did. The only real story here is about the work that wasn’t done to begin with.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

... I don't think kind words are called for when a scientist knowingly publishes claims that they don't have the expertise to evaluate for themselves.

But, until you can establish beyond all reasonable doubt that that is what happened, you should be polite because there is a chance you are the one who is wrong. Then, after you have established it beyond reasonable doubt, you should be polite because trying to destroy someone will only make them dig in and fight you til the bitter end. And, because it's the right thing to do.

You can be kind and tenacious, and forceful, and not take no for an answer. I think that's what the original commenter was implying.

groby_b• 4 years ago

This is an interesting stance to take on HN, of all places. "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

This extends to other places, too.

On a more practical level, not being kind doesn't buy you anything. (I want to be clear here that "kindness" doesn't mean "freedom from consequences". Of course there should be consequences. But there's no need to be a jerk about administering them - it achieves nothing)

monksy2• 4 years ago

its prominent characters, as you might expect, have reputations for being interpersonally difficult [1]. Collectively they've been labeled "data thugs" [2] and accused of "methodological terrorism" [3]

Ahh the "everyone I don't agree with/like are nazis" trope.

mathattack• 4 years ago

I suspect he would come after the lack of rigor in models like Big 5 personality factors. :-)

okl• 4 years ago

I think they should have sent in their paper somewhere other than APA. Don't expect courtesy in consequential confrontations. I think similar about responsible disclosure sometimes. If a company played dirty in the past why bother with accomodating them.

duxup4• 4 years ago

I think they wanted to give the APA a chance to make the right call / improve, and it also seems they found the peer process valuable and they wanted to get that feedback.

Seems like it worked out.

CRConrad6• 4 years ago

Seems like it worked out.

Yeah, kind of... Mainly by exposing how reluctant the APA was to make the right call / improve.

MetaWhirledPeas3• 4 years ago

I see this as an argument for adding more STEM to every degree plan. There's unavoidable crossover, and people need intuition to properly question unfounded claims.

wbsss44123• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I’m not sure that STEM in and of itself is the antidote.

It’s very easy to just routinely apply methods without properly reasoning about the underlying assumptions.

MetaWhirledPeas3• 4 years ago

The less exposure one has to these concepts the more tempting it becomes to skip the reasoning part.

klabb35• 4 years ago

Be careful what you wish for. Increasing the competence of fraudsters will simply make fraud harder to detect.

Had the original theory simply included a "measured" coefficient, the debunking would have been much weaker and never made it into a gotcha story for bystanders to enjoy. This was sloppy from the outset.

What we need isn't stronger technical skills, but strong self-correction mechanisms and incentive structures.

(Ironically, the management consultant who orchestrated this whole ploy is in the field of group psychology - so perhaps it was performance art all along)

FredPret5• 4 years ago

But you shouldn’t be able to get a degree in a soft “science” without demonstrating that you can apply disciplined thinking by passing some proper STEM courses.

pvarangot• 4 years ago

I think if you add more STEM people will use mathematical models incorrectly even more because they'll feel more confident about understanding the tools they don't.

Domenic_S• 4 years ago

Additionally, Fredrickson references a textbook called Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and an Introduction to Chaos, a book Sokal says “is aimed at upper-level undergraduates in mathematics, physics and related disciplines.”
“If she had studied 1/10th of what she said she studied,” says Sokal, “she would have seen right through Losada.”

The author making the bad claims seems to have a pretty decent math education. Or she's lying about what she studied...

MetaWhirledPeas3• 4 years ago

The real people in need of STEM were all those reading the original paper. Those seeking to be published could substitute ill intent for ignorance.

SeanLuke3• 4 years ago

Isn't psychology part of STEM?

