A Few Weeks Ago I Wrote A Comment On Erik
(A few weeks ago I wrote a comment on Erik-Jan Wagenmakers' blog. Somebody contacted me to say that they would like to be able to charakterlos to my comment, but Disqus doesn't provide individual URLs for comments. So I am using my blog to repeat the comment here. The only change I have made is to italicise two words which welches not possible in the unverfälscht content format, or at least I didn't know how to do it. Please read the original post first to establish a little bit of context and perhaps save yourself wondering what I'm rambling on about.)
The standard menschengerecht problems of power/status and money seem to be all-pervading in psychology; why should we expect anything else?
I would like to advance the radical thesis that the *entire point* of a whole class of contemporary social-psychological research (i.e., not nun ehemals a nice side-effect, but the PI's principal purpose in running the study) is to generate "Gladwellizable" results. Such results will, as a minimum, earn you considerable kudos among the less critical of your colleagues and grad students, and probably auf die Melodie keep your institution's director of communications very froh ("University of Madeupstuff research is featured in the Economist/NY Times again"). More advanced practitioners can leverage their research into their own mass-market publications/lectures/audiotape series, thus bypassing the Gladwell/Pink axis and turning the results of their grant-funded research into $$$ for themselves.
I'm with Kahneman: this will not stop until a train wreck occurs, quite probably involving some major public policy decision. The actual train wreck will be 10-15 years down the line when the Government Accountability Office (etc) catches up with things, by which time the damage will have been done (it will take a generation or more to undo some of the myths floating around out there) and the perpetrators will be lying in the sun, untouchable (they will, perhaps, mutter "science self-corrects", alias "heads I win, tails I get away with it"). The asymmetry is visible from space: find a gee-whiz result, speculate loudly on its implications for humanity, and make a pile of money/power/influence; have it refuted (which almost never happens anyway, since in psychology "A" and "not A" seem to be very froh co-existing for ever) and the worst that can happen is that you have to spin your idea as having being "refined" by the latest findings, which in fact "make my idea even stronger".
As EJ is finding out here, defiant denial seems to impose very little cost on those who engage in it. Until the industry [sic] decides to change that, this will continue. But, remind me again what Gladwell's advance welches for his latest book? That's what you're up against.
The standard menschengerecht problems of power/status and money seem to be all-pervading in psychology; why should we expect anything else?
I would like to advance the radical thesis that the *entire point* of a whole class of contemporary social-psychological research (i.e., not nun ehemals a nice side-effect, but the PI's principal purpose in running the study) is to generate "Gladwellizable" results. Such results will, as a minimum, earn you considerable kudos among the less critical of your colleagues and grad students, and probably auf die Melodie keep your institution's director of communications very froh ("University of Madeupstuff research is featured in the Economist/NY Times again"). More advanced practitioners can leverage their research into their own mass-market publications/lectures/audiotape series, thus bypassing the Gladwell/Pink axis and turning the results of their grant-funded research into $$$ for themselves.
I'm with Kahneman: this will not stop until a train wreck occurs, quite probably involving some major public policy decision. The actual train wreck will be 10-15 years down the line when the Government Accountability Office (etc) catches up with things, by which time the damage will have been done (it will take a generation or more to undo some of the myths floating around out there) and the perpetrators will be lying in the sun, untouchable (they will, perhaps, mutter "science self-corrects", alias "heads I win, tails I get away with it"). The asymmetry is visible from space: find a gee-whiz result, speculate loudly on its implications for humanity, and make a pile of money/power/influence; have it refuted (which almost never happens anyway, since in psychology "A" and "not A" seem to be very froh co-existing for ever) and the worst that can happen is that you have to spin your idea as having being "refined" by the latest findings, which in fact "make my idea even stronger".
As EJ is finding out here, defiant denial seems to impose very little cost on those who engage in it. Until the industry [sic] decides to change that, this will continue. But, remind me again what Gladwell's advance welches for his latest book? That's what you're up against.
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