posted on February 14, 2023 05:48 PM by
u/ritterteufeltod
63
u/Considerable-Girth68 pointsat 1676400313.000000
There may be value to being “unprimed” before an experiment, but not
before publishing. AFAIK most of what Aella is doing is getting her simpy
followers to take surveys, then doing “data science” and someone is
paying her 104460104460$ for this. But at the end of the day, I think
most of this is still just “look at me, I’m talking about sex! but this
time with numbers!!!” Aella is the halo effect personified.
It's the kind of thing though that comes from those 'critical thinking' bromides that fall apart when you actually try to start understanding the world.
Like the reason people think that 'I can tolerate anything except the outgroup' says anything at all is that conflating systemic oppression with 'tribalism' is common in our culture so most people implicitly beleive it already.
"I know everything about what I'm talking about, and I'm proud to be ignorant of those special considerations that others have found about my own research!!!"
Reviewing the literature is critical actually! Anyone worth their salt cares about the state of research in their fields. Disdaining scholars talking about the state of research is absolutely sneerworthy.
Well if you believe science exists in the vacuum of a perfectly rational universe, and your study simply taps into that universe and extracts it’s essence without interference, than sure, don’t bother with the previous literature. Of course, only a non-scientist would proceed with those assumptions. Then again, that’s what we’re talking about here.
It seems like at the very best case scenario you end up repeating work and more importantly repeating *mistakes* that previous researchers ran into. Replication is important but in most fields more complex than ball-going-down-a-hill physics it's really important not to natively repeat the same exact experiment with the same biases and predictable issues.
Also, I've always considered the broader scientific community's modern approach to consent admirable even if it is occasionally excessive. Yes you can probably assume that someone taking an online survey for a given purpose consents to their survey data being used for that purpose, but I definitely trust the people who ask anyways more than those who don't.
It's not a personal preference! It's part of actually being a serious scholar.
If someone shows up and starts talking about my field of historical research and doesn't at least include indirect references to the current scholarly consensus I would take them less seriously.
Like this reminds me of me complaining at age 17, about learning about historiography.
>You can't prove unequivocally that the existing literature processes made any progress on things like the replication crisis.
And why is it that you think the burden of proof should fall that way? Not only do you demand to be proven wrong, but "unequivocally" so?
Given the larger context of Rationalists disdaining actually knowing stuff and continuously reinventing the wheel (only less functional and also racist) it feels pretty sneerworthy to me?
Like literature reviews by actual sexologists and psychologists and other researchers may or may not improve their results. But Aella et al. noping out of them absolutely enables her and other Rationalists to just ignore actual scholarship in the fields they blunder into and make fools of themselves again and again.
>But Aella et al. noping out of them absolutely enables her and other Rationalists to just ignore actual scholarship in the fields they blunder into and make fools of themselves again and again.
(applause)
Like I can kind of tell you are talking about academic publishing but the Rationalists here are a classic case of silcon valley raging against some crappy system and trying to replace it with something worse.
>You understand that actual literature review for getting published in journals didn't really get started until the 1950s or so, right?
i don't know what fields you work in or are referring to, but in the ones I work in this is not true. understanding & showing that you understand the state of the field has always been critical. in fact one of the surprising things about e.g., philosophy as a discipline is how rich the reference apparatus is among figures who can sometimes seem like isolated islands if known just through summary, but aren't at all--even the very big names are constantly referring to both very contemporary work and the longer histories.
and i mean going back as far as you care to go back. philosophy is a "series of footnotes to Plato," as Whitehead said... and yet Plato himself is a series of footnotes to so many others around and before him.
There is always background information it's helpful to know when reading a paper, and a literature review helps you understand how these results fit into our broader understanding of the field.
If you take it in a very narrow sense of "it's silly to mandate a specific checkbox for consent in an online survey which consists entirely of checking boxes anyway", eh, I guess. In the followup tweets she goes on to expand that she considers ethics review boards "actively ridiculous" which is less innocuous. But then again, it's the kind of thing that seems like an annoying obstacle until you learn how things have previously gone wrong, and in her point 1 she declares she'd rather not.
I don't have a strong opinion of it TBH but I think there are Reasons why in psychology especially consent is required to be super specific. So not a sneer but I don't want to agree with her.
It's a trivial procedural quibble that, if included purposefully, is there to distract from point 1 which is the real thrust of the tweet. #1 is far more stupid/controversial
And the entire post is there to distract from the fact that she isn't doing any academic research. A lot of senior researchers in their fields don't summarise the state of existing research because the targeted audience is usually also other senior researchers. For example, serious papers in fluid dynamics won't spend time discussing how to derive the Euler equations. Rather they will just cite the preliminary results from which their paper is either inspired or is drawing upon.
Of course, this criteria extends to most subfields in STEM, and I would guess that this remains true in the humanities department.
This distraction is very good to use because it makes people gloss over the real question, "What exactly are your academic accomplishments which makes you confident that we want to know your thoughts on practices in academic research?"
But it is good that she want people to gloss over that because the answer to that would be [embarrassing.](https://knowingless.com/about/)
I think it's definitely a symptom of the greater erosion of privacy in the US in the last three decades that "let's have accountability for ethical use of survey data" is somehow a controversial take. Like, there's a reason we have privacy and ethics standards—*not least of which* is that if your participants don't trust that you'll keep their answers private, *they might lie to you and fuck up your data*. For crying out loud.
There may be value to being “unprimed” before an experiment, but not before publishing. AFAIK most of what Aella is doing is getting her simpy followers to take surveys, then doing “data science” and someone is paying her 104460104460$ for this. But at the end of the day, I think most of this is still just “look at me, I’m talking about sex! but this time with numbers!!!” Aella is the halo effect personified.
Aella prefers to be “unprimed”… and other jaw-dropping statements you really can’t believe someone would actually make
either an idiot, or a pro grifter
LOL, of course she doesn’t believe in informed consent!
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I don’t actually disagree with her second point…