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Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd like to see fewer low quality scientific criticisms here. Instead of speculating on effect sizes without reading the paper, and bloviating on sample sizes without doing the relevant power calculations, perhaps try looking at the results section?
With respect to this paper, the results were consistent and significant across three tasks - an eye task, a facial expression task, and a vocal tone task. They did a non-social task (an anagram task) and found no significant effect (though that wasn't the purpose of doing the task, its a bit more complicated than that). They also did an interesting caffeine experiment to see if they could relieve social anxiety by convincing participants that the anxiety was due to a (fake) caffeinated drink.
Anyways, as with any research in this area, it's too soon to be confident of what the results mean. But armchair uninformed scientific criticism will not advance knowledge.
(In hindsight this is a bit of an overreaction, but I've seen too many poor criticisms of papers and too much speculation particularly on Reddit, but also here and on several blogs, and not nearly enough careful reading)
I would like to see fewer low quality science papers posted. FB put in way more work than was justified. My new policy is to down vote every psychology paper posted without any discussion of the endemic problems in psychology research and why that paper might not be pure noise.
Are all psychology papers garbage? And if only some are, how do you tell which is which if you don't read past the first line of the abstract? (which FB didn't, because he was unaware that more than one experiment was conducted).
We have to filter the papers somehow and the the people who do the filtering have to read them. But that doesn't mean that the people doing the filtering should be people on LW. Username relied on a journalist for filtering. This does filter for interesting topics, but not for quality. That Username did not link the actual paper suggests that he did not read it. Thus my prior is that it is of median quality and pure noise. Even if psychology papers were all perfectly accurate, there are way too many that get coverage and it is unlikely that one getting coverage this month is worth reading.
There are standard places to look for filters: review articles and books.
Okay that's very fair.