Quikinterp• 4 years ago

It's a social science so no I don't think most people would consider it part of STEM.

mhh__6• 4 years ago

Half of British MPs can't calculate the probability of getting two heads in a row from a fair coin. It'll kill us one day.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

I've been watching Dopesick, and the part, where they are chasing down the "1%" study, is pretty damn sobering.

klabb35• 4 years ago

Citations are upvotes for academia.

eru8• 4 years ago

Perhaps more like links in the original Google PageRank?

mhh__6• 4 years ago

Or downvotes, gotta cite it to say it's bullshit.

efsavage• 4 years ago

IANA data scientist, but I would hope that 4 decimal places in the context of psychology would trigger anyone's BS meter.

anyfactor3• 4 years ago

I think there is inverse relation of how frequently a number is written everywhere with it's degree of decimal places. It is a convenience thing. Also if the number is generated on a computer and used there subsequently 4 decimal is plenty for social science and business research/purpose IMO.

klabb35• 4 years ago

I think parent means the opposite, that 4 decimal places is really high precision in a field with lots of measurement bias and noise.

mhh__6• 4 years ago

Then you have those french philosophers with equations but no decimal places, if you believe Sokal.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Taking equations from physics out of context to bolster social science claims isn't unique to psychology, other social sciences like economics have done the same thing with little more justification. The rationale behind this approach is simple marketing, in that 'using more mathy stuff' will sell better to the general public than non-mathy hand-waving claims will.

However, the practioners of this approach don't seem to understand that physical equations are constructed by analysis of empirical experimental and observational data on one hand, and theoretical mathematical development on the other, within limited scopes of applicability. Copying equations from one area of science to another willy-nilly like the article describes is just ridiculous - would cosmologists studying general relatively just plug in quantum mechanical equations in the hope of getting a 'mathy explanation'?

Here's another example from 'mathematically sound neoclassical economics', which does the same with 19th century physical science equations:

"The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-economist-has...

munchler• 4 years ago

Based on other people in the field whose responses were quoted at the end of the article, I suspect this phenomenon may still be occurring. Specifically:

"David Pincus, a psychologist at Chapman University who specializes in the application of chaos theory to psychology"

"Stephen Guastello, a psychologist specializing in nonlinear dynamics at Marquette University"

notahacker• 4 years ago

There are niche heterodox subfields of economics that literally are just a dubious physics analogy (thermoeconomics), but the source's argument that marginal utility theory was copying von Hemholtz is the sort of extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, not zero citations, baffling confusion of economist Francis Edgeworth with literary writer Maria Edgeworth and a lot of tacked on claims that are laughably false (Jevons certainly didn't believe that "natural resources are inexhaustible: he was actually initially famous for trying to predict when the coal supply would run out!).

There are obvious reasons for studies of how money is spent to involve mathematics (though Menger managed to deduce marginal utility theory from first principles without equations) and it's unsurprising some of the equation forms superficially resemble some of the many simple equations of physics. There are much better criticisms of neoclassical economics and the application of neoclassical economics than accusing the early economists of plagiarising another field!

_v7gu2• 4 years ago

Because neoclassical economics does not even acknowledge the costs of environmental problems and the limits to economic growth

Econophysics is really crank stuff but some people really like to shit on econ without knowing a tenth of the discourse in the field. How can someone not have heard of carbon taxes or balanced growth paths?

What's funnier is that you both are revealing that either you don't know the methodology of solving economics models, or don't know what the physics equations represent. Nature acts to minimize convex functions while economic agents move to maximize concave ones. Of course the solutions end up the same.

Don't think that our utility functions are correct or actual people act differently? Honestly only having profits to maximize is just a good first order approximation. That's why we have an entire field working on supposedly irrational behavior and backing up everything with data and experiments.

Now economics does have its huge problems, but things aren't as simple as this. But if you still see a huge problem, just get your correct model, back your results with data and enjoy getting the Nobel prize.

choward• 4 years ago

But if you still see a huge problem, just get your correct model, back your results with data and enjoy getting the Nobel prize.

The "Nobel prize" for economics isn't a real Nobel prize. It was made up to make economists feel better.

