The amount of armchair criticism of this sort of thing always surprises me.
There's literature on the the number of response options and it basically says:
People respond quicker with binary options.
You lose information though. People get pissed there's no nuance available (no "maybe" for example). They refuse to answer because they can't say anything other than thumbs up or thumbs down.
As you increase the number of options, your ability to predict increases. Predict the same thing later, predict other things, etc. It stabilizes though.
It does take longer for people to respond, but then they complain about what "slightly agree" means.
Regardless, though, you can ask people to do it, and if they just do it, you can predict from it.
Even when you let people omit responses and refuse to respond, you can model that refusal to see what it predicts and then use their refusal anyway.
You can model how people use the response options in different ways, and in general it doesn't matter too much.
You can even eliminate rating scales altogether and use entirely different systems (forced-choice between different statements), but those don't actually work much better either.
Yes, you can always respond in a cheeky, subversive,or manipulative way, but then that's an entirely different issue altogether. You can always do that, and all you've shown is that you're smarter than a rating scale?
As for the original article... these criticisms have been made for decades. Decades. These are my general impressions:
1. The problem of western focus in behavioral sciences is a problem of western focus in the sciences period. Many behavioral scientists would love to do research across multiple sites but cannot afford to do so. And this doesn't stop all sorts of other biomedical research from being done on very narrowly defined groups of people (or animals).
2. Effects observed in undergrads generalize a lot more than the author is letting on, and effects observed in western populations generalize even more. I'm not saying it's not important to study things cross-culturally, only that the idea that people are fundamentally different in different settings is itself flawed. Many things have been examined across different cultural settings, and the differences are not all that dramatically different. In fact, in one recent replicability study, the effect of culture/sociogeographic population was one thing that didn't seem to matter that much. Some studies replicated and others didn't, but the sociogeographic setting didn't seem to matter very much.
I agree that being more sensitive to human variation is critical, but like a lot of things with behavior, there's a lot of grey areas, which people don't like to hear.
There are whole fields within psychology and the behavioral sciences devoted to these issues. People have put a ton of effort into studying them, considering all the issues being raised here as well as many others to numerous to count, and it's like all that work gets brushed aside like snow in the wind because of random blog posts and anecdotal experience.
And yet it's not uncommon to see job postings here on HN from time to time at pretty well-positioned places where it's basically stated in the ad that they won't consider you unless you're from an Ivy League institution or someplace equivalent like MIT.
I completely agree with you that you can get fantastic educations in a number of places.
But I think part of the problem is how much of a walled garden there is associated with these elite institutions in terms of top positions.
Tech isn't the only place this happens either.
I've become convinced that part of the source of our inequality in the US is hypercredentialing. That is, your abilities and skillset are equated with your degree. You're not that competent if you didn't go to an elite college, you can't do task X unless you have this very specific degree in Y, etc. and so forth and so on. It's rampant and affects all sorts of realms, from unemployment to licensing laws.
Eh. I was a tenured professor who recently left my position because I got tired of the mind-numbing cacophany that academics has become.
However...
I think people may be reading into this too much, and overlooking the more obvious problem this points to, which is the typical IRB system in a university setting. The real scandal here is probably not anything about grievance studies or its pushback, but how it's even possible that the IRB can function in this way. Because, as someone who has seen all sorts of IRB investigations and feedback and discussions, this to me looks more like typical IRB behavior than anything about grievance study politics.
To me this looks like a simple case where the IRB saw something about this study and decided that it was unreviewed human subjects study, and that as such, the investigator should be investigated. I've seen stuff like this before, and it has nothing to do with broader university politics, it's everything about Kafkaesque IRBs that now oversee every nanometer of university research.
People seem to assume that IRBs are rational, and that the only reason this could be occurring is because the IRB is being leveraged to punish this professor for politically unpopular views. This could be possible, but to me this action is totally expectable given the IRBs I've seen. They're mindless, bureaucratic institutions that approach everything from a robotic literal interpretation of every guideline, with little to no regard for actual scientific ethics per se.
I agree. I use and like LaTex but also use other things as well and am a bit surprised something better hasn't come along.
My overall sense is that the underlying reason for this is that supporting math in typesetting is an extremely difficult problem, much more so than people realize. Most typefaces don't come anywhere near being adequate for math, and those that are functionally ok are often really not very good aesthetically speaking. The equation typesetting can also be really difficult, in terms of "under the hood" implementation issues as well as the specification of standards. etc. etc. etc.
As a result, it's not so much LaTeX is good, as much as it is that it's been around for so long, and the domain is so much of a slog, that it's hard to develop something better.
I think a lot of people have a limited vision of what things could be like, and tend to base impressions on limited experiences with alternatives. The proprietary nature of Word does create problems in sharing written documents sometimes; the "black box" nature of WYSIWYG programs in general can be infuriating when you need to be careful with typesetting equations. On the other hand, constantly having every typesetting detail in your face with most LaTeX implementations can be intrusive and leads to "forest for tree" problems sometimes.
There are lots of beautiful texts typeset in LaTeX. But there's also a lot of LaTeX documents out there containing correctly typeset equations that are nonetheless really unpleasant to read or look at, for visual design reasons.
The amount of armchair criticism of this sort of thing always surprises me.
There's literature on the the number of response options and it basically says:
People respond quicker with binary options.
You lose information though. People get pissed there's no nuance available (no "maybe" for example). They refuse to answer because they can't say anything other than thumbs up or thumbs down.
As you increase the number of options, your ability to predict increases. Predict the same thing later, predict other things, etc. It stabilizes though.
It does take longer for people to respond, but then they complain about what "slightly agree" means.
Regardless, though, you can ask people to do it, and if they just do it, you can predict from it.
Even when you let people omit responses and refuse to respond, you can model that refusal to see what it predicts and then use their refusal anyway.
You can model how people use the response options in different ways, and in general it doesn't matter too much.
You can even eliminate rating scales altogether and use entirely different systems (forced-choice between different statements), but those don't actually work much better either.
Yes, you can always respond in a cheeky, subversive,or manipulative way, but then that's an entirely different issue altogether. You can always do that, and all you've shown is that you're smarter than a rating scale?
As for the original article... these criticisms have been made for decades. Decades. These are my general impressions:
1. The problem of western focus in behavioral sciences is a problem of western focus in the sciences period. Many behavioral scientists would love to do research across multiple sites but cannot afford to do so. And this doesn't stop all sorts of other biomedical research from being done on very narrowly defined groups of people (or animals).
2. Effects observed in undergrads generalize a lot more than the author is letting on, and effects observed in western populations generalize even more. I'm not saying it's not important to study things cross-culturally, only that the idea that people are fundamentally different in different settings is itself flawed. Many things have been examined across different cultural settings, and the differences are not all that dramatically different. In fact, in one recent replicability study, the effect of culture/sociogeographic population was one thing that didn't seem to matter that much. Some studies replicated and others didn't, but the sociogeographic setting didn't seem to matter very much.
I agree that being more sensitive to human variation is critical, but like a lot of things with behavior, there's a lot of grey areas, which people don't like to hear.
There are whole fields within psychology and the behavioral sciences devoted to these issues. People have put a ton of effort into studying them, considering all the issues being raised here as well as many others to numerous to count, and it's like all that work gets brushed aside like snow in the wind because of random blog posts and anecdotal experience.