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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

I took a class with Susan Fiske in grad school, and the following is a quote from one of her comments on a homework where I had called into question a paper that was clearly not just statistically incorrectly done but was based on urban-legend-level assumptions:

"These results are from respected investigators, so it's inappropriate to question them."

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Haha this reminds me of the feedback I got on a report in Comparative Religion, when I questioned some French dude's really elaborate and fanciful interpretation of the paintings at Lascaux. "Ummm... what supporting texts do we have from 17,000 years ago?" "No, you can't ask that sort of question and it's really disrespectful."

FWIW, I wasn't really upset by that feedback. Senior spring; I don't care!

It immediately reminded me of "Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate" by Leszek Kołakowski : ) Highly recommended and very funny snce there's much truth to it I think. I found it online in English: http://jennis22.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/5/3/30531242/emperor_...

I've seen churches with more skepticism.

While I trust your story, and I believe it's somewhat taboo on HN to ask for this, I feel that it would be much more valuable if evidence was provided. That is an absolutely egregious act for a professor to commit and I feel like it should be reported to someone if substantiated..

Oh, I made a huge stink about it (and this was just one example of many comments of that type). This was at Penn in 2007.

An upvote for outing her for clearly bad science and bad teaching, if she actually did this. There are few things that offend me, a teacher damaging impressionable students like this is one of those.

I think she mostly damaged herself there, the student seems to have come out all right (but there was a risk they wouldn't have).

Not to question you, but I can't find any evidence that Fiske was ever teaching at Penn. Her CV [1] is quite exhaustive, but only lists giving colloquia at Penn.

[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1605966/27061956/14652...

She was one of the people giving the Social Psychology prosem in Fall 2005, because John Sabini (who normally gave it) died:

> September 21: The Self (Prentice) > September 28: Social Cognition (Fiske) > October 5: Attitudes (Cooper) > October 19: Social Inference (Pronin) > November 2: Prejudice & Stigma (Shelton) > November 16: Dissonance (Cooper) > November 30: Close Relationships (Fiske) > December 7: Social Influence (Prentice)

Thanks.

> Not to question you

It's quite okay. That's exactly the kind of attitude that's being scrutinized here ;)

Is that verbatim?

Yes.

Please photograph and publish it. (Pics or it didn't happen?) This debate is important and shouldn't be muddied with hearsay on all sides.

Thanks.

dmd is a respected HNer, so it's inappropriate to question him.

It is inappropriate to use that fact to dismiss a valid request for the evidence. Being famous in some (possibly popular) website does not mean that one's experience has not been biased.

Go five levels up from your comment and you might find a joke you're missing—unless you're in on it too and it's sailing right over my head

Oh-kay, now I understood what happened (the fifth level is invisible from the parent comment, ugh). Thank you for pointing out where I screwed up :S

Out of curiosity, do you remember what paper it was?

I'm not entirely certain but I think it was

The modern synthesis of contrasting styles of thought in “east” and “west” *Nisbett, R. E., Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, September 16, 2003, 11163-11170

Interesting. As a physicist, I tend to put extra trust in PNAS credibility due to their history of critical editors and reviewers, and therefore am less likely to question results published there. Maybe it's the same fallacy, but at the same time we can't all be experts at everything and have to defer to trust at some point. Anyway, thanks for the contextual tidbit.

PNAS is notorious for inconsistent quality, and has recently had to modify their direct submission process, partly as a result. I don't know about physics, but I've seen them publish a lot of very poor work.

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