From Wikipedia:

He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

fhood4• 4 years ago

Seconded. Blindly implying that economists of all groups are blatantly appropriating math from other fields without understanding it seems a step too far to me. I'm sure it happens, but I've worked in conjunction with people writing computer models to study certain economic subsystems and virtually everybody involved had a serious academic background in mathematics.

unixhero• 4 years ago

What is middle aged of any relevance???

TameAntelope4• 4 years ago

I think this is a fantastic example of how a) anyone can call bullshit on science if it doesn't make sense and b) there are more and less correct ways of calling bullshit on established science.

You don't need to hop on a podcast or radio show in order to question the orthodoxy of a scientific claim, and in fact you shouldn't if you want to be taken seriously. Nick Brown would have hurt his case had he done that, and instead found a path that actually knocked down a faulty concept in a way that has lasting effects.

This is the process working. This is all okay, and welcome, IMO, though possibly not by everyone involved.

jvanderbot5• 4 years ago

I agree. The real shining light here is that a determined amateur was able to get free, volunteer help from inside the community to weather the publication process.

Those who read the review / revision process in this article and were dismayed / convinced the process was flawed should realize this is precisely how review works in many fields. It takes a year to get a paper reviewed and revised, and a "25 page" (TFA) statement of revision is par. Not "all" will have the stomach for that, but once you are part of that process, it's normal.

horsawlarway2• 4 years ago

You consider having to threaten the reputation of an academic journal by emailing the CEO directly before you even make it to the review for a well written, concise, critical paper "part of that process"?

Not even mentioning that it required the publicity and reputation of a well known figure (Sokal) to even open that door for them.

If that's the "shining light" of this industry - I sure as fuck don't want to see the dirty alleyway.

nostromo• 4 years ago

The people that publish and promote bullshit science spend a lot of time on podcasts, so I don't see why the people falsifying their research shouldn't as well.

bonoboTP3• 4 years ago

This is the process working. This is all okay, and welcome

No! This sort of thing casts enormous doubt on the field of psychology and many soft sciences as a whole. A lot of it is academic politics and people being afraid of calling things out in fear of hurting their career prospects. It's much easier to just stay silent, ignore it, and play along. Who knows who will sit on your next grant proposal's committee. Academia is full of this and it's a disgrace.

FredPret5• 4 years ago

I, for one, will never trust another “finding” coming out of the field of psychology.

Between this and the marshmallow study, I think psychology should be considered an art. We’re many centuries away from this progressing to being a science on par with physics.

There’s nothing wrong with that, a wise therapist has much to contribute - but not to science.

hex4def6• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. In his own words, he had to ship around for a respected authority so that it would be taken seriously.

Once he had that, the journal have a bullshit response that it was passed two months since the original article was published, and so not eligible for publication. Sokal through his connections, went to the CEO to get that decision over ruled (edit: by threatening that the journal would be humiliated by refusing to publish it). The original debunker would never have got that far on his own.

To me, this sounds like a process that is far from some sort of egalitarian "judge ideas on their merit rather than the person presenting them." If he hasn't got Sokal involved, I wonder if this would have gotten published at all.

Edit: also, this casts a pretty negative light on the field, given that it's been cited 350+ times in this field. Not one of those other papers dug into the content (or understood it) enough to question it, and/or raise the alarm bells. It's one thing Its one thing if this was some obscure paper that never got eyes on it, but that is obviously not the case.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

Science can only be as good as the people doing it.

The problem is that most papers, especially on very complicated topics, are not science and just serve the purpose of proving a point or helping someone's career.

Even without taking easy jabs at psychology (you would need full brain understanding of its inner workings and evolution over a lifetime, to have a 100% clear picture of what's happening - we probably have 0.0001% - it's all based on observations and interpretations), the reproducibility crisis is affecting a lot of areas.

Hopefully with more time and more people getting involved in the field, we'll get more and more science.

