“Power pose” research is the latest example of scientific overreach
slate.com
slate.com
I guess my point is, many people seem happy to believe utter nonsense without a moment's thought, providing it gives them a clever-sounding, apparently counter-intuitive anecdote to impress their friends with.
Presuming a military or political speech, that sounds about right. Rousing speeches are still rousing even if you don't speak the language they're written in!
The point of a lot of presentations is effectively to dump a bunch of words that move the audience's emotional state closer to the presenter's emotional state. In "emotional rhetoric", the body language and tone is primary; the words themselves are secondary, much like slides—they exist mostly to serve as a substrate for social-alliance signalling. (Imagine interactions between candidates during a presidential debate.)
The words in the speech can also aid the one-in-ten audience members who are too stubborn and analytical to be swayed by anything other than the facts. Even then, though, most emotional-rhetoric speeches usually have an accompanying leaflet/programme/manifesto/whitepaper specifically for these people. A speech is almost never the proper place for the data to convince people of the soundness of the plan; instead, a speech's proper role is in making clear what emotional affect the speaker holds toward the ideas they're presenting. Which is, in a political environment, usually the most important thing to know about an idea: it's the metadata that lets you know whether the idea is really going to be tried or not, caught up in bureaucracy or not, etc.
A social scientist will not become famous as a deep, original thinker by telling people to work hard, be patient, keep a reputation for honesty, and eat their vegetables.
Now on to a method that does invoke "neuroendocrine and behavioral changes". The Wim Hof Method, it takes about 10 minutes to do to feel a strong effect IMO. Don't want to hijack the topic but I thought it was a fitting counter example :)
The results are also not barely statistical significant, it's more like 5 deviations away from the norm with regards to their main RQ.
Paper is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379.full
Claims about behavioral changes are mine (and I'm just a guy on the web who takes cold showers every day), the research team focused on immune response. But as you can see in their charts about the adrenaline boost one gets, behavioral change occurs in my experience at least.
Peter Thiel quipped that "The eccentric university professor is going extinct fast". He is completely right - and what's replacing them are incredibly media savy extroverts that are incredibly apt at marketing their own studies.
Would anyone be interested in seeing something like that?
Have you taken a look at PubPeer?[1] I guess I don't have the right touch in submitting articles to Hacker News. I've submitted a few that mention this problem of checking and exposing bad science publications, linking to PubPeer, but the articles I submit[2] don't usually enjoy as much discussion from you and other Hacker News participants as I would expect, based on the frequent statements I see here that people would like to help clean up scientific research. There is already a site for that, and it's called PubPeer.
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/31/pubpeer-founders-revea...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/pubpeer-s-secret-out-...
I like PubPeer because it can help fix science. But what's also broken is journalism/popular media, and how it encourages "pop science" attitudes. It sensationalizes unproven and dubious content, actually making the public dumber.
Would you agree that there's room for a site that wants to fix science journalism and how the public interacts with science? Heck, it could even link to PubPeer, without directly replacing it.
Problematic publications about science are certainly a big problem, worthy of your attention and mine, and my posting history over 2624 days here on Hacker News may suggest that it is one of my pet issues. How much interest this issue gains here on Hacker News is one thing I look at as I ponder what to do about the problem--it will take a lot of work with a lot of collaborators (some of whose work is cited in my various submissions and comments here) to tackle that problem.
As far as I know about who can participate on PubPeer, absolutely anyone can participate, as long as they have something to say about a particular scientific paper.
He could help you get started :)
It's because, on average, sick people tend to get better even if nothing is done. The placebo study had no control group. So they can't say giving a placebo is better than doing nothing.
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-harnessing-the-power...
Objective diseases are a whole other matter.
If the same people were on late-night TV peddling this, I doubt we'd be calling it "overreach".
For those of us who truly love science, it's important to treat these things exactly the same, whether it's a newspaper article, TED talk, or "Incredible Mysteries" TV show. Being mealy-mouthed isn't doing anybody any favors.
It sounds like that name is implying science shouldn't be touching this, as if it's over science's reach and it's going for it anyway.
One scientist does a study, finds a thing.
Another group attempts to repeat the study (as one does in science) and finds different results.
Sounds like science to me.
I mean, look at the figure in TFA where they show the original study effect size plus/minus two standard deviations, and the huge error bars (at 95% confidence) are just barely excluding the null hypothesis. With a sample size of 21 people. That is so pitiful even the Mythbusters would've said "We need to do a bigger experiment." But this Harvard professor instead said "Hooray, a significant result!" and went and did TED talks and books and all sorts of publicity stuff.
Scott Aaronson recently quipped "(...) there was much discussion around the discovery that most psychology studies fail to replicate. I'd long assumed as much, but apparently this was big news in psychology!"
The observation in the hard sciences that psychology has a big problem goes at least back to Feynman's "cargo cult" speech in '74. The fact that it's taken them forty years to catch up to this fact speaks volumes about the field.
This kind of "science" happens here on HN every day and nobody bats an eye.
"We used XYZ framework and it's the best thing ever!"
Then tons of people use XYZ framework.
Blog posts.
Videos.
Fad happens.
Fad is over because "Why I'm switching to ABC framework."
With tons of benchmarks of course.
My point is that this happens all over the place. Someone makes a "discovery", markets the hell out of it with great speeches, bravado, etc. It gets coverage. It "grows legs" if you will. People repeat it and spread it.
The "science" part I was referring to was the part where someone else attempts and fails to repeat the initial findings.
Not really. Most conference presentations present stuff that's not (yet) peer reviewed. A Master's thesis is not peer reviewed. Etc.
> This kind of "science" happens here on HN every day and nobody bats an eye.
Sure. And bad cooking happens every day in the kitchens of many homes in the US. But when bad cooking happens in the kitchen of a Michelin star restaurant, and the cook still serves it up as gourmet food, it's a really big problem.