Would that be reliable? As you make cautionary tales of researcher biases. How do you know that looking through the garbage bin to find the good looking nitbits is not just cherry picking the few of the thousands that seemed to work without serious problems? But does that mean it is a viable theory still, or that you did a good job in noise mining for false positives?
Agreed. When crossing the road do I look both ways because of TMT, or because of my knowing that not doing so would be stupid. Taking something to the level of a dread fear of death confuses the proximal with the distal.
I think researchers should just leave theories at the sideline when so much of it is crap that looking for the good stuff is like finding a needle in a very large haystack. It either means that the theory is crap and is strongly biased due to strong publication bias and QRPs or it means that the theory is so tenuous that it is dependent on very strickt and specific criteria that it can't be all that useful in reality. One often returning critique of researchers defending their pet theories is that they defend until their deathbed and will always find excuses to move the goalpost. How do you know that you are not doing the same? What is more likely to be humility? That you can accept that 1 in 1000 studies is good enough that you can think the theory is still viable or that you can accept that it likely is a strong researcher allegiance effect and confirmation bias and that this theory should be largely abandoned so that it's resources can be used somewhere else which could be more useful?
Very interesting insight for this layperson into the subtleties of teasing out a reliable conclusion from an inherently imperfect set of data and analyses.
You don’t hear anything about the Meaning Maintenance Model especially relative to TMT. I’d like to hear more!
I have this pet concept of ‘socially maintained cosmic obliviousness’ which is pretty self-explanatory but basically means we almost never acknowledge or talk about the reality of our mysterious, uncanny and relatively recent situation here as strange animals on this watery ball of rock zipping through the lonely vastness of space.
Would that be reliable? As you make cautionary tales of researcher biases. How do you know that looking through the garbage bin to find the good looking nitbits is not just cherry picking the few of the thousands that seemed to work without serious problems? But does that mean it is a viable theory still, or that you did a good job in noise mining for false positives?
Agreed. When crossing the road do I look both ways because of TMT, or because of my knowing that not doing so would be stupid. Taking something to the level of a dread fear of death confuses the proximal with the distal.
This is good news! Because of Inzlicht's judgment of TMT, I put a cautionary note at the beginning of my article on the subject, but now I think I can take it off. Should I? And I can go on believing that a man will sit further away from a woman if he has seen one of her tampons, a weird TMT finding that I discuss. https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/terror-and-human-weirdness?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I think researchers should just leave theories at the sideline when so much of it is crap that looking for the good stuff is like finding a needle in a very large haystack. It either means that the theory is crap and is strongly biased due to strong publication bias and QRPs or it means that the theory is so tenuous that it is dependent on very strickt and specific criteria that it can't be all that useful in reality. One often returning critique of researchers defending their pet theories is that they defend until their deathbed and will always find excuses to move the goalpost. How do you know that you are not doing the same? What is more likely to be humility? That you can accept that 1 in 1000 studies is good enough that you can think the theory is still viable or that you can accept that it likely is a strong researcher allegiance effect and confirmation bias and that this theory should be largely abandoned so that it's resources can be used somewhere else which could be more useful?
Very interesting insight for this layperson into the subtleties of teasing out a reliable conclusion from an inherently imperfect set of data and analyses.
You don’t hear anything about the Meaning Maintenance Model especially relative to TMT. I’d like to hear more!
If I may, here is Steven Heine describing MMM. Just started listening but I can tell it will be edifying…
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/people-who-read-people-a-behavior-and-psychology-podcast/id1432369172?i=1000582096045
I was a big fan of Steve's Meaning Maintenance Model back in the day!
I have this pet concept of ‘socially maintained cosmic obliviousness’ which is pretty self-explanatory but basically means we almost never acknowledge or talk about the reality of our mysterious, uncanny and relatively recent situation here as strange animals on this watery ball of rock zipping through the lonely vastness of space.
I wonder if the MMM helps explain why.