If I think about nutrition / fitness, between 40-20 years ago and now we made great progress: we went from "Fats are bad and make you fat" (pure propaganda to sell processed sugars), "BULK on a 4000 diet" to any video of Jeff Nippard quoting incredibly detailed studies about minutiae of nutrition and building muscle.

kurthr• 4 years ago

The journal publishers (similar to FB et al) are commercial entities designed to make money from desperate academics trying to publish. They thrive on novelty and readership, but also "respect" (rather than ads and "engagement") from not having their occasionally outrageous papers questioned. Sometimes to stoke or avoid scandal and increase readership they might include a debunking paper, but it's important to remember these are not bought by individuals but by departments who won't stock "less respected" journals.

Now, if perhaps there were a respected public psychology paper service like psyarXive at the time that might have made things slightly better.

https://psyarxiv.com/

mindcrime• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. In his own words, he had to ship around for a respected authority so that it would be taken seriously.

I don't see how that contradicts the person you are replying to. Ze is saying there is a path to contradicting established science. Ze didn't say that it was easy, or that it didn't involve working with people who are in "the establishment" - just that jumping on podcasts and talk shows and spouting off as an outsider with no credibility isn't the best way.

dandelany2• 4 years ago

I agree completely with criticisms of the journal - clearly their process is flawed in a multitude of ways. But regarding "shopping around for a respected authority to be taken seriously" - I think this is actually an important lesson.

The problem with the vision of an egalitarian meritocracy in science (or any other field, honestly) is that reviewing, understanding and critiquing someone else's work has a non-zero cost - actually quite a large cost if done correctly. Also, the people most qualified to do this analysis generally loathe doing it, as they'd rather be spending time on their own original work. Inevitably, people develop heuristics to estimate the credibility of every new email or article that comes across their desk, to decide which is even worth reading.

Understandably, one of those heuristics is credentials/authority - the ratio of good articles published by non-experts in their field is extremely small and massively outweighed by crackpots. So what does a smart non-expert with a good idea do to hack this system? "Bootstrap" your authority, by first finding someone with more credentials than yourself, but not so much notoriety that they're too busy to read your email. If you can convince them, they'll bring it up the chain to the next-highest authority they can convince, and eventually it'll have some important names behind it and people will pay attention. Brown was able to accomplish this with only two collaborators, so I consider him a master bootstrapper for this :)

Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days. On the internet, a non-expert trying to rapidly gain credibility on their own is indistinguishable from social media hucksterism/"influencing". If you want to break into a new field, find some experts in that field and work with them!

PeterisP3• 4 years ago

Not one of those other papers dug into the content (or understood it) enough to question it, and/or raise the alarm bells.

Quite the opposite, the article itself found out that many of them did question it (and quotes three such researchers), however, "raising the alarm bells" and disputing such claims requires exceptional diligence (more than the original article did) and lots of thankless work (like Nick Brown and his two collaborators did) that's not likely to be rewarded (you'd be lucky if you can even get it published in an appropriate venue); so they quite reasonably went on with their own research agendas instead of letting their actual work languish while doing a debunking campaign.

tdrgabi• 4 years ago

I understand what you mean, but I see a series of lucky moments, that all had to happen for the paper to be published.

Sokal picked it up, even if usually he doesn't. The journal rejected it and they had to extra push it etc.

You can see how many rebutals, done without podcasts are never heard of when going through the oficial path.

gjvc• 4 years ago

I understand what you mean, but I see a series of lucky moments, that all had to happen for the paper to be published.

The role of luck is often under-estimated.

pasquinelli2• 4 years ago

that's an odd interpretation. this seems less like a system doing what it's supposed to do and correcting itself and more like an instance of that system failing to do what it's supposed to do and correcting itself.

endgame• 4 years ago

The article describes events set into motion over a decade ago. People calling bullshit on things that happened over the past couple of years have had a much worse time of it.

emilfihlman• 4 years ago

This is absolutely not the process working.

It took 3 people months of work to debunk a claim.

