gwern comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 02 July 2013 04:21PM

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Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 01 July 2013 10:46:20PM 8 points [-]

For a few years, I attended a meeting called Animal Behavior Lunch where we discussed new animal behavior articles. All of the meetings consisted of graduate students talking at great length about the flaws of that week’s paper. The professors in attendance knew better but somehow we did not manage to teach this. The students seemed to have a strong bias to criticize. Perhaps they had been told that “critical thinking” is good. They may have never been told that appreciation should come first. I suspect failure to teach graduate students to see clearly the virtues of flawed research is the beginning of the problem I discuss here: Mature researchers who don’t do this or that because they have been told not to do it (it has obvious flaws) and as a result do nothing.

Seth Roberts, ‘Something is better than nothing’, Nutrition, vol. 23, no. 11 (November, 2007), p. 912

Comment author: gwern 02 July 2013 12:03:31AM 13 points [-]

Roberts, naturally, has substantial interest in avoiding any criticism, and the work of people like Ioannides and the eternal life of the publication bias says that if anything, we are insufficiently critical...

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2013 12:40:21AM 10 points [-]

I think we're looking at the wrong kind of criticism. Like, the kind of criticism you can make with almost equal ease of results that will and won't turn out to replicate later.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 02 July 2013 12:37:07AM *  2 points [-]

As you know, I agree with you that Roberts is incorrigibly biased, and I liked your earlier post on this. But I think we can be critical in the sense you have in mind, and still try to cultivate the attitude that I take Roberts to be hinting at. Perhaps this is not very clear in the passage I chose to quote though.

Comment author: TimS 02 July 2013 12:48:41AM 6 points [-]

From an outside view, how can we distinguish this virtue-of-flawed-research from insiders refraining from criticizing each other for the sake of the reputation of the research field?

Comment author: Estarlio 02 July 2013 12:14:47PM 2 points [-]

Virtue of flawed research insiders won't not criticise the flaws, but they will follow up on them with further studies expanding on a point or fixing a methodology.

The problem that Roberts might be criticising is the sort of thinking that goes: I've made a criticism, now we can forget about the thing.

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