Arjun Khemani

Norgard

Brett Hall

Moritz Wallawitsch

Carlos De la Guardia

Aaron Stupple

Jay Topp

Tom Howard

Nivi

David Kedmey

Dawn

Logan Chipkin

 Basically, what we were supposed to do for the assignment was to 

 study retention of information by using recall and recognition tests.

 Our sample size was just 10 people, 5 boys 

 and 5 girls, and we'd go to them individually

 and test if they are better able to recall or better able to 

 recognize some 15 odd 5-letter words that were concrete nouns.

 So, just describing the method of going about the testing for the individual participants,

 for the recall test, we would go and show them 15 five-letter words, each individually

 word for one second, and after all the 15

 cards were shown, the participant had to, was given a piece of paper, and that participant

 had to write as many words as they could remember on that piece of paper.

 And after a two-minute interval, the researcher would begin the second test, and this was 

 the recognition test, where we would give the participant a document with some words typed in.

 All the previously shown words to them were included, plus some other new words.

 So their task was to mark the words that 

 they had read earlier in the recall test.

 And after they had finished, they had to sign 

 and return the document back to the experimenter.

 After this, we would tally the number of correctly recalled words on the recall test

 and the number of correctly recognized words on the recognition test.

 Then the data was to be tabulated and a summary written.

 And after results were tabulated, the researcher would turn to the exact 

 hypothesis which was already provided in the instructions document and we 

 check whether the results aligned with the hypothesis or contradicted it.

 If the results were supported by the hypothesis, the researcher just states the theory, and if 

 results contradict the hypothesis, the researcher would give appropriate reasons for such a conflict.

 Now, I thought that this entire research that we had to do was 

 trivial, and fundamentally flawed, and so that's why I didn't do it.

 Instead, I wrote a criticism to the research that we were 

 supposed to do and summarized my criticism in the following chits.

 Firstly, psychology is the discipline to understand how the mind 

 works, and we want to find out the reason why people behave and why they 

 have certain ideas that they hold in their minds, which make them behave 

 the way they do, so that we can understand and predict human behavior.

 But unfortunately, this is not something that we were doing in this project.

 What we're doing here is going to an insignificant sample size and collecting data

 which has got to be riddled with confounding variables, though by using the results of such

 a petty nature of testing and data collection we somehow fulfill the aim of the experiment

 which is to study the broad general concept of 

 retention of information in the memory of human brains.

 So, how is one to control the variables here, right?

 Does it make a difference what time of the day the experiment is being done?

 Does it matter? So, like a bigger variable is the words, right?

 We're using five-letter words, what if we use four-letter or six-letter words,

 and we're using concrete nouns, but would it matter if that changes?

 What if the subjects are given a list of proper nouns,

 maybe Harry Potter character names to remember?

 There are a lot of questions, and each of them valid and important, that precisely 

 boil down to the absence of an underlying explanatory theory and explanatory framework.

 We don't have an explanation for whether or not we have 

 better recall as to recognition, so we want to know why.

 Why is it that it is the way it is, and 

 if it is the right way to be looking at it?

 And so without having this explanatory framework, what is even being tested here?

 With bigger sample sizes established phenomena like the primacy 

 and the recency effects are observed from similar recall tests and

 The idea is like the greater accuracy of recall of words

 is early and late in a list of words as such

 But these observed effects don't explain anything. They don't explain that people are better

 able to recall the first and last words in a list. Observation cannot be exercised for

 an explanation. And science is not observation based, it is explanation based. Observations

 aren't a source of any kind of knowledge. Their only role is to test theories. Testing

 theories against observation and experiment allows us to criticize them and to create

 an explanation about what goes on in the mind. But without an explanatory framework, it gets

 unclear what you're testing. So what is even being learned here?

 Passing observational and experimental tests is only one of the many things that a 

 has to do in order to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

 Another thing that is trivial to me about this experiment in particular 

 we were supposed to do in school is the absurd sample size, like 10 people.