These resources just don't exist in reasonable numbers and we absolutely need short, piercing, direct call outs that quickly demonstrate that fuckery is going on.

Feelings are the worst thing that has happened to science.

phkahler• 4 years ago

It doesnt seem possible to have a fixed positivity ratio when considering research on extinction.

The gist of extinction is that when training using positive feedback, the desired response will cease when the positive feedback does (extinction). In order to maintain the behavior the feedback has to essentially be randomized with a decreasing prevalence (positivity ratio).

j7ake2• 4 years ago

A quote struck me as relevant during covid and work from home times:

“because more good things will happen to you than bad on any given day, but nothing will happen to you if you just sit indoors.”

j7ake2• 4 years ago

This misuse and abuse of methods will continue as long as you can make a big splash in the field.

The technical correction of the misuse afterwards can then be tacked on to the end of your article later, with absolutely no recourse or penalty to your career.

roywiggins• 4 years ago

In a valid fluid dynamics problem, the numbers plugged into the equation must correlate to the properties of the fluid being studied. But in attempting to draw an equivalence between the physical flow of liquids and the emotional “flow” of human beings, Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.

Incredible. So it wasn't just a matter of, say, applying an equation beyond its domain, or generating the inputs to the function in a sketchy way, or hacking the inputs to the function until they got an answer they liked, but literally copying example parameters from a 1963 paper.

The "Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking" paper is very readable:

https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/complex_dynamics_final...

FabHK2• 4 years ago

It is very readable, and it utterly nihilates Losada's papers. It is hard to believe that anyone could have taken them seriously, let alone let them get published. Sigh. Nice touch that Sokal helped debunking it.

I wonder to which extent this taints the whole of "Positive Psychology", which I was moderately excited about.

at-fates-hands2• 4 years ago

And through it all, the three met only once in person, when Friedman was in London to give an academic address. It was a day spent scribbling equations in chalk on blackboards and talking strategy – a debunkers’ bonhomie.

I truly miss this about academics. Where you get a chance to sit down and think freely and pick someone else's brain in the pursuit of some hypothesis you're chasing down.

throwawaypt2• 4 years ago

Anyone have suggestions of the best way to call BS on clinical studies and their marketing? A publicly traded company's products are all based on BS science. I've pointed it out to them but they are dead silent. Just one example is them comparing (in marketing) the active group of one study to the control group of another study performed in different countries years apart with different inclusions criteria massively different n and insanely different dropout rates. It just blows my mind this stuff happens.

If anyone is interested here is the full writeup:

https://www.sendbig.com/view-files?Id=c131d2fc-9a4a-0616-f77...

eru8• 4 years ago

You could try a shareholder lawsuit?

toast0• 4 years ago

Complain to the agencies that are/should regulate them. FTC coverse false/misleading advertisements generally, but maybe just FDA for mediciney things?

throwawaypt2• 4 years ago

Good idea. Just lodged a complaint with FDA and SEC. They won't provide updates but at least someone might read it. Will look into FTC.

errcorrectcode• 4 years ago

Toxic positivity and toxic negativity are grating to some, myself included.

The issue is that soft, squishy not-STEM "sciences" aren't all that evidence-based or experimentally-verifiable. That doesn't make them completely useless, it makes them prone to fungible, inconsistent guidelines rather than hypotheses, theories, or laws.

davidwritesbugs2• 4 years ago

The whole "Cited 350 times" made me laugh. I used to think this type of number sounded impressive. Recently I just started to do a Masters and was told "1 citation for every hundred words", so dozens of papers need reading and it take for *ever* weeks to read just a small number. Then I recalled articles claiming most citations are never checked so, and you won't believe this, I skim read papers and if vaguely relevent inserted cursory comments from the paper and cited it. Did that go horribly wrong? Go on, guess. So 350? I so believe it.

