Ego Depletion: Accepted Theory in Trouble
This story from Slate was cited by Retraction Watch (http://retractionwatch.com/).
It is not that "all these pseudo-scientists on government money are frauds." For one thing, the original research was carried out at Case Western Reserve University, a private school, in fact, the "Patrick Henry University" of Atlas Shrugged. Rather, it speaks to the sociology of science. Science, no less than religion, sports, or business, is an artifact of human society. It is subject the same kinds of personal failings that are the equal and opposite of heroic achievements.
Identifying these failures is integral to the process, no different than a business dropping an unprofitable product. That product had champions who cited research before being able to show at least some market response. We all carry smart phones now, but how many failed PDAs (personal digital assistants) can you name from the 1990s?
Ego depletion may be real: it seems intuitively obvious that we can get worn down. Quantifying that may be intractable with our current paradigms. Objectivism might suggest a more robust psycho-epistemological model.
For the fifth year in a row, I judged our regional science fairs for senior high, junior high, and elementary schools. My area is Behavioral and Social Science. Across all of the categories in the Intel International, we always give the highest ratings to "original research." We never reward replication studies.
When I lived in Michigan and my wife worked at the U of M (Flint), I delivered two "Super Science Friday" sessions to middle schoolers. The second year, my theme was "CSI: Flint." Centered on junk science in the courtroom and police laboratory misconduct, I suggested to the kids that anyone with a head for science who wants to go into police work should consider working for an office of research integrity. Every major university has one. The federal government has several because they fund so much research. I have never heard of such a thing in the private sector.
Here is the original Slate article
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...
It is not that "all these pseudo-scientists on government money are frauds." For one thing, the original research was carried out at Case Western Reserve University, a private school, in fact, the "Patrick Henry University" of Atlas Shrugged. Rather, it speaks to the sociology of science. Science, no less than religion, sports, or business, is an artifact of human society. It is subject the same kinds of personal failings that are the equal and opposite of heroic achievements.
Identifying these failures is integral to the process, no different than a business dropping an unprofitable product. That product had champions who cited research before being able to show at least some market response. We all carry smart phones now, but how many failed PDAs (personal digital assistants) can you name from the 1990s?
Ego depletion may be real: it seems intuitively obvious that we can get worn down. Quantifying that may be intractable with our current paradigms. Objectivism might suggest a more robust psycho-epistemological model.
For the fifth year in a row, I judged our regional science fairs for senior high, junior high, and elementary schools. My area is Behavioral and Social Science. Across all of the categories in the Intel International, we always give the highest ratings to "original research." We never reward replication studies.
When I lived in Michigan and my wife worked at the U of M (Flint), I delivered two "Super Science Friday" sessions to middle schoolers. The second year, my theme was "CSI: Flint." Centered on junk science in the courtroom and police laboratory misconduct, I suggested to the kids that anyone with a head for science who wants to go into police work should consider working for an office of research integrity. Every major university has one. The federal government has several because they fund so much research. I have never heard of such a thing in the private sector.
Here is the original Slate article
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...
Previous comments... You are currently on page 3.
As for Michael Faraday, the only biography that I read (as a child) revealed the abuse he took while working for Sir Humphrey Davies. So, Davies, too, then, would be suspect as a scientist acting lower than his station, if you will.
I pointed out above, that even at the elementary school level, at science fairs we reward originality, not replication, testing, and falsification. This is the culture of science, to promote new ideas and new discoveries.
Imagine what it would be like in a world operating on the opposite paradigm, one where only replication and verification were highly rewarded and novelty was always suspect. It would take a long time for the candle to replace the torch.
Clearly, the proper path is not rigid adherence to one Kantian "idea" over another. I do not know how to encapsulate that "middle of the road" except to use the word "objective."
"Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’"
"Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests"
"...Academics routinely lie and exaggerate when telling funding agencies what impact their research will have, a series of candid interviews with scholars in the UK and Australia has suggested..."
"Respondents said that future projections of impact were 'charades' or 'made-up stories'. As one UK professor put it: 'would I believe it? No, would it help me get the money – yes.'
"Academics felt pushed into lying on their impact statements by the logic of ferocious academic competition, the paper found.
“'If you can find me a single academic who hasn’t had to bullshit or bluff or lie or embellish in order to get grants, then I will find you an academic who is in trouble with [their] head of department,' said one professor in Australia.
"Another Australia-based academic said that embellishment was about 'survival' in the research grant game."
This is the corrupt ethics and political system side of the influence of bad philosophy in science as in everything else.
"[R]esearchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.
"Researchers have recreated prominent studies from several scientific fields and come up with wildly different results...
"No one is accusing the psychologists behind the initial experiments of intentionally manipulating their results. But some of them may have been tripped up by one or more of the various aspects of academic science that inadvertently encourage bias.
"For example, there’s massive academic pressure to publish in journals, and these journals tend to publish exciting studies that show strong results.
