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shminux comments on [Link] Why Science Is Not Necessarily Self-Correcting - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (17)
The article seems to be heavily biased towards psychology. I wonder if the "harder" sciences like physics, chemistry and biology suffer from the same issues to a similar degree.
The author of the article, Ioannidis, has published extensively about the unreliability of reported medical and biochemical results, over a more than 10 year period. The article is not so much "biased" towards psychology, as focusing on that one area.
Right, "focusing" is a better description. But I wonder if this focusing resulted in a generalization which is a bit too sweeping. The "publish or perish" race is certainly everywhere in academia, but its side effects might be better mitigated in some areas than in others.
I think of the work on blue LEDs that recently got the physics Nobel.
Blue LEDs work. You can buy them off the shelf. Each one works pretty much every time.
Is there anything in sociology or psychology of which the same can be said?
Depends on whether "Each one works pretty much every time" means a phenomenon which works on pretty much every individual on pretty much every occasion, or a phenomenon which can simply be replicated reliably given a big enough sample.
I can think of nothing in sociology or psychology satisfying the former criterion. But the latter, weaker criterion seems to be satisfied by anchoring bias, which was replicated by 36 sites out of 36 in the Many Labs project, as indicated by its table of summary statistics.
Whether one counts anything in psychology as satisfying the former or not, I think depends on where one draws the line between psychology and neurology. There are certainly things we've discovered about how the brain works that tell us things about the thought processes of every human, but one might argue that these fall under the purview of neurology, and not psychology.
Definitely the former. Each one, every time. The world around us is filled with such things, yet when it comes to the study of anything to do with living organisms, people dismiss the idea as "physics envy", a concept which makes no more sense than "separate magisteria", and serves the same function.
CBT?
CBT has a proven chance to help, but it doesn't have a 100% success rate for anything.
If you count medicine as a subfield of biology, people are already well aware of problems there...
In psychology you have the controversial replication initiative. In physics you have nobody complain about people attempting replications.
Perhaps that is because the stuff actually replicates.