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

That seems like it's own separate problem which is also bad.

davidwritesbugs2• 4 years ago

It was just a lazy metric to measure effort and engagement, and that relieved the lecturer of the need to read the paper himself to see if you'd absorbed it and analysed its relevance correctly. I can't say I'm unsympathetic - the guy had 50 students to mark. I'm guessing this is standard in academia but if they'd said "read and include relevant papers" I'd have done a good job on half a dozen and the lecturer probably wouldn't have been overburdened either.

8K832d7tNmiQ• 4 years ago

Ah yes, the classic Goodhart's law [0] working as intended again.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

mhh__6• 4 years ago

It's more of a "it'll do"-ism from bored supervisors IMO, could be imposed upon them but also is an easy way to avoid extra being different.

PeterisP3• 4 years ago

Things like your master thesis or anything like that simply aren't included in the citation count at all, generally no one cares how much students or general public are citing your work so that practice has no influence on the metric being used.

As the article states, it was cited 350 times in academic journals, i.e. cited in 350 reviewed publications with novel scientific work written by her peers.

sampo• 4 years ago

But in attempting to draw an equivalence between the physical flow of liquids and the emotional “flow” of human beings, Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.

It was a bit crazy in the late 1990s. Chaos theory had been popularized, and the social sciences copied fashionable buzzwords and buzzconcepts from chaos theory, and used them totally out of context. Maybe it was crazy in the 1920s, too? Einstein's theory of relativity had become popular, and sciences that had nothing to do with gravitation, copied the "everything is relative" slogan.

mannerheim• 4 years ago

'I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.' - Richard Feynman, 'Cargo Cult Science'

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

georgecmu• 4 years ago

For those curious: The two nonsense papers are:

Losada, Marcial. “The complex dynamics of high performance teams.” Mathematical and Computer Modelling 30 (1999): 179-192. | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089571779...

Fredrickson, B. L., & Losada, M. F. (2005). Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing. American Psychologist, 60(7), 678–686. | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/

The debunking paper is

Brown, N. J. L., Sokal, A. D., & Friedman, H. L. (2013). The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist, 68(9), 801–813. | https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7006.pdf

f154hfds• 4 years ago

Interesting read! The most disturbing part is not fraud scientists, I think there will always be a certain percentage of fraudsters in any field. The most disturbing part is the 300+ citations, scientists who based their work off of an obviously garbage paper.

It seems inescapable that the reason why must have been complete mathematical incompetency across the entire field. Say a psychologist partners with perhaps a chemist and uses some organic chemistry to 'prove' some critical point in a paper. I could imagine brushing over the details and citing the paper when any chemist would see the fraud as 'obvious'. Such is the complexity of cross discipline science I guess, and the reality that the sum total of human knowledge is beyond any individual's ability to grasp.

That being said, knowing that some papers are utter garbage I should do my due diligence by taking a humble pill and reaching out to my colleague in the chem department across the street to tell me what this critical chemistry is about before I include it in my work.

justin66• 4 years ago

The most disturbing part is the 300+ citations, scientists who based their work off of an obviously garbage paper.
It seems inescapable that the reason why must have been complete mathematical incompetency across the entire field.

I think you won't have to try very hard to find analogous failures to properly test the truth or falsehood of the literature's conventional wisdom in more "mathematically competent" fields.

richardfey• 4 years ago

Here's the key passage (SPOILER ahead):

Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.

monksy2• 4 years ago

I can guarantee you there are a lot of people really upset with him.

A lot of those kinds of studies are "this makes me feel good and this is the world I want to see" types. No consideration of the negative outcomes of bad info, bad practices, or even externalizes.

tomohawk• 4 years ago

You have to wonder how many people were harmed by this fraud.

And that's exactly what this is. The original paper was a fraud. No honest mistake can explain it. The reviewers committed fraud by not seeking competent input when they lacked the competence to do the math.

How many people under psychological care were given treatments and were harmed?

How many companies wasted on money on this and should be able to seek compensation?

