Power Poser: When big ideas go bad | Hacker News Reader

Power Poser: When big ideas go bad

chronicle.com

99 pointssamclemens55 comments

Cuddy wrote that she was "concerned about the tenor" of the discussion regarding power poses and other disputed studies, worrying that such criticism could have a "chilling effect on science." Cuddy’s not the only one....Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton, referred to scientists who search for errors in published studies as "destructo-critics" engaged in "methodological terrorism."

Yikes. So when a study is seriously flawed, the bad guy is the one who uncovered it? I'm more concerned that peer reviewers aren't searching hard enough for errors.

Peer review serves a useful, but limited, function. In a case like this, the important issue is that failures to replicate can also be published.

Those statements are so incredibly antithetical to the ethos of science. It amazes me they could say something like that and keep face among their peers. My hope is that history does not look kindly on such words.

Those comments are shockingly close to just announcing "caring whether my studies are right gets in the way of my career".

I realize that good social scientists may get stuck falling behind bad ones in reputation, and I think that's a structural problem. But responding to that with a demand to stop checking for bad results is shocking, and it's not something that should be acceptable for a practicing researcher. I hope those voices don't slow down the effort to reform these fields.

>such criticism could have a "chilling effect on science."

>"destructo-critics" engaged in "methodological terrorism."

wonderful. Can be used as responses to [unfavorable] code reviews. Especially effective if typed in while taking a power pose.

A few weeks ago, I managed to catch blame for finding a bug in our software as if I had created the bug. So "the bad guy is the one who uncovered it" makes sense. At least, in a very depressing way.

"So how did arguably the most popular idea on the internet end up on the scientific ash heap? For that matter, how could such questionable research migrate from a journal to a viral video to a best seller, circulating for years, retweeted and forwarded and praised by millions, with almost no pushback?"

That's easy.

1. Videos and books aren't peer reviewed. In fact, books and videos by scientists usually are not even about the science. They are about self promotion.

2. Peer review isn't the gold standard of truth. At some level, it's political. At another, it's just three or four people arguing about what they believe.

And don't forget...

0. A single paper has roughly as much chance of being wrong as of being right, even without methodological issues. Which all research has.

But also...

-1. The power pose thing told people something they wanted to hear. Piltdown man and cold fusion did too. And that recent thing with random cells + lemon juice -> stem cells.

The lemon juice -> stem cells thing: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/01/29/26817101...

And a critique: https://researchtheheadlines.org/2014/02/10/how-not-to-repor...

True, I referred to the description in the popular press. :-)

On the other hand, the more nuanced versions appeared breathlessly in all of the scientific news outlets I frequented at the time it was published. As a complete non-biologist, it definitely sounded too good to be true; I was unsurprised when it was retracted a few months later, even without knowing all the antics involved.

The fact that the presenter is a beautiful, well dressed woman speaking at a commercial venue certainly helped this get popular.

TED is here to make a buck...

Bingo. The fact this is one of the two most popular TED talks says volumes about TED, and how to interpret TED vis-a-vis the broader scientific community.

>The fact that the presenter is a beautiful, well dressed woman speaking at a commercial venue certainly helped this get popular.

imagine if additionally such a woman also had heavyweights like Kissinger, Shultz and future DOD secretary on the board of her enterprise... It could have easily get into like almost 10B valuation.

This is something other commenters picked up on - but the tragedy of this is that in the current scientific climate, doing good, unglamorous solid science has nowhere near the payoff than coming up with feel-good theories and then marketing the shit out of them.

Peter Thiel said that: "the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast" - and that's exactly right. Cuddy is a terrible scientist, but she's a fantastic communicator, an engaging speaker, and a great 'seller'.

How do we fix this? Brian Nosek is doing some absolutely fantastic work on this, and I hope it picks up more traction, but I'd like to see the ecosystem around scientific communication seriously revamped. There are a few publications (the Economist and the Atlantic come to mind) that have excellent scientific writers, but things like TED or Malcom Gladwell's books are a blight upon science.

Marketing has always won out over knowledge. It just took a bit of time for that sort of thing to catch up here. And I doubt that marketing through news publications is going to fix that. Human systems slowly accumulate entropy and eventually have to rebuilt from scratch. I don't think human systems can self-repair. There is too much vested interest from various parties to allow that to happen in human systems. And usually when that happens some other group that's doing the work better, say China, out competes the systems which are broken. I don't know if China suffers the same problem, they probably do. But whatever, this sort of behavior creates opportunity for others to move in that do the work better.

