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by throwawaysea
2102 days ago
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I am glad this topic is getting attention. There is significant bias in academia in social science even outside flaws in statistical techniques. The field has been weaponized to build foundational support for political stances and blind institutional trust granted to academia is enabling it. This author mentions the implicit association test (IAT) as an example of a social science farce that is well known to be a farce, and notes that most social science work is undertaken in good faith. However the damage has been done and it doesn’t matter if MOST work is done in good faith if the bad work has big impact. As an example, IATs have been used to make claims about unconscious biases and form the academic basis of books like “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. Quillette wrote about problems with White Fragility and IAT as early as 2018 (https://quillette.com/2018/08/24/the-problem-with-white-frag...), and others continue to write about it even recently in 2020 (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/flaws-white-fragility-theo...). However few people are exposed to these critical analyses, and the flaws in the scientific/statistical underpinnings have not mattered, and they have not stopped books like White Fragility from circulating by the millions. We need a drastic rethink of academia, the incentives within it, and the controls that regulate it to stop the problem. Until then, it’s simply not worth taking fields like social science seriously. |
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Most analyses of the problems in science are really analyses of the problems in academia. There's no iron law that states academia has to be funded to the level it is today, and for most of history it wasn't. And let's recall, that these meta-studies are all about science, which is one of the better parts of academia. Once you get outside that into English Lit, gender studies, etc, the whole idea of replicating a paper ceases to be meaningful because the papers often aren't making logically coherent claims to begin with.
A lot of people look down on corporate funded science, but it has the huge advantage that discoveries are intended to be used for something. If the discovery is entirely false the resulting product won't work, so there is a built-in incentive to ensure research is telling you true things. The downside is there's also no incentive to share the findings, but that's what patents are for.
Of course a lot of social psych and other fields wouldn't get corporate funding. But that's OK. That's because they aren't really useful except for selling self-help books, which is unlikely to be a big enough market to fund the current level of correlational studies. That would hardly be a loss, though.