Daryl Bem and the Replication Crisis(redux.slate.com)
redux.slate.com
Daryl Bem and the Replication Crisis
https://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html
65 comments
Not "science" but "a science", psychology, which is notoriously problematic with regards to reproducibility.
Perhaps ESP is actually proof that we live in a simulation/hologram. Seeing the future, is somehow tapping into the simulation and being able to on a subconscious level guess at what comes next.
branch prediction, you mean.
Why was this flagged?
Users flagged it. Hard to say why, but it might be because they don't think HN is able to sustain a high-quality discussion about this topic.
Users in this case were probably wrong; this is a straightforward article about the replication crisis, not a story about ESP.
Unfortunately, the title is so bad that the thread is swamped with people who'd rather discuss ESP.
A better title, synthesized from the last graf of the introduction, might be "Daryl Bem, ESP, and the Replication Crisis".
Unfortunately, the title is so bad that the thread is swamped with people who'd rather discuss ESP.
A better title, synthesized from the last graf of the introduction, might be "Daryl Bem, ESP, and the Replication Crisis".
I agree completely but IMO the topic is still too triggery for HN to discuss it without losing it, and a title change may not be enough. We can send the submitter a repost invite, though, with a different title, and see if starting from scratch would help.
When this topic flipped to [flagged] yesterday the top comment thread was the one about racism/sexism. That may have influenced it.
The Slate Star Codex has a good article on the same topic.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...
Has anyone called James Randi yet?
Before invoking that guy, have a glance at this first: http://www.human.cornell.edu/hd/upload/CIWS-module_ESP.pdf
The above is something I quickly found - one of many examples. It doesn't have any hallmarks of quackery that stand out to me. I've always wished Mr Randi would graduate to confronting more formidable scientists in the field, rather than picking on spoon benders[1] and other lunatics. He is a powerful thinker and has some great work behind him, but he's missed some important opportunities to challenge himself.
1. Uri Geller
The above is something I quickly found - one of many examples. It doesn't have any hallmarks of quackery that stand out to me. I've always wished Mr Randi would graduate to confronting more formidable scientists in the field, rather than picking on spoon benders[1] and other lunatics. He is a powerful thinker and has some great work behind him, but he's missed some important opportunities to challenge himself.
1. Uri Geller
The title is clickbait. Bem didn't prove ESP is real. He (unknowingly) manipulated his data.
The article doesn't believe he did either: in fact, the whole premise of the story is the reality of ESP is a nonsense result. This is probably a case where the editors rewrote the title; it's mostly a story about how lack of rigor is sabotaging the social sciences.
If the article agreed with the title, I'd just say it's an uninformed article. In my opinion, the clickbait distinction requires the discrepancy.
The article itself is clearly not clickbait --- it's long-form (more than 5000 words) reported narrative journalism. It's an uncharacteristically deep piece for Slate.
That's why I said the title is clickbait.
Also, it's a misleading title. It has a false statement in it. The false statement is intended to get you to click something.
The quality of the article isn't relevant to my point. My point is just that people will click this link expecting a defense of ESP.
Also, it's a misleading title. It has a false statement in it. The false statement is intended to get you to click something.
The quality of the article isn't relevant to my point. My point is just that people will click this link expecting a defense of ESP.
Oh, sorry! Yeah, we agree.
Daryl did the science perfectly at a standard beyond what most studies do. Well beyond the accepted rigor and burden of proof, he demonstrated that ESP is real. Therefore, the accepted burden of proof is broken.
While you accuse the title of clickbaiting, you seem to agree entirely with it.
While you accuse the title of clickbaiting, you seem to agree entirely with it.
Interesting, can you elaborate or do you have a reference?
This is an entertaining explanation: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episo...
Stopped reading at the line: "A few students—all of them white guys, Wu remembers—would hang around to ask about the research and to probe for flaws in its design. Wu still didn’t believe in ESP, but she found herself defending the experiments to these mansplaining guinea pigs."
Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials but to me it's not okay. This is what a constant focus on "white injustice against minoritys everywhere!!" has done to our society. Casual sexism and racism is totally okay, as long as it's directed against the perpetrators of sexism and racism? Slate / Huffington Post / other outlets are full of this garbage.
Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials but to me it's not okay. This is what a constant focus on "white injustice against minoritys everywhere!!" has done to our society. Casual sexism and racism is totally okay, as long as it's directed against the perpetrators of sexism and racism? Slate / Huffington Post / other outlets are full of this garbage.
> Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials
This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to introduce classic flamewar topics. This sort of ideological ranting is never interesting, never goes anywhere good, and is plainly off-topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to introduce classic flamewar topics. This sort of ideological ranting is never interesting, never goes anywhere good, and is plainly off-topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I recommend this read, "White Fragility": http://www.overcomingracism.org/resources/White-Fragility.pd...
I don't think it's fragility to fight against the slightest racist comments. I think it's the way every race should be. Nobody should have to 'endure' racist speech in the news articles they read, that's the goal any race should be striving to achieve. Just because it's not as bad as other hate speech doesn't mean it's not racist.
[deleted]
Why are these off-topic posts in every submission today, did Mozilla sponsor another outreach?
What's sexist or racist in there? The only thing I see that might qualify is "mansplaining," and it's really mild.
Why is it in the article in the first place?
Why does it matter that Bem is Jewish, or that the people probing for issues in the studies methodology were white men?
Why does it matter that Bem is Jewish, or that the people probing for issues in the studies methodology were white men?
Because details are interesting. Bem being Jewish adds some color. That all the people probing for issues were white men is a really interesting remark. Why would that be the case? Are white men particularly skeptical, or more willing to rock the boat? These are legitimate, interesting questions that we'd lose out on if they had omitted that description.
If they are legitimate and interesting questions, why aren't they probed further? They're throwaways.
In the article, describing Bem as a 'gentle Jewish kid from Denver who didn't care for sports' plays on a racial archetype in order to flesh out a character for the reader, but what does it have to do with his potentially fudging his data and changing the replication requirement in social sciences?
In the article, describing Bem as a 'gentle Jewish kid from Denver who didn't care for sports' plays on a racial archetype in order to flesh out a character for the reader, but what does it have to do with his potentially fudging his data and changing the replication requirement in social sciences?
We could remove every bit of detail that doesn't directly relate to the conclusion of the article, but that would completely change its character. You seem to be applying newspaper standards to an article that doesn't even attempt to conform to those standards.
I am applying the standards of well written and organized thought to it, which should apply here.
What... isn't okay about this? It's a description of the interviewee, you don't have to agree with it.
It is completely out of place in this article and blatantly stereotyping. Just because some situation happens to fit a trendy topic like "mansplaining white males" doesn't mean it has to be explicitly pointed out.
It's not stereotyping to mention that a particular group of people actually predominantly or entirely consists of a certain race or sex.
I'm not a native English speaker, so I had to look it up, but I think I'm using the word correctly:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stereotype#English - A person who is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stereotype#English - A person who is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.
Which requires there to be some set image or type for the person to match. It would be stereotyping if the article was implying that white men are usually mansplaining skeptics or something of that nature. But merely stating the fact that this particularly group was actually all white men isn't stereotyping.
that's actually exactly what stereotyping is. so if you agree with the statement in the article then you must agree with all the other stereotypes out there.
Then you missed the whole point of the article. (SPOILER: The mansplainers were correct).
it's slate, what do you expect. garbage.
Exactly where I stopped too.
Anyone care to give a tl;dr version?
It's about the replication crisis and it's well written so I'd consider reading the whole thing when/if you have the time. Here's a few of the most important parts.
Having served for a time as an associate editor of JPSP, Bem knew his methods would be up to snuff. With about 100 subjects in each experiment, his sample sizes were large. He’d used only the most conventional statistical analyses. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure there were no glitches in the randomization of his stimuli.
