Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipsa | Hacker News Reader

Like said by the other poster, long-term priming is not proven nor disproven: Science needs better and more experiments. So we don't yet scientifically know enough about long-term priming to make a judgment on its effects. Short-term priming is well-established and has real measurable effects though. The prominent priming studies you refer to are the "exotic" studies -- these looked at less defined aspects of priming, and were found to be lacking.

> Amidst the recent furor over failures to replicate some empirical results on behavior priming, it is important to emphasize that some basic behavior-priming effects are real, robust, and easily replicable even if others are much more problematic.

For instance, your reply contains too many words starting with "p" and "pr" for it to be a mere coincidence :). (syntactical priming is something that authors or editors have to guard against, as it can make for poor quality writing).

View on HN

The prior for priming effects as strong as those claimed by psychology is, obviously, extremely low. After all, the only reason everybody knows about priming is that it got lots of press coverage, because it was surprising and unexpected. Now that we know the evidence for it is very weak, we can just go back to our original prior for it, which was very low.

In general this is true for almost all popular psychology results. They're all popular because they're surprising, which is what makes them interesting. And now we are learning that such surprises were only produced in the first place because the evidence for them was p-hacked. It turns out that there are no tiny hacks that radically change human behavior, beyond placebo effect.

I'm sure that psychology produces some real results, but whatever they are, they aren't what get reported in the New York Times, or TED talks, or bestselling pop science books.

> Like said by the other poster, long-term priming is not proven nor disproven:

If there is no evidence for it, there is little reason to be concerned about it at this point given how much research has gone into it.

Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. You could put the Bayesian prior to be extremely low, but a zero chance would not make you a Bayesian anymore, it would make you a believer in that something is simply not possible (and no amount of scientific evidence would update your priors. It really is scientifically a mistake to claim: There exist no black swans. To proof that, one would have to observe all of existence. Now... should you worry about black swans, when all you see is white swans? Depends on you and the amount of risk managing. But that poster claimed all of priming is non-scientific, when we have clear replicated proof.

Suppose I run a fake investment company that pretends to double your money, but actually just steals it. Suppose you find out all my claims are lies, and demand your money back. How would you react if I said "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. The prior probability of my investment strategy working is nonzero. Now give me more money."

Just pointing out that priors can't be zero isn't a principled stance, it's Pascal's mugging. You can use it to justify literally anything.

>Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence.

No shit. But at this point it’s pretty safe to not waste money building anti-aircraft guns to shoot down flying reindeer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com