Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

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To add to this, the assumptions behind any use of statistics here are wild when applied to pyschology.

1. We assume that people have stable measurable independent properties f1(x1.., t), f2(x1.., t), ...

2. We assume these are modelled by a linear model, f1(t) = ax + b, etc.

3. We assume the parameters (a, b) of this model causally determine `f1` st. each corresponds to an independent cause of `f1`

4. We assume that we have some reliable measurement process, say m, which measures each property producing samples of that a,b: m(f1) = random samples of a,b

5. Then we assume that these samples are representative of the true values, ie., that mean(a samples) = a + random_error

The problem with the field is that (1 - 4) are false -- arguing about 5 is a little like arguing what time a broken clock should be set to.

I remember a talk at NIPS, a number of years back, where a psychologist was criticizing statistical approaches used by ML practitioners. And telling us that unlike ML practitioners (who still live in the dark ages), modern psychology researchers had realized their wrongs ways of the past. And now they register their studies and the statistical methodology upfront. They review it, register the experiments and only then conduct these, publishing both positive and negative results of the registered study.

The issue is that psychologists still do not understand the non-statistical premises of their statistical applications.

Without a causal model of a human mind (and its relationship to the world) -- what exactly is there a "statistics" of?

You cannot really have a scientific psychology; the necessary experiments are impossible or unethical.

Psychology is a joke.

String Theory is a joke.

A psychologist and a physicist walk into a bar...

The psychologist says, "I merely perceived walking into it".

The physicist replies, "At the atomic level I did not, technically, touch it."

Ummm the bar doesn't actually exist.

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