I am gobsmacked by the unintentional irony in this post. The claim is that LessWrong is full of smarty-pants researchers who can outperform entire fields because they value statistics and scientific rigor. Yet the post itself is ludicrously unscientific!
- The author acknowledges that they don't provide good evidence for their claim, relying instead on intuition. I mean... come on, man. I don't think the claim is actually true!
- The idea that median researchers are not intelligent enough to understand p-hacking is just absurd: it is not a sophisticated topic. I imagine the median researcher in fact has a robust and cynical understanding of p-hacking because they can do it to their own data. Such a researcher may be cowardly and dishonest, but their intelligence is not the problem. This is the crux of my disagreement with the post: the replication crisis is a social problem, not a cognitive problem.
- They badly misstated the results of that IQ study, ignoring outliers like philosophy and economics which have poor reproducibility. The correlation between IQ and major is much better understood as indicating which undergrads will go on to academia, versus fields like biology and psychology where most students plan to enter the workforce after college. Replicability is incidental. (They also ignored that the study itself is probably not replicable! I believe the root cause of the replication crisis is motivated reasoning and laziness, both of which are certainly on display here.)
In general this post is the combination of undeserved arrogance and jaw-dropping ignorance that I expect from LessWrong. It is a community for narcissistic blowhards.
> The idea that median researchers are not intelligent enough to understand p-hacking is just absurd: it is not a sophisticated topic. I imagine the median researcher in fact has a robust and cynical understanding of p-hacking because they can do it to their own data. Such a researcher may be cowardly and dishonest, but their intelligence is not the problem. This is the crux of my disagreement with the post: the replication crisis is a social problem, not a cognitive problem.
It's 100% pure navel gazing. I didn't realize it was possible to generate that level of purity, but those geniuses at LessWrong managed to overcome the azeotrope maximum!
- The author acknowledges that they don't provide good evidence for their claim, relying instead on intuition. I mean... come on, man. I don't think the claim is actually true!
- The idea that median researchers are not intelligent enough to understand p-hacking is just absurd: it is not a sophisticated topic. I imagine the median researcher in fact has a robust and cynical understanding of p-hacking because they can do it to their own data. Such a researcher may be cowardly and dishonest, but their intelligence is not the problem. This is the crux of my disagreement with the post: the replication crisis is a social problem, not a cognitive problem.
- They badly misstated the results of that IQ study, ignoring outliers like philosophy and economics which have poor reproducibility. The correlation between IQ and major is much better understood as indicating which undergrads will go on to academia, versus fields like biology and psychology where most students plan to enter the workforce after college. Replicability is incidental. (They also ignored that the study itself is probably not replicable! I believe the root cause of the replication crisis is motivated reasoning and laziness, both of which are certainly on display here.)
In general this post is the combination of undeserved arrogance and jaw-dropping ignorance that I expect from LessWrong. It is a community for narcissistic blowhards.