Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Jason Smith — How do you know if you're researching in bad faith? A handy checklist.


10 points checklist.

If you don't follow it, then you either don't know what  you are doing as a scientist, or you are pushing an agenda and not disclosing it, or you are fooling yourself.

Compare Richard Feynman:
 The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. —  adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 343
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.  "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 342
All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however. For example there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell.
Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science. — "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345

7 comments:

Noah Way said...

#1 You are paid to provide a specific result.

André said...

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory."

Well, we know for sure that economics doesn't work like this. Economists keep their reputation even when their models are proven completely wrong. Why? I don't have a clue...

Tom Hickey said...

Well, we know for sure that economics doesn't work like this

Economics is not science. In Feynman's terms it is "cargo-cult science." Aka "pseudoscience."

Noah Way said...

Somebody should rename the site.

Mike Norman's Cargo-Cult?

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Between cargo cult, farce, and fraud
Comment on Jason Smith on ‘How do you know if you’re researching in bad faith?’

Economists claim to do science but obviously lack any deeper understanding. Feynman put is thus: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”#1

What is missing is a proper understanding of what science is all about. The goal of theoretical economics is the true theory: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

Economists do not have the true theory. The original methodological blunder of economics is given with the Walrasian microfoundations: “HC1 economic agents have preferences over outcomes; HC2 agents individually optimize subject to constraints; HC3 agent choice is manifest in interrelated markets; HC4 agents have full relevant knowledge; HC5 observable outcomes are coordinated, and must be discussed with reference to equilibrium states.” (Weintraub)

Methodologically, these premises are forever unacceptable. It should be pretty obvious that the Walrasian axiom set contains THREE NONENTITIES: (i) constrained optimization (HC2), (ii) rational expectations (HC4), (iii) equilibrium (HC5). Every model that contains a nonentity is A PRIORI false. Its proper place is the waste basket.

Because it is built on vacuous axioms, economics is a cargo cult science since 140+ years. As far as economists have not realized this economics is a farce. As far as economists have realized it but are telling the general public that they are doing science economics is a fraud.

Jason Smith’s own blog is simply a bad cargo cultic joke.#2

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 See ‘Cargo cult science’ on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
see also Tavares ‘The Farce That Is Economics: Richard Feynman On The Social Sciences’
www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-18/farce-economics-richard-feynman-social-sciences

#2 See thread ‘The key to macro and Keen’s debt-employment model’
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/02/the-key-to-macro-and-keens-debt.html

MRW said...

AXEC / E.K-H, have you read Paul Davidson's latest book or watched his talks on youtube about axioms. Gave a one-hour lunch talk to econ students at the Univ of Chicago and kept muttering under his breath how uneducated they were.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

MRW

You say: “[Paul Davidson] Gave a one-hour lunch talk to econ students at the Univ of Chicago and kept muttering under his breath how uneducated they were.”

Heterodox economists are always right telling the students at the Univ of Chicago that they are proto-scientific morons. But the problem of heterodox economists in general and Paul Davidson in particular is that Post Keynesianism, too, is axiomatically false.#1

The point to grasp is that economics needs a paradigm shift from false Walrasian microfoundations and false Keynesian macrofoundations to true macrofoundations.#2

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 See ‘Why Post Keynesianism Is Not Yet a Science’
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1966438

#2 See ‘If it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics’
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/02/if-it-isnt-macro-axiomatized-it-isnt.html