Fantastic Anachronism

I wasn't actually talking about the training, I was talking about the concept of unconscious bias. So, keep reading. The implicit association test is what it's all based on but it doesn't have any test/retest reliability. You can test someone and it'll tell you they're a raging racist without even knowing it, and if you test them again 10 minutes later it'll tell you the opposite. It's junk science which is why unconscious bias training doesn't do anything - the problem it claims to be solving isn't real.

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#fn149596345917

"The original IAT paper is worth revisiting. You only really need to read page 1475. The construct validity evidence is laughable. The whole thing is based on N=26 and they find no significant correlation between the IAT and explicit measures of racism. But that's OK, Greenwald says, because the IAT is meant to find secret racists ("reveal explicitly disavowed prejudice")! The question of why a null correlation between implicit and explicit racial attitudes is to be expected is left as an exercise to the reader. The correlation between two racial IATs (male and female names) is .46 and they conveniently forget to mention the comically low test-retest reliability. That's all you need for 13k citations and a consulting industry selling implicit bias to the government for millions of dollars."

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-20587-001

"IATs were poor predictors…

I want to be as optimistic as you, I do. At the moment I'm not though. My perception of things like the push for replication or pre-registration is not as a one-way ratchet towards progress, however slow moving, but more like pushing down on a blob of mercury. The problems aren't actually solved but simply get moved around by an academic community that deep down doesn't want to improve, only to create enough of an appearance of improving to dispel criticism.

For example, there was a big push to give people access to the raw data. Researchers were made to sign data availability statements. The appearance of improvement was created. Then one day someone decided to test if these statements meant anything and discovered they did not; compliance was extremely low [1].

This seems to be how it goes. After over a decade of noise about P-hacking and low replicability in the social sciences, estimated replicability of studies has hardly changed, nor has statistical power improved much [2].

And these are the subtle problems that people don't mind talking about because the problems are sufficiently opaque enough that the general public doesn't pay much attention. During COVID we saw just how deep and serious bad science can get. Climatology isn't better. P-hacking is an irrelevant concern if you aren't even comparing your hypothesis to actual data to begin with (c.f. computational epidemiology), or if your response to a hypothesis/data mismatch is to edit the data (c.f. surface…

A score on a test doesn't imply enough for you to actually have things in common. (However, just being in a secret club might motivate you enough to find some things to talk about.)

You can get the Mensa experience without joining by having a Quora account - their AI always picks the oddest topics to send to you. For the longest time it would send me all the "what's it like to have a high IQ?" questions and I noticed 1. it wasn't really like anything, and 2. I didn't want to hang out with the people answering them.

You could also read rationalist-associated blogs, several of which are written by people who if you leave them alone for ten minutes try to reinvent eugenics.

e.g. I was linked this one yesterday: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/
and there is like no self-reflection on the concept that maybe optimizing babies for "IQ" will not get you what you want, and that maybe Singapore is not actually genetically better or worse than other places, and neither was John von Neumann.

“In a study of over 28,000 students in Switzerland, 62% of economics students gave money at least once to help students in need, compared with 69% of non-economics students. These differences were already present before the students took a single economics course: students with lower giving rates were drawn to economics. As freshmen, before their first lectures, 71% of the students who chose economics contributed, compared with 75% of non-economists.”

That’s...not a significant finding by any means.

Secondly, I would take these psychological studies with truckloads of salt. In what is possibly the most damning indictment of the social sciences: they have among the lowest replication rate of any of the sciences, and even after retraction (due to replication failure), the vast majority of positive citations continue after retraction, specifically in the social sciences: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/

There's a lot of hack pseudo-scholarship going on in universities, almost all on the political left. Just yesterday there was this article on HN:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#There-Are-No-Journals-With-Strict-Quality-Standards

And that doesn't include the various grievance studies, nor, epidemiology, which turns out to be absolutely full of hack papers that cherry pick their sources, abuse citations, make absurd assumptions and then bury them in appendices, etc etc. If Dr Fauci has been replaced (didn't know that) then that's certainly just fine given the overall level of intellectual rigour and integrity in the field. You could use a bunch of laymen and get more trustworthy output.

The problem you're decrying is the proliferation of pseudo-science in general, it's not a political problem.

Signal processing may be unusual, but it's generally not true that professors know which papers are likely to replicate or not:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#or-Maybe-They-Don-39-t

"studies that replicate are cited at the same rate as studies that do not"

Confidence is eroded in all papers by this sort of thing, because academic structures are the same across fields. Whilst individual fields or labs may be more rigorous than others, people can't be expected to keep a massive database in their heads of which fields are good and bad. To be able to generalize about quality requires institutions that create quality, but universities don't do this. And because universities dominate "science" or at least the public discussion of it, that lack of quality control reflects on all science.