“Journals favor novelty, originality, and verification of hypotheses over robustness, stringency of method, reproducibility, and falsifiability,” Hagger tells Quartz. “Therefore researchers have been driven to finding significant effects, finding things that are novel, testing them on relatively small samples.”
"[I]n cases where researchers have access to large amounts of data, there’s a dangerous tendency to hunt for significant correlations. Researchers can thus convince themselves that they’ve spotted a meaningful connection, when in fact such connections are totally random."
But these are not the primary causes. They are the result of a lack of commitment to scientific objectivity and a lack of knowing how when the dominant methods of thinking are rationalistic "model building".
Jan
I took one 'soft' science course in college: Sociology. It was obvious to me that the high grades went to the people who knew the right 'cant' phrases to use. It was a type of techno-Babel competition, not a science class.
Pity. It could have been interesting otherwise. I stuck to the hard sciences after that - at least they had answers that could be measured in grams.
Jan
His work on ego and self-esteem written well before this recent test would have indicated the same result, even though that was not specifically what he was aiming at. I love debunkers, don't you? From the 70's fear of global freezing, to today's fear of global warming. Only in those cases you might get arrested in the near future.
Those that live mostly in the mind, no longer need an ego for identity...however, it's rarely that clear cut, it's not pretty. Due to many distractions; including the memes of awareness and the paradigm in which we live, everyone finds themselves vacillating back and forth between the bicameral brain and our minds. [excepting those that do not have a connection to a mind, ex. liberal progressives...the very young or those so challenged]
Computer science, supposedly the science underlying computing, however, more the collection of rules followed at a time by those writing programs. Computer science is further from science than engineering and medicine, it relates to science much as the study of law.
It is hard to see how economics, as currently understood and propagated, is a science. Economics today incorporates some of the greatest con-tricks and slights-of-hand of the age. As for psychology, this is a branch of social sciences (oops), distinguish from psychiatry which is part of medicine, the theme of this thread suggests how common it is for myths to be accepted as fact in psychology.
I am a lover of one-liners so I am quite upset (sob) to see them condemned. I wish I had the writing skill to condense my thoughts to one-liners instead of having to quote them.
http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/14...
At my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, the psychology department was very proud of being in the physical sciences building, rather than with the social sciences.
Oh... and computer science! (Not a science?)
Quips and zingers are a lot of fun, but the tragedy of Orwell's 1984 was the destruction of thought with "ducktalk" the recitation of one-liners. We call the best of them aphorisms or proverbs.
Tobacco- when the companies paid, one kind of conclusion came out. Now there is little company money but much from government, only the other kind appears.
Climate- ' research is bought and paid for on both sides. And that is good'.
But when the money ratio is about 3000:1 no wonder which way the research goes. Stopping all the government money would solve that, there will always be altruistic sheep who want to save the planet, let them use their own money.
Rather than government ensuring fair play (expletive deleted), I'd rather rely on Galbraith's countervailing power which says that other interests always exist and these will do their own research with the public deciding.
What may be called the scientific method is as you say not overtly taught in 'hard science' classes, it is by and large practiced. The reverse is the case in social science when sensitive cultural beliefs are defended according to the orthodoxy of the time.
As Samuel Johnson said-
"Example is more efficacious than precept".
It has been observed before on this site (was it jbrenner?) that any field of study containing the word science is not science.
political, social, climate, ..
See also here:
http://utexas.academia.edu/HiltonRatc...
And his blog here:
"Scientists are neither superhuman nor divinely privileged. Scientists, let me tell you right now, are simply plodding bricklayers in the wall of knowledge."
http://www.hiltonratcliffe.com/
I must insist, however, that the social sciences actually do teach science. It is the physical sciences that are remiss. In sociology classes from the freshman to the senior level, we study the study: how sociology came to be, how it grew and changed by criticism within and without. We also study the scientific method and statistical methods. That is not true in physics. They just dump the thing in the lap of the freshman as if it were from the head of Zeus. They assume that you know the scientific method. But is that the three-step, nine-step, or 14-step version?
No, truthfully, the social sciences adhere more closely to what we expect from "real" science.
It does happen that results are buried for financial reasons, and that just fuels the fires of anti-capitalists who want all research to be funded by the government.
While your example certainly speaks to the problem, we all have stories. i worked for a software firm that scammed investors with promises of Reaganomic investment credits. One of the officers went to prison, but not enough of them did. That proves nothing about the software industry "being in real trouble" or the fraudulent core of investment tax credits. It is just one case.
I do agree with you (I believe) that in order to improve (if not rescue) science in America, we need to create a new educational model in science. As I said above, we do not reward replication studies, but they are the touchstone of science.
Ratcliffe makes the claim that science in general is at a critical juncture at this point due to the effects of those belief biases carried into popular literature and even professional materials. I think he's right, and as a result, I question nearly all 'new' science and claims.
I've seen some amazing stuff...
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