[socalnate1]

I find this response overly dismissive. Did you read the paper or just the abstract?

Dismissing the work of marketing professors out of hand isn't the right approach. What if this is one of the half of psychology papers that do replicate?

[tqi]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientis...

While I definitely agree that one shouldn't be overly dismissive without reading the underlying paper, the abstract can actually be surprisingly predictive.

"Beyond statistical issues, it strikes me that several of the studies that didn’t replicate have another quality in common: newsworthiness. They reported cute, attention-grabbing, whoa-if-true results that conform to the biases of at least some parts of society. One purportedly showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to understand other people’s beliefs and desires. Another said that thinking analytically weakens belief in religion. Yet another said that people who think about computers are worse at recalling old information—a phenomenon that the authors billed as “the Google effect.” All of these were widely covered in the media."

[joshe]

Scanned the paper too with sci hub. Nothing remarkable.

But we should be dismissive of any new results from psychology, it just doesn't have systems in place to validate claims. There is some cool stuff in psychology that has been replicated 20 times, across different cultures, and over time. But the chances of a headline psychology paper being true are, generously, 5%.

To be far to the authors, they are in a bit of a bind. In order to get their Phd, and progress in their academic career they have to do "original" research.

For psychology for the last 40 years, this means do stuff like this. Get cohorts together and test claims. When one is statistically significant, publish. They really didn't have much of a choice other than drop their career. They are probably nice people who just want to teach college classes. Misinforming people is an unintended side effect and more an indictment of academia than of them.

[socalnate1]

I think skepticism is warranted, but dismissiveness is not. Honestly it's a little offensive.

Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).

[nearbuy]

The fact that most of us already believe it is reason for increased skepticism. We have a bias towards accepting things that mesh with our existing beliefs.

That doesn't mean their results are untrue. We just have to be careful not to overestimate the strength of this evidence.

[bonoboTP]

Being a little offensive is fine. The question and argument should be whether it's a corre t assessment about the field, not whether it will hurt their feelings to read this. If it's false, argue that. It can be offensive to priests to say there's no god. It doesn't by itself make it false.

[socalnate1]

That’s fair. But you are just proving my point. This research was dismissed out of hand, it wasn’t actually engaged with to see if it’s a correct assessment or not. That seems to happen whenever any sort of soft science research is posted here. There is a contingent of folks that seems to believe soft science is an oxymoron and therefore shouldn’t even be tried.

[pas]

It's not necessarily bad habit to kind of purge HN of these random "paper announcements". Wait until there's a meta-analysis and let's submit that and talk about that.

Regarding the folks who are militantly ignorant about the science of soft science, alas I have to agree, they are a bit of a problem.

[falseprofit]

We all already believe that grass is green. Nothing is gained by pointing out that a Magic 8 Ball confirmed this.

[gentleman11]

I read part of the paper. Note the graphs where the y axis is as short as possible to make the effect size look larger. The title is explicitly non-serious. They also represent that they can measure cognitive capacity and fluid intelligence reliably and meaningfully, instead of presenting the data more clearly in the form of... data, eg, raw text scores. It also lacks the sort of control group that has a non-smartphone distraction present, so there isn't conclusive evidence that its the smartphone itself. What if it was a chessboard or a sandwich?

They need to hold themselves to more serious standards, this makes science itself look bad

[gus_massa]

In the physics lab the T.A. will yell at you if choose a scale that starts at zero instead of a scale that shows only the relevant section. When the T.A. is tired, he/she will ask another T.A. to continue the yelling. (Or sometimes just make you redo the report until you choose the correct scale.)

The research journal have a similar policy.

For some reason people in the Internet don't like it, so a solution for a blog post is to show both graphs. One that starts at zero and other with the relevant section.

[IshKebab]

Rubbish. Sometimes it is appropriate to start from zero and sometimes it isn't.

[gus_massa]

At least we can agree that using a bar graph with an axis that is not at zero is a bad idea.

[mjburgess]

It's worse than half. In some areas it's 2/3rds of the best!

No one is actually replicating the mass of research, they are trying to replicate highly cited results. Of those its half.

The vast majority of social science research is unreplicable, primarily because it uses dramatically under-powered association modelling to make causal claims. It's dressed-up astrology.

[Knuthtruth]

What if it's not