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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

best option is to just assume every psychology/social sciences article is bullshit, pretty much all of the most famous studies have failed to replicate. And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades

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Indeed, the book The Quick Fix goes over exactly this point. For example, did you know that the Superman pose had no scientific evidence whatsoever? The researcher simply pushed for it because it made her feel good. The grit study by Angela Duckworth is similarly faulty, the cadet training camp she went to had a pass rate of over 90% so the ones who didn't pass weren't in a statistically significant group to show whether their grittiness actually meant anything to them failing or passing.

Here's some incontrovertible evidence of the effectiveness of the Superman position.

https://youtu.be/99K4gpJZWdw

So... I do think the superman position is effective, but I don't think a single video without any auditing is considered "incontrovertible evidence"

I think you missed the joke of the video.

I heard this is so effective, they had to ban it to keep the sport safe and fair.

If everyone can do it, isnt it fair?

It's like steroids in baseball. Anybody could do it so in that sense it may be fair, but it's unfair to all the players who aren't utterly reckless and short sighted.

Examples of 'failed-to-replicate-but-used-to-justify'?

Read the book The Quick Fix, which has many examples.

> And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades

Can you clarify where you beleive trillions were spent as a result of bogus social research?

Probably tough for psych research, but trivially easy for biomedical research, which has one or two orders of magnitude more money involved.

HN loves to critique psych research without understanding that once you're above chemistry in the complexity hierarchy, these problems are everywhere.

I think the best thing is to do more research to understand more rather than rejecting the scientific method entirely. It has and will continue to get better and better over time, with occasional regressions that may seem meaningful in the short term but are tiny blips when you zoom out. The history of science is one false theory being replaced by another that’s (usually) marginally closer to the truth.

So someone does a single dubious research, and we follow with 3 more dubious researches to justify the first research. For each of these 3 dubious researches we have to do 3 more to ensure their credibility. And the number of researches grows exponentially while the research quality doesn't improve at all.

peer review only really took off in the last few decades and it has been a disaster. Nothing about my post says anything about the scientific method, it's about sham fields that lack rigor and use cartels of influence to push each others pet theories to support their own ideologies.

Well this is somewhat ironic, but “citation needed” on that first statement.

simplest is a visualization of the term usage - https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-art-of-academic-peer-review...

but looking at the criticism and history sections of the wikipedia page will cover it in more detail. It basically promotes gatekeeping and group think, as seen with the Alzheimer's research issue which wasted billions of dollars and slowed progress by decades via effectively an academic cartel. Funding becoming tied to publication which relies on peer review made things worse

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

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