The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014)

theguardian.com

46 pointsJun815 comments

From the article it felt like nobody had called BS because they didn't understand the math at all, not because they were afraid of their careers or something. It is extremely rare that a researcher tries to debunk an article because they realise they don't understand differential mathematics.

This is actually almost a bigger problem! Being scared of debunking others can be somewhat easily corrected if there's enough will, but if the bulk of psychology researchers don't understand enough mathematics to design unbiased studies and interpret data, the results are random at best.

But debunking aside, why would a paper allow such amazingly precise claims (5 significant digits, and a precise ratio on "happy thoughts"?!?!) without having independent mathematicians review it?

Because the social sciences are not sciences and many (not all) of its practitioners, especially academics, have science envy.

(I say that as someone who got an undergraduate degree in the humanities, so I don't look down on them).

The sad thing is that if psychology were considered a research discipline in the way physics was 500 years ago, it could still help people! Up through the era of Newton and the Royal Society physics didn't even a specialized name -- it was still observational ("butterfly-collecting"); theories were mostly simple and non-predictive. That didn't mean the people were dumb, they were simply busy building the foundations of an edifice without any blueprints.

A few years ago I read a bunch of Sanskrit & Arabic mathematics papers from about 500-1500 BCE. None of them contained a proof; they were essays and (in particular the Baghdad ones) collections of observations. But they did eventually help lead to a field of mathematics. There is no shame in that -- there is glory.

My impression is that psychology is bankrupt as an academic pursuit. They have no axioms. Neuroscience is getting results and appears poised to eclipse psychology completely.

The original article:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/pdf/nihm...

Browns debunking:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clea...

There doesn't even seem to be much of any math in it. Rather they collect some data on the one hand, use this set of differential equations describing some random system on the other hand, and then combine the two and look at what the system does, yielding the magic number.

That seems as sensible as normalizing my "feelings" onto a scale and putting that into a Nest as the room temperature input.

(Edit: I see the PDFs are also referenced in the article. I'll keep them here for easy access and anyone else who has learned to ignore links on newspaper sites for they rarely lead to anywhere except that newspaper)

"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

This quote being so prominent in the support says a lot. Assuming she even meant Celsius, there's nothing special about the freezing point of water at an arbitrary location's pressure, and 0C isn't even that number because of measurement error.

This speaks volumes to the entrenched interests in the so called academic-industrial complex. No insider, or very few, are willing to speak up against questionable claims and shoddy research. Making a mockery of academic rigor. As he said, you realistically have to have no skin in the game in order to be able call out questionable conclusions. To do so while having skin in the game quickly arrives at career suicide.

> "Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

Statements like this are why science types look down so much on the softer studies. And perhaps why Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel in economics, despite being one of the best and most breakthrough psychologists in recent times. (His pop sci treatment of his and Tversky's seminal "Heuristics and Biases" came out a couple years ago, "Thinking Fast and Slow". If Heuristics and Biases is too long/dry/boring, read the pop sci version, as it's the best model (that I've heard of) for how human brains actually think.)

This also impacts public policy and health. If psychologists are so unscientific and not rigorous, they'll get the wrong results at best. And at worst, the field will just be manipulated for political reasons. Also, it gives people and excuse to not take psychology seriously. Hell, some people still refer to Freud reverently. (Sadly, the author of "Flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi seems to fall into this category and I'm sad to see he supported the nonsense in this article.)

There's great book called "How to Think Straight About Psychology" and I wish more psychologists would read it (it's a great general read, and the 9th edition is cheap). An interesting note on it is that a lot of the book is just basic critical thinking, rationality, basic science. The fact this needed to be pointed out specifically for psychology seems a bit unsettling. But perhaps that just reflects on people overall - if psychologists, who are supposed to be scientists, are so far off mark, how much worse the general public?

I hope Nick Brown signs up for an economics class next.

Perhaps an army of Mr Browns (and Ms Browns) organised through a well designed Web site somewhat akin to the typical open source project bug-tracker?

There are plenty of un(der)employed skeptics around with spare time.

Do you mean crowd-sourcing an army of skeptics in the way of Mathematicians?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project

"There was Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who with Seligman is seen as the co-founder of the modern positive psychology movement;"

I recollect that Csikszentmihalyi's book is based on introspection and quotations of experience rather than any attempt at statistical analysis or modelling by differential equations. I suspect many here will recognise the experience of 'flow state' and may accept it as a phenomenon worthy of investigation. The OA seems to me to describe a bad case of 'premature mathematicalisation'.

Mathematical talent is so useful, and so few have it. I hope genetic interventions will help in this next century.

It's true that it's useful but its the same mathematical talent that was (ab|mis)used by Losada, according to the article. What was useful here was Brown's scepticism, borne by him being an amateur(having no bread to lose over it).

Here's to those brave enough to whistle in the church of science! Even if, in this case, the science in question avoids the scientific method like the plague.

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