Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raincole 268 days ago
After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.
1 comments

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.
As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".
The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

You can find, maybe, three or four such recipients out of 100. And they usually did make peace, even if they previously or later made mistakes.

Obama.
I suppose to be fair to the field of economics, the replication issues were mainly with research in psychology (as I recall).

On the other hand, does economics have less of a replication issue because it’s basically unreplicable?

> We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

Maybe, but e.g. Millikan's prize for physics was on the basis of results that appear to have been at least partially fabricated.

Was it? I thought Millikan's measurement had a minor error from an incorrect viscosity of air, and several other researchers' subsequent measurements were fabricated to agree with Millikan's.
That also happened, but there are suspicious patterns in Millikan's data considered in isolation.