Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities.

The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basically rode that to success in her professional and public life.[1]

All of this came crashing down when no one could replicate her experiments. It’s absolutely incredible that things got this far in science, or at least the soft sciences. Shameful

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Cuddy

View on HN

Things don't always work out this way though. If you publish a scientific paper that reports an interesting result, it can permanently help your career even if it is later proved to be wrong. It just needs to be believed for about 10 years or so - you'll extract most of the career advancement possible from the paper during that time. When the paper is debunked, as long as there is no evidence of fraud, you'll still have tenure, you'll still be the PI on projects you have started after the paper, you'll still have your network of collaborators who won't shun you if it looks like you made an honest mistake years ago.

I've seen the above happen, and it can be caused by a perverse fact one of my mentors told me in grad school: "Bad data almost always looks interesting." Cold fusion started out as bad data, and looked very interesting. Those faster-than-light neutrinos that were in the news several years ago were bad data. When I was a kid in the 1960s, there were numerous reports of exoplanet detections - all were bad data. Etc.

>It’s absolutely incredible that things got this far in science, or at least the soft sciences.

In 1996, a physics professor submitted a nonsense paper saying that reality doesn't exist and gravity is a social construct. The reviewers didn't understand the paper, but published it anyway since it had all the right political buzzwords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

There are more subtle variations on this that still affect the harder sciences.

A topic closer to home for most of us might be benchmarking. It is terribly difficult to construct an honest A/B comparison between two different algorithms, especially when the person doing the testing designed B themselves.

It's usually easy to get benchmark results that are reproducible within 10% or so, though often people don't bother. With careful work you may be able to get benchmarks reproducible to 9 significant figures. See SUPERCOP for an example.

Now, your reproducible results may or may not be fair, but that's an issue further down the line.

Somewhat interestingly, the rat-studying scientist Feynman refers to in the linked piece discussed body postures in animals to some degree in [1] back in the 1940s. No mention of Power Posing directly but it's just a curious coincidence. Maybe it means something! (Just kidding)

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026431919&vi...

If measurable chemical changes fall under soft sciences, is there any hard science at all? By this definition, chemistry, physics, and biology are all soft sciences.

Yes, but how do you measure posturing? And if you can't (in an objective way) then the claimed cause/correlation doesn't hold up.

no one could replicate her experiments

... basically rode that to success in her professional and public life

Looks like the experiment has been successfully implemented in real life.

what about the facial feedback hypothesis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_feedback_hypothesis

Basically, the act of physically smiling may influence the emotion (usually it's the other way around)

Studying Statistics has ruined every "psychology" article out there.

I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community.

People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" scientific research (and vice-versa).

Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer. Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or some such.

You tell that to the geometers.

A lot of applied math -- especially modeling -- is pretty freaking fuzzy.

I use "soft" to mean that the measurements are more subjective, contextual, or open to interpetation.

Chemical changes are "hard", but "power pose" and "improvements to your abilities" may be "soft".

Soft sciences are characterized by an inability to conduct controlled experiments. It's impossible to quantify all the independent variables so researchers guess or make assumptions.

I wouldn't take this too seriously. Theoretically mathematics is also a "soft science" or no science at all depending on the science theoretical background of the person you talk to (science is only experiments with data, empirical stuff...you know, following the scientific method).

I have since developed a very soft criterion for what I call science. Roughly...stuff that advances our understanding of the world and is conducted in a rigorous way.

They're called soft because the standards are very low when compared to the harder sciences, and it's basically impossible to do perfect controls or replications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com