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Alex Arnold's avatar

The post section "How Much Does a Thought Weigh" makes me think of something from a paper by Tal Yarkoni, "The generalizability crisis" (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20001685). In his conclusion, he writes:

"Closer examination reveals that the inferential statistics reported in psychology articles typically have only a tenuous correspondence to the verbal claims they are intended to support. The overarching conclusion is that many fields of psychology currently operate under a kind of collective self-deception, using a thin sheen of quantitative rigor to mask inferences that remain, at their core, almost entirely qualitative."

Your excursus on the study of leadership is a great riff on Yarkoni's concern. Learning more about how the psychological sausage gets made has made me enormously skeptical of any claimed results from the discipline; the apparent fact that there is no core of understanding makes me wonder further just what the point of psychological science is.

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Mike Hind's avatar

Wild theory, that literally occurred to me 30 seconds ago, so be gentle...

Maybe there is only all this energy fuelling 'hogwash' science of this kind because creeping technocracy creates massive demand for understanding people, so that they can be 'managed'. That, plus marketing.

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