Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Sure fire way to make it to the top of psychology / sociology academia:

1) Go to Ivy school, get your phd, make all the key connections

2) Find something that makes intuitive sense to a highly educated person, and create a test that you claim measures it. Even better if it’s really fuzzy, like “ego depletion”. For example, call it “mood enhancement”. This is if your mood is elevated. The test would ask 20 questions about your current mood, like “Do I feel happy” and “I feel above-normal positive emotions”. These 20 questions will use 1 to 5 scale and provide a 100 point outcome.

3) Use your connections to get people in the academic industry to start promoting it and using it. Publish a paper showing what baseline is.

4) Now is your time to strike. Start making experiments that you anticipate would modify someone’s mood, like giving them a glass of wine before the test, or having them call their mother. Do control and experimental and see the boost to “mood enhancement”.

5) Publish paper after paper on your amazing discoveries of how to boost “mood enhancement”. Get others to cite your publications and make a cottage industry of “mood enhancement” research experts. More people, more papers, more funding - and you started it all with the key genesis “mood enhancement” paper!

6) Write books, go on NPR as a guest speaker, give speeches. You have quantified mood and determined how to boost it. “My research shows that a 7.2 percent increase in mood occurs when you call your mother before a big company presentation. It’s science!” You are now a public figure and can get tenure and big corporate speech bucks. The world has been forever changed by your mood enhancing research!

Despite its length, this comment is a shallow dismissal in the sense that the site guidelines ask you not to post here: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Elongating an extra cynical rant does not count as teaching us something, so please don't post like this to HN. If what you're writing is based on knowledge or experience, please share your knowledge or experience directly. If it isn't, please post elsewhere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am indeed throwing stones at the entire academic discipline of psychology and sociology. I see your point but I am curious in the counterpoints in replies, given the massive edifice that has been constructed on taxpayer dollars and has been shown to have absolutely no basis in reality with further pre-registered studies. I can link to many articles about this crisis if you are unaware

I’m happy to not reply to your provocation.

It's impossible to make a counterpoint, because you don't actually make a clear point other than "its all rubbish"

Truly a tone deaf reply. I understood the point they were making.

"It's all rubbish" is a very clear point, and it might very well be true.

Given that the placebo effect is a well-documented meta-effect, to what degree can we suggest that any particular weak psychological effect is real and not placebo? This is not rhetorical; to what degree do you believe that psychology even exists as a reasonable experimental science? The main lesson of these meta-analyses and examinations of statistics is that we cannot trust our minds to be honest.

Your failure to be cynical in the face of ever-mounting evidence is a clear sign that you are failing to show the skepticism demanded of sincere scientists. From [0] linked upthread:

> This means, presumably after about Jan 1st 2025 utilizing willpower will increase the available resources to utilize in willpower tasks. This in turn will require us to hold back from utilizing our willpower in order to prevent exponential amplification in a loop… However, holding back from utilizing willpower itself requires willpower, leading to actually super-exponential ego growth. Shortly after midnight Jan 1 2025 all humans will vanish in a blinding flash of pure ego.

Clearly something is wrong here; clearly ego depletion, as described by the literature of psychology, does not exist. (Or I am about to write a lot of code in the next few years!)

The thread-starter you are criticizing was obliquely referring to several well-known failures of the psychologist community: power poses [1], priming [2], and more beliefs about food than you knew you ever held [3].

As somebody elsewhere says, the point is indeed that perhaps it's all rubbish. Do you have a coherent reason to believe, or is it something taken on faith?

[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/19/break-out-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing

[2] https://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psycho...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink

My comment was not about psychology studies. It was about bad posts to Hacker News.

Then I feel that you're engaging in a double standard. The thread-starter and I both have a critique of the social construction of psychology, and your response is that the direction of the critique is "shallow" and "extra cynical". However, only the thread-starter and I have given anything of substance, and y'all have not really refuted any of it.

It's disappointing when a site is supposed to promote curiosity and yet its moderators are not only uninformed but actively incurious. You have a pattern of policing folks' tones under the auspices of poor content, but it doesn't hold up well when you post two-sentence dismissals to hundreds of words worth of original, sincere, considered thought. It makes you come across as lacking in empathy and insight.

This ain't the first time you've shown this attitude, for what it's worth. I am picking up on a pattern.

It's clear that "this mood enhancement research" has some value. So what is the problem? That we should aim higher? What could be done better to compared to the story you describe?

>It's clear that "this mood enhancement research" has some value.

Only in the same sense that the fad diet industry has "some value". It makes people careers and money. Actual value in the field would be to discover truths about people's psychology.

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