[HN Gopher] The control group is out of control (2014) ___________________________________________________________________ The control group is out of control (2014) Author : stakkur Score : 116 points Date : 2022-01-22 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (slatestarcodex.com) (TXT) w3m dump (slatestarcodex.com) | amelius wrote: | Reminds me of a talk of Rupert Sheldrake at Google Talks: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic18Xyk9is | | and then later he gave a talk called "The Science Delusion" which | got banned from TED: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg | 3np wrote: | What do you mean by "banned" (as opposed to just taken down | from their video channel)? | | BTW, YouTube title says "TED TALK"; note that it's TEDx. | amelius wrote: | Does it matter? Sheldrake makes some wild claims, but | eloquently packs them in a talk that is entertaining and at | times thought-provoking. In any case, his braveness is | certainly admirable. Worth a watch, I would say (perhaps with | a pint of beer). | monocasa wrote: | [2014] | darkerside wrote: | Arthur Conan Doyle, through Sherlock Holmes, said, once you've | eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how | improbable, must be the truth. | | This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and | Wiseman does not. It actually makes perfect sense. People who are | psychic wouldn't be skeptics, and people who are not psychic | certainly would be skeptics. | kibwen wrote: | I suppose that, had Conan Doyle been aware of quantum | mechanics, Sherlock Holmes would have spent a portion of every | case entertaining the notion that quantum phenomena caused the | universe to spontaneously arrange the crime scene. | | "It's elementary particles, my dear Watson." | ModernMech wrote: | No, I think the story would have been exac | eternalban wrote: | > This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and | Wiseman does not. | | Alternatively it is possible we all have psychic powers (but | not all are conscious of it) and our thoughts actually shape | our reality. | aradox66 wrote: | This is a simpler and more coherent theory that also has more | explanatory power | ReactiveJelly wrote: | It also simplifies gender theory a lot by making self- | identification the end of the discussion. | Sniffnoy wrote: | (2014) | jrockway wrote: | They need to invent control group version 2. It worked for Linux. | olliej wrote: | Well this certainly makes me glad that the only time I was having | to do statistical studies for research purposes, it was in the | context of generated code performance. | FabHK wrote: | The "fits of nervous laughter" paper by Wiseman & Schlitz (1998) | was replicated by Wiseman & Schlitz (1999) [1], with a similar | yet different result: RW (again) found no effect of staring, MS | found a significant (p=0.05) effect of staring, but with | _opposite_ direction than the 1998 paper. | | [1] https://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/expt2.pdf | , found on | | https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/research/parapsychology... | mannykannot wrote: | Hence the enthusiasm for preregistration of trials. | gumby wrote: | > That is, in let's say a drug testing experiment, you give some | people the drug and they recover. That doesn't tell you much | until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn't | work - but which they themselves believe in - and see how many of | them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover | whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do | significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven't | found anything. | | I had a drug program in which we blew away the standard placebo | rate ... unfortunately our placebo arm did too, though not by as | much. But it was just enough that we weren't _enough_ better than | our placebo arm. | | We changed modality from the current standard (we were an | injection rather than a tablet and all the trial participants | were super excited. | HWR_14 wrote: | So you just accidentally performed an experiment that | injections have a stronger placebo effect than pills. | dTal wrote: | For that, they would have needed a control group that took | placebo pills. They can estimate the likely behavior of such | a group from other trials, but it's not a rigorous experiment | unless they do it themselves, carefully controlling all the | other possible variables. | csee wrote: | Assuming methods were the same, the first study was the | control. | [deleted] | civilized wrote: | There is no such thing as a standard placebo rate. If there | was, there would be no need for every study to have a control | group. | gumby wrote: | For the particular indication we were going after there had | been a number of topical trials and academic studies that | showed that the placebo response was less than 1%, | essentially no different from spontaneous (i.e. no | treatment). Same was true of oral. This is pretty common in | fungal infections unfortunately. | | The FDA wanted us to compare against the topical treatment | placebo rate for various technical reasons. | | Perhaps you thought that "standard" was some sort of standard | for any placebo for any indication and any mode of | administration? Indeed that would make no sense. | | Even specifying a placebo itself is non obvious. Of course | your procedure and the object itself (tablet, whatever) is | ideally indistinguishable by the study participant and, | ideally the clinician (hard to do, say, when it's a surgical | procedure; you can't hide that from the clinician). But even | with a pill, you can't always just