The Scent of Bad Psychology

post by Jacob Falkovich (Jacobian) · 2018-09-10T18:42:21.682Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

This is a link post for https://putanumonit.com/2018/09/07/the-scent-of-bad-psychology/

Contents

6 comments

Inspired by the psychology replication quiz [LW · GW], I've come up with four rules to tell bullshit studies in psychology from real ones:

1. The rule of antisignificance

2. The rule of Taleb's grandma

3. The rule of multiplicity

4. The rule of silicone boobs

And finally, a reason why this could mean that there's a brighter future for good psychology research.

6 comments

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comment by Dr_Manhattan · 2018-09-13T15:08:58.556Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Why not post the full article, especially since this is your own blog?

Replies from: Jacobian
comment by Jacob Falkovich (Jacobian) · 2018-09-13T17:53:03.847Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I usually cross-post the entire article if:

1. It's related to rationality and the sort of thing I would post to LW if I didn't have Putanumonit.

2. It doesn't have a lot of images and tables I'll have to reload and reformat.

3. I'm not too lazy.

This time, the fault was mostly with #3.

comment by gjm · 2018-09-11T16:16:04.654Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Pedantic correction: silicone, not silicon. Perhaps silicon boobs would be interesting to a hypothetical (Too-)Friendly AI, but most humans would not find them appealing.

[EDITED to fix a typo.]

Replies from: Jacobian
comment by Jacob Falkovich (Jacobian) · 2018-09-11T17:20:18.651Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I never even noticed that those are two different things! This was not a typo, it was a glaring hole in my education. Thank you for filling it up.

Oh, and pedantic correction: you misspelled *silicone* with an extra *l*.

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2018-09-13T01:22:39.366Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Mistyped rather than misspelled (or, depending on how you prefer to define those things, misspelled by mistyping). Anyway, I'll fix it; thanks.

comment by Paperclip Minimizer · 2018-09-19T12:26:39.706Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

don’t trust studies that would be covered in the Weird News column of the newspaper

-- Ozy