If tomorrow, they say "growth mindset" is also a non-replicable phenomenon, will HN be full of smug people saying "I knew it all along, lol!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...
>Biostatisticians Jager and Leek criticized the model as being based on justifiable but arbitrary assumptions rather than empirical data, and did an investigation of their own which calculated that the false positive rate in biomedical studies was estimated to be around 14%, not over 50% as Ioannidis asserted.
Combine that with people upgrading uncertainty to certainty post-hoc when debunking comes out and you have these entertaining things. Overall, I’m glad you called it out. Once I wished I had a profile for people’s past guesses to see how actually good they are and now I have Manifold, Kalshi, and Polymarket.
The weak version is something like: "Even talented people need to work on improving themselves, if they want to be successful." Most people would agree with this.
The strong version is something like: "If people believe that there is such a thing as talent, they automatically stop working on improving themselves." This is used to justify things like: "never tell your kids that they are talented or intelligent, you must attribute all their success to their hard work". In my opinion, this is a false dilemma: there can be things like talent or intelligence, and hard work can be necessary to succeed among those who are comparably talented or intelligent.
This seems like something that could (does) also apply to "stereotype threat."
It was entirely reasonable to be skeptical of stereotype thread when the concept was new, a priori, An "unsurprising" result is not necessarily one that someone confidently believed. If I flip a coin, I'm not "surprised" when the result is heads, nor when the result is tails.
Of course people may also adopt it as a personal philosophy, but that's separate.
I will be one of them! Many people I've met in the industry—disturbingly, especially among founders and VCs—are extremely susceptible to reductive theories about the human experience that have little relation to reality. Just in the last year we went through "founder mode" hell even though any person that this "founder mode" describes should probably be in prison for wildly abusive behavior.
Of course the flip-side of this is that there are concepts that are situationally useful even if they aren't broadly applicable. Both "stereotype threat" and "founder mode" may fall into this category. (I've never heard of "growth mindset" before and looking it up I'm not sure what the point of it is—I guess to contradict the idea that people and personalities are static?)
Let this be a lesson: even if something seems like science and it confirms you bias - that doesn't mean it is true. You should look closer at things you embrace than things you reject lest you embrace a lie.
If “crackpots” turn out to be right when “reasonable people” and “science” were wrong—and this is far from the only instance of this happening—maybe we should reevaluate some things.
Just because a peer reviewed paper published in a prestigious journal says something doesn’t mean it’s true. Even a survey of multiple peer reviewed papers published over time isn’t necessarily determinative if there are common methodological issues or publishing biases. Yes, a lot of times actual crackpots will make stupid criticisms, but not every criticism is stupid even if it comes from outside the ivory tower.
In particular, whether or not a big rock falls faster than a small rock [1] is a fairly basic question in physics, which has one of the most certain answers. Virtually nothing in psychology, let alone human social psychology, is at that level of certainty, and any psychologist worth their salt will agree with that. Basically any finding in psychology should have a level of certainty somewhere between “yeah, that’s probably mostly true” and “hmm, interesting hypothesis that’s not entirely crazy, I wonder if it holds up”.
[1] Also, the literal question of whether a big rock or a small rock falls faster is trickier than you might assume if you only know the middle school version of the question. If we’re doing this on the moon, so as to dispose with the tricky aerodynamic questions, and we are answering the question from the frame of reference of an astronaut standing on the surface of the moon, the bigger rock actually does fall faster. Both rocks accelerate towards the center of the moon at the same rate, yes, but gravity works both ways. Both rocks pull on the moon but the bigger rock pulls harder, resulting in an extremely small torque on the lunar surface, drawing the side of the moon closer to it very slightly upwards. Which, from the surface frame of reference, is equivalent to the bigger rock falling faster.