What’s most weird to me is the idea that living in a city that had a massive earthquake that caused tremendous loss of life and destruction of communities would somehow be the same thing as sitting on an inflatable pillow. Who thinks that?
What’s most weird to me is the idea that living in a city that had a massive earthquake that caused tremendous loss of life and destruction of communities would somehow be the same thing as sitting on an inflatable pillow. Who thinks that?
When “formal” hypothesis testing spread amongst social scientist (which unavoidably resulted in a non-sequitur-fest, as they had no training or experience with epistemology or logic), for some reason they thought that the time spent on creating a hypothesis should never exceed 3.27 seconds. Probably comes from the popular media depiction of Einstein, where you see a lightbulb lighting up over his head, and BAM, relativity.
“Probably comes from the popular media depiction of Einstein, where you see a lightbulb lighting up over his head, and BAM, relativity.”
Did you spend more than 3.27 seconds creating that hypothesis? ;-)
well, it is a social priming hypothesis after all
It seems to me that there is still a lot of psychoanalytically-inspired thinking in psychology (despite the fact that “scientific” psychologists totally reject Freud, although arguably it took Popper fire them to do so, and now Popper seems to have been discarded as he also asks a number of awkward questions of psychologists). When you reason like a psychoanalyst, there’s very little need to take into account the relative magnitudes of two events; what’s important is that you can draw an analogy between them. After that the reader’s cultural upbringing (most Westerners alive today grew up with memes of mental health and human functioning based on psychoanalysis) fills in the gaps, aided by what Dale Barr calls the Innuendo Machine.
“My hobby” (in the sense of xkcd) is finding cases of psychologists themselves actually behaving in classically Freudian ways. It’s quite amusing to notice such events, which are not uncommon. (No, of course I don’t believe in Freud, but if you approach him as an excellent writer of convincing fiction, he has a lot of truth to tell us, kind of like Shakespeare.)
+1
And I quote from Andrew’s post of a few days ago:
“…..unfalsifiable theories such as Freudian psychology and rational choice theory have been central to our understanding of much of the social world…..”
http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/17/gathering-of-philosophers-and-physicists-unaware-of-modern-reconciliation-of-bayes-and-popper/
Also:
“In social science we’ve forever been in the unavoidable position of theorizing without sharp confirmation or falsification”
To me that sort of thing has gone a bit too far these days. Lot of this stuff is akin to an eccentric, misinformed Op Ed masquerading as “Science”.
“Who thinks that?”
Inflatable pillow salesmen. I met one who promised the pillow would rock my world.
@Elin
You are being to harsh. I can attest thst sitting on a bathtub with a wobbling rubber duck evokes a tsunami.
In fairness, the authors were interested in physical instability, which is inarguably present in both instances (though in very different forms and degrees, to be sure).