Even with all that extra care, Bem would not have dared to send in such a controversial finding had he not been able to replicate the results in his lab, and replicate them again, and then replicate them five more times. His finished paper lists nine separate ministudies of ESP. Eight of those returned the same effect.
...
But for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.
...
These dodgy methods were clearly rife in academic science. A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 university psychologists had found that more than half of those researchers admitted using them. But how badly could they really screw things up? By running 15,000 simulations, Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn showed that a researcher could almost double her false-positive rate (often treated as if it were 5 percent) with just a single, seemingly innocuous manipulation. And if a researcher combined several questionable (but common) research practices—fiddling with the sample size and choosing among dependent variables after the fact, for instance—the false-positive rate might soar to more than 60 percent.
...
That’s more or less Bem’s position. “The critics said that I put psychologists in an uncomfortable position and that they’d have to revise their views of the physical world or their views on research practice,” he told me. “I think both are true. I still believe in psi, but I also think that methods in the field need to be cleaned up.”
Having served for a time as an associate editor of JPSP, Bem knew his methods would be up to snuff. With about 100 subjects in each experiment, his sample sizes were large. He’d used only the most conventional statistical analyses. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure there were no glitches in the randomization of his stimuli.
Even with all that extra care, Bem would not have dared to send in such a controversial finding had he not been able to replicate the results in his lab, and replicate them again, and then replicate them five more times. His finished paper lists nine separate ministudies of ESP. Eight of those returned the same effect.
...
But for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.
...
These dodgy methods were clearly rife in academic science. A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 university psychologists had found that more than half of those researchers admitted using them. But how badly could they really screw things up? By running 15,000 simulations, Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn showed that a researcher could almost double her false-positive rate (often treated as if it were 5 percent) with just a single, seemingly innocuous manipulation. And if a researcher combined several questionable (but common) research practices—fiddling with the sample size and choosing among dependent variables after the fact, for instance—the false-positive rate might soar to more than 60 percent.
...
That’s more or less Bem’s position. “The critics said that I put psychologists in an uncomfortable position and that they’d have to revise their views of the physical world or their views on research practice,” he told me. “I think both are true. I still believe in psi, but I also think that methods in the field need to be cleaned up.”
> If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.
That's... not really difficult to admit.
That's... not really difficult to admit.
It is if you've dedicated your life to academic psychology.
Well written? I stopped reading at "mansplaining guinea pigs."
Anyone who resorts to such tropes can't be taken seriously.
Anyone who resorts to such tropes can't be taken seriously.
Basically, a gentleman appears to have shown high quality scientific studies showing some effect implying the existence of ESP. So either ESP is a real thing, or our metric for scientific reliability is not effective at weeding out fraudulent claims.
However.... it's really quite an enjoyable article to read if you have the time.
However.... it's really quite an enjoyable article to read if you have the time.
Basically the guy has very sound and rigorous methodology, and has achieved higher-than-random-chance results (to the tune of a mere 53% correct guessing based on variables in one experiment involving hidden erotic pictures.)
I suppose claiming ESP is real is like claiming cold fusion is real. You better have some damn good proof because there have been a lot of shoddy claims that didn't hold up in practice. So has this been replicated by outsiders based on his paper?
I personally am extremely skeptical. If we did discover something like ESP is possible, it would be the biggest discovery so far this century. It would open up possible consideration of religion, and all those people who claim to astral travel, could any of that stuff be real? It would be cool and scary. But naw, it's got to be bullshit :-)
I personally am extremely skeptical. If we did discover something like ESP is possible, it would be the biggest discovery so far this century. It would open up possible consideration of religion, and all those people who claim to astral travel, could any of that stuff be real? It would be cool and scary. But naw, it's got to be bullshit :-)
No, he has a methodology that is facially sound but fundamentally unserious: his team explores a gigantic space of possible experiments that would demonstrate an effect and reports only on those that support his claim. As a result, his results don't reliably replicate. He's using heavily biased statistics, just on a higher order.
A particularly excellent work by Dr LeShan is: The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (1974) - The appendix is excellent, if the unabridged version.