IANAL, but this smells like litigation.

mlindner• 4 years ago

Psychology in general is full of hucksterism. My sister got her bachelor's in Pyschology and she also found a whole ton of nonsense in it. She says that there's been a split in psychology and the real science was getting done on the "Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience (BCN)" side of the split while the psychology side is getting further and further away from real science and more into the realm of the made-up.

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

I did a psychology undergrad major in the late 00s. There was a shocking amount of bad science in the required courses. Lots of stuff that supported "common sense" but would be impossible to replicate, and the methodology didn't even align with the summary of why the study was important to learn about. Mountains of work built off imprecise self assessment tests. You can find a psych study to support just about any idea, and it seems like that's what many successful psychologists in academia have done.

Big part of why I decided not to pursue it as a career.

3flp• 4 years ago

What I find sad about this is that the effort and skill required to debunk this nonsense is an order of magnitude higher than the effort and skill required to create it in the first place.

Aka, the "Gish Gallop" and other analogues, observations and quotes about this effect, made many times.

ensan• 4 years ago

Reading the title, I expected the debunker to be a middle-aged many _studying_ CS.

mleonhard• 4 years ago

If there was a collaborative project to review dubious published research papers, which of you would be interested in contributing? I think there are four categories of papers to focus on:

1. Papers with obviously false claims.

2. Papers that omit information that is crucial for verifying their claims.

3. Dubious papers that introduced ideas that attracted a lot of attention and subsequent sketchy papers.

4. Dubious papers published by people who just started in PhD programs.

mhh__6• 4 years ago

Post-publish review is something that should probably be improved. It can't exactly be open to the public to contribute but equally the public should be able to see if scientists have (anonymous) serious doubts about a paper.

etempleton• 4 years ago

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Unfortunately a lot of academic papers throw hopelessly tortured sentences, esoteric words, and complex formulas at you in the hope that no one notices that the whole paper is built on a house of cards: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0

vzaliva2• 4 years ago

The paper mentioned in the article: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/complex_dynamics_final...

vzaliva2• 4 years ago

This is a fascinating story of how some questionable research slipped through peer review safeguards of academic publishing and flourished. More importantly, it shows how the scientific community eventually caught it and debunked it. The original results were recalled. Sadly, one of the main perpetrators slipped into murky waters of "business consulting" and continue to sell this snake oil:

" Dr. Marcial Losada, has a Ph.D. in Social and Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Losada was invited to present his work at Cambridge University in England, Harvard Business School, Graduate Business School at the University of Michigan, Sloan School of Management at MIT, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Stanford Research Institute, and Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. He presented his findings on applications of nonlinear dynamics to team interaction and productivity at the prestigious Director’s Colloquium in Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has briefed Vice-President Al Gore and the president of MIT, Dr. Charles Vest, on the interaction dynamics of high performance teams."

https://www.losadalineconsulting.net/our_team

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

I feel like the field and the journals in psychology have a history of being and currently are quite fragile. I have taken a couple of examples and done some simulations and come to the conclusion that the kinetic fragility index of the field is about the same as amorphous silicon dioxide most the time.

And as anyone will tell you if your building a house of that material. It is vital that you ensure no one around is looking critically at it. So you should paint it with a brick pattern, and ensure nothing heavier than a feather is ever thrown towards it.

In that regards it seems the journal in this case agrees, as they seriously resisted a scientific rebuttal of a piece until they realized they could not prevent it. Had they had integrity (which I believe we can model analogue to a high Young’s modulus, I haven’t yet finished simulations to give a precise number of how high it should be for the journal) then they would have been thrilled at the chance to adjust their building to not include the original material.

sTeamTraen• 4 years ago

Hi - I am the subject of this article. I don't know how to prove that other than tweeting a link to this post, which I will do right now (renewiltord already posted my Twitter account here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30247543).

Thanks for the kind words to those who posted them. For everyone else, feel free to AMA.

Edit: Here is the link to the tweet that links to this comment: https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1491041770217811977?s=...

How a middle aged CS major debunked a classic positive psychology finding (2013)

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