CarlShulman comments on RAND Health Insurance Experiment critiques - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (17)
I'm curious about the n-back confirmation bias and the evidence those folk neglected.
Oh, that's easily explained. By going through the Brain Workshop ML archives and then keeping on top of all subsequent emails, I've managed to compile a fair number of failures-to-replicate in http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism and also deeply troubling criticism of studies that were reported at complete face value in places like Wired (for Jaeggi 2008) or the Wall Street Journal (for Jaeggi 2011, which we criticized here).
And I know that the failures to replicate are not widely known because I also have a Google Alerts set up for dual n-back and I see how it's being discussed on blogs and forums, which invariably cite - if they cite anything - only the positive results. Then there are the people on the mailing list, who enjoy discussing positive results but ignore or insult the other results. (I fear Moody's essay has caused his name to be taken in vain more than once over the years.)
Thanks. What's your take on the claim that stereotype encouragement, along the lines of "you're part of a group that's good at math" or "this is a test that you'll be good at," can boost performance above baseline on high-stakes tests? I've heard this claimed with regard to men and Asian-Americans, but worried about publication and reporting biases.
I don't know much about stereotype encouragement. Mostly I hear about stereotype threat, which strikes me as more than a little suspicious - smells like a Clever Hans or publication bias sort of situation.
There was earlier discussion of publication bias on this here (which makes sense given the attractiveness of the claim, along with general psychology research standards). This article is paywalled, but if it matches the abstract and is itself kosher, it shows a devastating pattern in the published studies:
That was a surprisingly difficult article to obtain; Google Scholar failed, my UWash access as usual didn't work on Psycnet, a straight fulltext search failed, and when I finally found the journal in Ebscohost, the PDF download didn't work! After a while, I figured out that I could email the citation - with PDF attached - to myself. Here it is:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-stoet.pdf
EDIT: I had to laugh at this from the conclusion (or should that be cry?):