supply, say, a slug of | mannitol -- that might actually affect what you're studying. | civilized wrote: | Thanks, this is helpful additional info. Sorry, I didn't | mean to contradict you, I was actually trying to reinforce | the principle behind your experience. There is no true | "standard" for what sort of placebo should be used in a | trial, even if something has become "standard" in the sense | of commonly used. It is not something that can be specified | in the abstract, but is a matter of expert judgment with | many variables. | | Your trial gave an appropriate placebo, regardless of the | "standard" in the field, and thus you were shielded from | overstating the evidence of drug effectiveness. | mauricioc wrote: | I understood it as "(standard placebo) rate", not "standard | (placebo rate)". That is: | | "standard placebo" (tablets) << "new placebo format" | (injection with no active components) < "real drug" | (injection). | [deleted] | skrebbel wrote: | So maybe that isn't what the GP meant? You're telling the | person who did a study that they misunderstand the utter | basics of studies, based on a 3-sentence comment they wrote. | rictic wrote: | Sometimes people misunderstand the basics of their full | time work yes | | We've all seen that person, and almost all of us have at | times _been_ that person | | And unfortunately, given the replication crisis, there is | no reason to assume that a published scientist is not | making a fundamental error that undermines the validity of | their work. It apparently happens quite frequently, and we | should be quite grateful for those that question and probe | at assumptions and potentially faulty analysis techniques | [deleted] | nathanwh wrote: | Honestly this XKCD arguing that psychic phenomena don't exist | because they're not exploited for profit is a comforting | difficult to refute argument for me: https://xkcd.com/808/ | HWR_14 wrote: | You don't know if people are using them for profit. Are the | best surgeons guided by auras or do Oil companies use | divinations? | TigeriusKirk wrote: | How do you know the things the chart says aren't happening | really aren't happening? | Groxx wrote: | Astrology, Tarot, and many similar things are absolutely used | by people in financial planning, yeah. And on the more | "acceptable" and orders of magnitude more people side of | things, just look at "lucky x" with lottery purchases. | | But that's still a LOT less profit exploitation than e.g. GPS | which is ubiquitous. Curses haven't replaced drones in the | military. Crystals aren't in billions of electronic devices | wait | wtallis wrote: | There would be evidence. The chart helpfully points out a | specific kind of evidence that is more or less impossible to | conceal with any kind of conspiracy. | Izkata wrote: | One kind of possible evidence. | | A flipside example: Financial world could instead be used | by individuals on casinos, betting, stock markets, etc. and | they'd have incentive to keep it secret so they keep | winning. | wtallis wrote: | It might be plausible to assume that someone exploiting | ESP or whatever to beat the house could keep the secret | of _how_ they 're winning. But it's a lot less plausible | to postulate that they could keep secret the fact that | they _are_ beating the house or beating the market, | unless the effect size is too small to be of much | interest in the first place (ie. you have to largely | abandon part of the original hypothesis: that the crazy | phenomenon actually _works_ ). | yosamino wrote: | This argument has the structure of a conspiracy theory: | "A small group of people being able to keep an enormous | secret, in order to manipulate the rest of us." | | The more enormous the secret and the larger the group of | people who supposedly are in on it, the more the | probability of the secret not being a secret very long | approaches one. | | I find it very unlikely that a shortcut to making a lot | of money would be secret for very long. | hirako2000 wrote: | no planned obsolescence took place for a number of | consumer products. | | multiple and costly military invasions were to offer | democracy as goodwill and for world safety. | | a certain vaccine I can't dare to name is a vaccine as it | does provide immunity. | | the institutions of most democracies surely can't be so | corrupted. | | worldwide cocoa isn't mostly harvested by enslaved | workers. | | HIV is so far more prevalent in Africa because they can't | afford treatment and understand prevention measures | there. | | JFK. | | I could go on and on but not sure how many examples you | would need to accept that the chances for enormous | secrets known by even a significantly large group to not | take a freaking long time before blowing up is rather | close to zero. thus reconsidering your opinion on the | existence of conspiracies. | | and, about shortcuts to making a lot of money being kept | rather well secrets: dark budgets, secret and hidden | inflation, supply fudging | wtallis wrote: | In particular, as the scope of the conspiracy grows, the | cost of _keeping_ that secret _very quickly_ outstrips | any potential profit from exploiting the secret. Eg. if | oil companies could use ESP to know where to drill, then | they would still need to be spending large sums of money | on computers and software to analyze seismic data, or | else the collapse of demand for those products would | expose the conspiracy. | aradox66 wrote: | theptip wrote: | It's a sound point. Even a very small edge in precognition or | mind reading (no matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds | to beat the market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do | not exist because nobody is doing this. | HWR_14 wrote: | Mind reading doesn't seem terribly useful if it is in a | relatively small radius. | | But you could do that, or just make enough money gambling in | poker rooms and racetracks. | | Hell, if you could see a few days into the future, it might | be smartest to just break that out when the lottery gets big | enough one time. | mistermann wrote: | Actually this only shows that this specific form does not | exist, or has not been discovered, or possibly something else | both of us have overlooked. | rkk3 wrote: | Hedge funds do beat the market, individually. Steve Cohen | probably has psychic powers. | wtallis wrote: | > Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers. | | What about his track record cannot be adequately explained | by mundane insider trading? | | Edit: Puzzled by the downvotes. I think it's entirely fair | to ask whether Cohen is enough of an outlier that it | requires a psychic explanation, even after accounting for | the degree of success that can be reasonably attributed to | luck and non-psychic skill (effects which other hedge fund | managers are also subject to) plus the insider trading he's | been involved in (which other hedge fund managers are not | necessarily subject to). | | In a world with a finite number of hedge fund managers, | there is always going to be somebody who is the most | successful out of the bunch, and that somebody is almost | certainly going to appear to be an outlier even without a | supernatural influence on their success. So before | attributing anything to psychic powers, we first have to | establish whether he's _too successful_ to be accounted for | by the non-psychic explanations. I genuinely don 't know | enough about Steve Cohen's track record to know whether | he's that much of an outlier, and I'd appreciate some real | information about the degree of his success rather than | just downvoting. | nradov wrote: | Just to play devil's advocate, how do you know they're not? A | psychic hedge fund manager wouldn't necessarily reveal their | secret. | alar44 wrote: | Because hedge funds don't beat the market for more than a | year or two at a time, no one does. It's all a scam. | Nothing beats just holding index funds. | aradox66 wrote: | That's only true on average. | CrazyStat wrote: | Renaissance's Medallion fund, net fees, has beat the | market almost every year since 1990. Twice by more than | 100 percentage points. | | Maybe Simons is psychic and all the quant stuff is just a | coverup. | theptip wrote: | A single psychic hedge fund manager wouldn't reveal | themselves, but as an industry if you're trying to hire | psychics it would not be possible to keep this fact secret. | q-big wrote: | > Even a very small edge in precognition or mind reading (no | matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds to beat the | market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do not exist | because nobody is doing this. | | It is known that many people who consider that they might | have psychic powers are on the highly sensitive side. | | Knowing people who are highly sensitive, I can easily imagine | that the enormous stress, pressure and greed in a hedge fund | environment would make hedge funds a horrible work | environment for such people. | bshepard wrote: | Just because a phenomenon can't be industrialized doesn't mean | it doesn't exist; you can't industrialize lyric poetry, for | example. | wtallis wrote: | The phenomena discussed in that comic were chosen for | inclusion specifically because they actually _would_ lend | themselves quite easily and obviously to commercial | exploitation if they really existed as popularly conceived. | If you stipulate that all of those alleged psychic phenomena | are inherently not exploitable in those ways or any other | significantly profitable way, you 're basically redefining | those terms contrary to their popular meanings and just | moving the goalposts. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | The same could be said of antibiotics. However, before | Ehrlich & Pasteur, there were no large scale use or even | specific awareness of the concept (i.e. some cultures had | folk medicinal remedies that involved antibiotics but the | mechanism and specific compounds were not understood). | | So until the 1880s, there was no commercial exploitation of | these compounds, yet they nevertheless existed either in | actuality or potential. Once there was an understanding of | the principles and the development of some related chemical | and biochemical processing, this exploded and had a | dramatic impact on human life. | | If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps | there were specific compounds that could be used to cure | infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it | not be analogous to respond that since nobody is | commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not | exist? | wtallis wrote: | > If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that | perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used | to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse, | would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is | commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do | not exist? | | None of the ideas included in the xkcd comic are | particularly new or obscure. Despite being pigeonholed as | a certain kind of bullshit, they are still ideas that a | _lot_ of people have heard about and been hearing about | for a very long time--more than enough time for someone | to get around to commercially exploiting if that were in | fact practical. _Ghostbusters_ came out 37 years ago, and | the stuff it made fun of was familiar enough to its | audience. | | However, in 1785 the principles of chemical engineering | _were_ largely unknown, precluding the development of a | modern-style pharmaceutical industry. It did not, | however, prevent widespread use of antibiotic treatments | that we now understand the mechanism for and can refine | or synthesize into more effective forms. | bshepard wrote: | (1) All of these practices depend on cultivating virtues that | are contradictory to industrialization/capitalization: just | as lyric poetry is. | | (2) It is intriguing to consider commercial music as an | industrial utilization of lyric poetry, but the point is that | the individual activity of lyric poetry is not amenable to | industrialization IN ITSELF, but it still exists. But perhaps | this example doesn't work -- the really important argument is | above, namely, that the cultivation of these practices -- | astrology, dousing, etc, is individuated, and oriented around | virtues directly opposed to their mass utilization. | | (3) As other commentators have noticed, we also don't know | that these sciences aren't used on a mass | technological/industrial fashion --- it seems likely, for | instance, that there are corporate entities that use i ching | divination, and likely, too, that there are financial firms | that utilize astrological methods -- but wouldn't reveal this | because of the likely opprobrium from a still dominant (if | clearly declining) orthodox materialism... | itronitron wrote: | The parent comment didn't mention industrializing it but | rather turning a profit, and many recording artists have | profited from their lyric poetry. | Stupulous wrote: | Many self-proclaimed psychics have made a good amount of | money in the practice as well. | kragen wrote: | RCA did. | jpttsn wrote: | What if in the time before the discovery of e.g. quantum | mechanics you did the same analysis? Would it tell you that | quantum mechanics doesn't exist? | wtallis wrote: | If you don't have a theory of quantum mechanics and you don't | have any observable phenomena that require a quantum | explanation, then there's nothing to apply this kind of | analysis to, and nothing to reject the existence of. | normac2 wrote: | The author of this blog, Scott Alexander, has an online novel | called Unsong [1] based on this idea. In the book's universe, | Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) | corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew | characters to find names of God that give various powers. | | [1] https://unsongbook.com/ | mathattack wrote: | Yes. The existence of casinos disproves psychic powers. | NateEag wrote: | It may be that psychic powers exist but that they are not | powerful, general, or controllable enough to be reliably | profitable. | | Also, if every profitable phenomenon in the world is already | developed, then no business should ever invest in fundamental | research - i.e., the pharmaceutical companies are wasting their | research dollars. | | Why is it comforting to you to believe psychic powers don't | exist? | gs17 wrote: | Yeah, e.g. someone who can, for example, consistently predict | single bits of output from true random number generators 51% | of the time would be evidence of something very strange going | on, but not necessarily usable for anything practical. (Maybe | if you could gather enough of these people to overcome the | "weak" ability?) | mathattack wrote: | If you could consistently predict stock moves 51% of the | time eventually you'd have all the money in the universe. | sokoloff wrote: | It depends on what you mean by 51% of the time. If you're | just making a directional prediction, "will the next | market day be up or down?", that's nowhere near enough. | | A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you | can't use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all | the money. | ajuc wrote: | Try "will the X go up or down next second". | | > A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet | you can't use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make | all the money. | | You can make money, just not ALL the money. And that's | because other people know that too. | SilasX wrote: | Wait, what? I don't have a specific cite, but I thought | that predicting a random number generator that well is good | enough to break common crypto algorithms? | | IIRC, doing better than chance by 2^-32 is enough for the | randomization system to be thrown out, and marching the | output 51% is way better than that. | | But yes, I'd agree with a steelmanned version of your point | with a much smaller improvement over chance. But then, you | would have to do a realllllly long test and it wouldn't | actually look that impressive. | prionassembly wrote: | AdaBoost, etc. were invented precisely to make good use of | weak predictors. | [deleted] | egypturnash wrote: | _Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of | different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be | conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because | the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, | apparatus and procedure beforehand, "conducted by" pretty much | just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental | instructions, and doing the staring._ | | _The results? Schlitz's trials found strong evidence of psychic | powers, Wiseman's trials found no evidence whatsoever._ | | _Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two | experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, | having no contact with the subjects except to introduce | themselves and flip a few switches - and whether one or the other | was there that day completely altered the result. For a good | time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to | make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This | is the only journal article I've ever read where, in the part of | the Discussion section where you're supposed to propose possible | reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co- | author hacked into the computer and altered the results._ | | Well, if you would take the "psi can never exist" blinders off, | Mr. Codex, then this seems to be a pointer towards "this works | better if you believe it will work", and it makes _perfect_ sense | if you accept this. | | Schlitz's belief that it would work resulted in it working. | Wiseman's belief that it wouldn't resulted in it not working. | | The whole idea behind psi is that the human mind can sense and/or | effect the world in currently-inexplicable ways, and _here it is | doing just that_. With at least ten other experiments on this | idea getting similar results. But parapsychology is completely | and utterly a scam in your eyes so that is not a result you will | consider. | einpoklum wrote: | One can get quite a bit of popular traction from arranging for | one's theory to be effectively-impossible to disprove (e.g. "it | only works if you believe in it during the experiment"). Not | much explanatory power though. | egypturnash wrote: | The experiment I excerpted his description of seems to go | along with _exactly that_. Experimenter who believes? Things | happen. Experimenter who does not believe? Nothing happens. | adamgordonbell wrote: | So if you assume ESP doesn't exist then parapsychology research | has something important to say about the replication crisis in | social sciences. | | This is a surprising thing I wouldn't have thought of on my own. | dang wrote: | Discussed at the time: | | _The Control Group Is Out of Control_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7666575 - April 2014 (74 | comments) | ed-209 wrote: | "...things we haven't discovered yet which are at least as weird | as subconscious emotional cues" - sounds like psi to me. | ALittleLight wrote: | This post really makes you think and challenged my world view | when I first read it. | | A while back I looked at the CIA "Star Gate" files[1], which, are | a collection of documents released under FOIA detailing the CIA's | investigation into psychic powers and whether or not those powers | serve an intelligence gathering purpose. I just opened up random | files and skimmed them - I wish I had taken notes when doing so, | but my impression was that the CIA was actually producing some | better than chance results with their experiments. | | I don't really know what to make of parapsychology or psychic | powers in general. Sometimes I'll idly wonder if I should | dedicate time to trying to uncover my psychic powers. | | 1 - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate | mcculley wrote: | I was intrigued by this wording: "which most reasonable people | believe don't exist" | | Maybe I am pedantic, but it should be "which most reasonable | people don't believe exist" | intrepidpar wrote: | Well, arguably believing that something doesn't exist and not | believing that something exists are two different things. | mcculley wrote: | Exactly. As a skeptic, I have no reason to believe. I don't | believe it exists. If I believed that it did not exist, I | would have a belief about it. | xapata wrote: | No, it's reasonable to phrase it as a belief that the | phenomenon doesn't exist. That's a positive belief of the | negative. The alternative of lack of belief in existence is a | more neutral stance. | mcculley wrote: | Lack of belief is the more skeptical stance, which seems more | reasonable to me. | wtallis wrote: | Skepticism doesn't mean resisting any justification for | moving the needle of your certainty away from 50%. | | You are allowed to expect that psychic phenomena being real | would lead to the existence of clear evidence that psychic | phenomena are real, and to conclude from the lack of such | evidence where it ought to be found that it is less likely | that psychic phenomena are real. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | this is similar to a kind of subject and object confusion: | | subject: most reasonable people | | object: psi phenomena | | verbs: to believe, to exist | | The full statement can be stated in at least two ways: | "[ these people ] don't believe that [ these phenomena ] | exist." "[ these people ] believe that [ these | phenomena ] don't exist." | | Either one is valid, as are the contracted versions, but the | first one describes the absence of belief in existence, and the | second describes the presence of a belief in non-existence. | | These are closely related things, but not identical, and I | imagine the author likely chose carefully. | Jweb_Guru wrote: | > I know that standard practice here is to tell the story of | Clever Hans and then say That Is Why We Do Double-Blind Studies. | | Yes, this is the answer to this entire article, and his attempt | to dismiss this for some reason is strange to me. | igorkraw wrote: | adamgordonbell wrote: | This is a strange take. | | I thought it was a fascinating write up about how if you | assume ESP doesn't exist then parapsychology research has | something important to say about the replication crisis in | social sciences. | | Going into how double blind solves all this means skipping | the interesting bit: that parapsychology can be viewed as a | control group for the scientific method. | igorkraw wrote: | wpietri wrote: | Exactly. He's definitely smart, and so it was a mystery to me | why his articles were so incredibly long and rambling. (I get | that some people enjoy his prose regardless of content, but | I'm not one of them.) Why would a smart person who in theory | wants to convey important points be so obscurantist about | them? I threw up my hands and put it down to a personality | quirk. | | It was the Sandifer article "The Beigeness" that cleared it | up for me: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the- | beigeness-or-how-to... | wpietri wrote: | And I really object to the comment I'm replying to getting | flagged. I get that some people will disagree, but flagging | it as if it were somehow inappropriate is a misuse of | flagging power. | phreack wrote: | That was a very eye opening article that also cleared up | what was bothering me about Scott's style. Thanks for | sharing. | _dain_ wrote: | have you considered the possibility that he is simply correct | about HBD? | igorkraw wrote: | Depends what you and him _exactly_ mean, but since he 's | talking about the neoreactionaries being correct, I'll | assume he doesn't mean the scientific version which posits | that race has no genetic basis (ctrl+F "race") | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation | | but more this variation | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism. | | Even if it was correct, I think if there are no nefarious | consequences being pushed for, I think people who want to | argue HBD should rise to the challenge of explaining in | plain english what they mean and what consequences they | would draw from their assumption being correct, instead of | hiding behind obfuscation. While I am not necessarily 100% | aligned with groups like AntiFa chapters, BLM etc., at | least they are _honest_ about what they think and want to | achieve. | wpietri wrote: | Have you considered the long history of racist misuse of | science and its "just asking questions" defenders? | chalst wrote: | Andrew Gelman had an interesting 9-years-too-late idea for what | to do in cases like Bem's article: | | https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/27/jpsp-done-... | | Rather than publish all of the dubious speculations and the | analysis whose problems took time to emerge, simply publish the | data. The advantage, in his words: | | > In the example of the ESP study, if anything's valuable it's | the data. Publishing the data would get the journal off the hook | regarding fairness, open-mindedness, and not missing a scoop, | while enabling others to move on reanalyses right away, and | without saddling the journal with an embarrassing endorsement of | a weak theory that, it turns out, was not really supported by | data at all. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Incentives: Spend five years doing difficult / expensive / | dangerous research, gathering data that demonstrates X. The | data set is vast, and you can get ten papers out of it, one | every six months with some awesome collaboration and possibly | tenure. | | Do you do that or | | publish all your data in the first paper and watch a dozen grad | students publish your next nine papers in three weeks ? | | Incentives matter yes. Science and data should be free and | transparent. But if we pay peanuts and expect the monkeys to | appreciate the applause of publication, we need to change our | incentive structure. | | The reasons AI / ML researchers don't mind publishing the data | early is because they already get 500k salaries and equity. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | Obvious question then: what are the arguments/forces opposing | this? Just inertia in the publishing norms? | [deleted] | Misdicorl wrote: | The approach fails miserably when taken in aggregate. I would | read five to ten papers from my own field a week while in | grad school. If I had to do the analysis for myself as well | there wouldn't be any time to do my own research. | | Add on twenty more papers a week from adjacent fields where I | don't even know all the techniques and the magnitude of the | problem hopefully becomes clearer. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | The raw figures would be available in addition to the paper | itself, not instead of it. | chalst wrote: | Gelman's suggestion is how to handle articles with | unlikely conclusions: don't publish the submitted | article, though that presumably would be circulated as a | preprint, but just the data. Then the journal is bringing | attention to interesting data without endorsing the | dubious analysis or conclusions. | csee wrote: | There is an incentive against doing it. No researcher wants | the embarrassment of having an error that they didn't know | about discovered. Journals don't fancy the embarrassment or | hassle either. It would serve broader scientific progress, | but that's not who is deciding to hide the data. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | A tragedy of the commons, then? | teekert wrote: | If you ever find yourself thinking like this, get the f out | of science asap, you have no idea what you are doing. | teh_infallible wrote: | " Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for | psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able | to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena." | | Therefore psychic phenomena exist? I don't see the problem. | selestify wrote: | It's only a problem if you have strong priors telling you that | they don't exist, because that indicates a lot of other | scientific fields are in trouble. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-22 23:00 UTC)