This article seems like it should have been flagged as part of political detox week, as it's promoting more emotional than useful discussions.

I do think your first sentence has some truth, but I wouldn't use Thiel as a reference as it just seems to be an appeal to emotion.

Is there any evidence backing up Thiel's assertion? It sounds like romanticizing the past and idealizing eccentricity. It's also begging the question that eccentric/idiosyncratic people make the best scientists.

I don't think I should have said 'that's exactly right' - I should have said 'that's partially right'. The funding climate right now is very competitive, and the ability to obtain funds is more important than it's ever been.

For another example, here is Peter Higgs (the guy who developed the theory that predicted the boson) discussing modern science: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-.... As far as quantitative data about trends in scientific funding - we have lots of data showing that the funding climate is the worse it's ever been, but I wouldn't even know how to quantitatively prove that being 'strategic' is more important now than it was in the past.

Think this is a shift across all disciplines of the social sciencse, where numerous results are not reproducible. Economics especially has a rash of issues (probably like psychology) because experimentation is performed on a sample of population of undergrad students who get paid for their time.

As a side ntoe, John Oliver does a great segment on how mainstream media miscommunicates scientific results

"Fiske says she’s received emails from distraught researchers whose careers and sense of well-being have been harmed and from young researchers who fear that they, too, will fall victim to the "destructo-critics." Some, she says, are leaving the field rather than face such hostility."

Good, data massagers leaving the field, their feelings be damned, is exactly what is needed.

One of the most popular TED talks ever turned out to be popsci bullshit wrapped up in some feel-good narrative? Imagine that.

Perhaps this will cast doubt on the veracity of other TED talks now.

I'd rather call Power Posing a bad idea that went big.

It's not a terrible hypothesis. The fact that it doesn't replicate doesn't make it a bad idea to have had in the first place - only one that didn't stand up to (further) investigation.

It was a reasonable idea and worth testing, but I think we should start the criticism a step earlier than replication. There were a lot of issues with the original study, both methodological failures (testing saliva after giving rewards) and academic ones (the admitted p-hacking).

This was a worthwhile experiment that would never have reached initial publication if held to existing best practices.

Worth mention other similar bad ideas gone big:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/09/16/ten-famous-psychology-f...

Meta: I submitted this yesterday, even with the exact same alteration of the original title.

The url that I submitted, however, ended with a different number (238544).

So my question is: Why are web sites doing this? Is this so that they can be resubmitted to sites like HN (do other sites have these similar rules)? I might have a clue if my link no longer worked, but it does.

The URL path is the same, but they've added a query parameter with /238544?key=... to the submitted URL.

The query parameter may or may not do anything, it depends on the site, so presumably it's just ignored and was attached to allow it to be resubmitted.

With that said, HN does allow resubmitting the same URL multiple times with some wiggle room around the last time it was submitted.

The ?key is part of the email tracker- I get mine emailed to my inbox and presumably OP does too. But the /238544 looks like a landing page. It's some sort of route- presumably for tracking- but when you leave the number off you get a 404 (I try to strip anything superfluous before posting).

Without the key in the URL, I only get "This content is available exclusively to Chronicle subscribers", no article. Your submission probably didn't get much traction because nobody could read it.

Thank you! So some sites use a key even from third-party sites to keep content from being shared. I knew sometimes we can get in through Google if it's paywalled, but I didn't know that other sites used a key.

Don't know about this specific site, but many sites do that for traceability, so they can disseminate slightly different URLs in different campaigns and see which got more traction.

The original TED talk is still worth watching. Amy Cuddy is a strong communicator and lessons on public speaking can be learned from that.

As for the efficacy (or not) of the "power pose", it might be worth considering that for some people it may have a psychological placebo effect.

That is to say: Perhaps if a person believes strongly enough that doing a thing will make them more confident, then that person's confidence will be improved by doing that thing.

Yes, but the replication studies showed that although people did feel more confident, nothing changed in their actions or in the actions of others toward them. So, the question is, what is all this newfound confidence good for, if the result of the meeting is going to be the same?

Good point. Perhaps people just "feel better" (i.e. experience less regret) with the decisions/actions they would have taken anyway, if they believe they have taken those decisions/actions with the benefit of some special knowledge/technique.

That's what I concluded as well - placebo effect. Which we know can be a powerful factor (excuse the pun) and is the bane of all researchers.

The whole "power poser" fiasco is a huge warning sign that science is well on the way to total failure. The problem is that scientists don't learn on their own, they are taught by other scientists what is acceptable or not. When the teachers are corrupted all the students follow and nobody knows anymore what is science.

The really worrying thing is that Cuddy and Fiske believe that they are doing science. They are amoral, not immoral.

TED used to be on top of my watching list, until I realised it's just another marketing channel, when ev promoted Twitter on stage. (I have nothing against ev, and it was a smart/successful marketing move)

Except "power poses" do work. I experience a marked increase in my energy and confidence when taking a "power pose".

Moreover, the "power pose effect" is a subset of the general experience that posture changes mood. The opposite effect can also be observed. Try exaggeratedly slouching. It produces a near-immediate decrease in energy and confidence.

Perhaps hormone levels do not change, but the subjective difference is (for me at least) undeniable.

Take it for granted for a moment that posture affects mood. In that case, how do we interpret a failure to reproduce? Could it be a case that they were not testing exactly what they thought they were testing, but that the folk-knowledge of posture is still correct?

> "After the book tour was over, one of Cuddy’s co-authors, who had been silent on the topic of power poses for years, unexpectedly weighed in. Dana Carney posted a 1,000-word statement on her website saying, in unambiguous language, that she no longer believed in power poses. (...) She tore into her own methodology, calling the sample size "tiny" and noting that the effects are "small and barely there in some cases."

Interesting taking some long, like waiting for a book-selling-tour end up, to then say that you don't believe anymore in what you've studied, and that you have reasons (and not just a felling) to dismiss your research.

If you want people to admit their mistakes instead of stonewalling or slowly walking them back, then your first reaction to someone doing so should probably be praise. Maybe she's a venal person like you're insinuating, but I don't know, and most of us reading this don't know either. As a programmer I know I make mistakes all the time, big and small. We're very lucky to get so much relatively clear feedback.

Yes, you're right. I can't say there was malice, nor was my intention. Just a bad timing, perhaps, or even that retreat just occurred because the book got attention.

I think you are being very unfair to the co-author, who wasn't co-author of the book, mind you.

The big discussion on this research also happened partly because of the book tour, so I see no reason to suspect malice for the public denouncing happening in the wake of the idea becoming popular among the general public

Here's a link to the statement: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/pdf_my%20positi...

No surprise here.

Social Science != Science.

Social Science == Talking about what feels "right".

I bet there's a spectrum, even within 'science'. Some social science is rather empirically oriented, like demography.

Others are less so, which doesn't make them any less useful, like frontier thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis

And on top of all that, empiricism isn't the only method for discovering truth!

Social science is extremely complex and difficult to measure. It's not as simple as, say, chemistry, where you know the number of protons and electrons and can easily calculate the energy in reactions.

We may simply lack the apparatus to fully comprehend social science. Neural networks as they stand might be the key, but they could also be a mere stepping stone, such as how Aristotle's belief of the world being formed by a handful of basic "elements" was a sufficient and necessary bridge to our contemporary understanding of the atomic and subatomic universe.

It's probably not a good idea to take social science findings too seriously, but that doesn't make it bunk science. Just...imprecise.

> that doesn't make it bunk science. Just...imprecise.

The bunk level of a field that claims to be a science can be determined from its predictive power. The predictive power of almost any social science is very, very low.

There is a lot we don't know about why people behave the way that they do.

Even if one's findings turn out to be wrong, that doesn't dismiss the necessity to study the unknown. Would you have given up on space travel after the first few rockets exploded on the launchpad?

Ironically, my parent post is being heavily downvoted for stating this opinion.

There's a difference between trying to create a scientific field and pretending you already have one.

Wouldn't the process still just be 'science' though even if the results are forthcoming?

>And on top of all that, empiricism isn't the only method for discovering truth!

What other method is there? Studying a rabbit's entrails?

The deductive reasoning used, for example, in geometry has done quite well for humanity . . .

That's very sensitive to the quality of the starting axioms, though...

It's very easy to shine a light at a glass prism and get a repeatable result.

It's much harder when dealing with humans, many confounding variables and what is a relatively nascent science.

Doesn't mean it's not science though.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, nor classic flamewar topics (which this is).

Changing your pose affecting the chemistry of your body made little sense to me. Not surprising it can't be replicated.

You seem to be endorsing a heuristic that things which don't make sense to you are false.

That seems obviously wrong to me. But I'm probably misreading your intention, so what are you trying to say?

> That seems obviously wrong to me.

What were you using to arrive at that conclusion? :P

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