 It's impossible to conclude a generalized theory based upon a set of 

 observations one makes, and ultimately what one is testing in this project is not a 

 hypothesis based upon whether or not recall is better than recollection in general,

 but what's actually being tested is the specific case of these 10 people.

 And without having an explanation, one cannot possibly generalize from these 

 people to any other individual, let alone the entire population of human beings.

 And so the explanation matters because it helps understand the world, and the same observational 

 evidence can be extrapolated to give completely different predictions according to the explanation one adopts.

 So that's why the explanation matters more than the observation.

 So the fundamental flaw in such kind of study is that it's not generalizable. There's no

 generalizable to people. It's just a set of data and these

 these people and just ten people. And if I were

 to conjecture the results gathered from a single test of a single subject might not

 even apply to the same subject the next 

 time you get to test that person. So there's so

 many variables to be controlled and questions that still 

 arise because of an absence of that underlying explanation.

 So my criticism to this project and the research instructions extended to school as 

 well, and so I wrote stuff about school, which I'll read out to you in the next chit.

 School markets itself as a place where creativity and critical thinking are

 cultivated and are allowed to flourish, but it's really the opposite. Filled

 with irrational ideas about what one is supposed to question and what is not to

 be questioned, implicit in which are bad philosophical doctrines such as

 authoritarianism that keep the system stable at the cost of progress,

 creativity, and questioning of basic ideas, it really is a lie. When kids

 object to learning methods or to classes, they are treated as having behavioral issues.

 It's ironic how hard some people are working on the problem of creating computers that

 can think for themselves, but society sends their kids to school at the same time, explicitly

 wanting them to follow the instructions, making them learn how to think like a machine.

 Well, I had a lot of fun writing this thing and

 If I were just to follow the instructions and 

 write the project as it was supposed to be written

 That pretty that would be pretty boring and mostly mechanical work

 writing definitions and stuff included so I'm glad I did this and

 teacher how she receives it and responds to it

 and yeah it'll be interesting to see the 

 teacher's response. By the way, it should be noted that

 it is widely regarded as extremely unethical to conduct psychological experiments on unwilling

 participants, except apparently when it comes to people in schools held against their will of course.

 Haha, of course. Yeah, I didn't do the project, but most of my classmates, 

 or all of my classmates who did do the project, they had to sit with ten 

 participants and actually make those participants sit with them and do the test.

 But there was reluctance from those participants, so what my 

 classmates did was they essentially just forged the signature of random people.

 They just made up random names that they did. They made the record themselves.

 And so it was like they were seeing the words and writing them, making 

 mistakes regularly, just intentionally so that there's no suspicion by the teacher.

 From an epistemological point of view and the outcome of the experiment and the execution,

 I will point out that I'm married to she 

 has a PhD in public health research and she

 runs these massive studies. In psychology, certainly 

 the collecting of data is actually a lot more of the work.

 So I think people tend to think of it like 

 psychology or studies analysis is about the

 ball game is the process of correcting and

 refining that information appropriately. So if the teacher's 

 intention was for people to learn how to do that, that's probably good.

 your own education in hand and I strongly

 support that. That just crossed my mind.

 And as far as yeah, I don't think these types of psychological things are unethical.

 I think cognitive testing is pretty widespread and non-controversial.

 One of the things they're concerned about is the terrible state of scientific literature. And yet...

 We were doing this kind of outreach project which involved surveying people, 

 but it was very casual, it wasn't set up to be research in the beginning, and as 

 we were doing it, I said to the founder, I said, wow, you know, doing this makes 

 me just absolutely not believe any survey studies, any studies based on surveys.

 It sounds like you weren't doing a survey, but something kind of similar.

 Collecting answers to questions without really understanding the full context of the questions.

 anyway so I was kind of laughing at that and you know you never know what's

 behind survey data you know how the question was presented and as you

 mentioned Arjun you know and they had a full meal 

 over they hungry or you know who knows what was going on

 anyway so I said this to the founder and then you know after we finished our

 little project somebody approached us and wanted us to write this up in a journal

 And everyone was so excited to get their work featured in a journal that the idea that 

 this was, you know, complete bullchit just didn't... didn't seem to mind all of a sudden.

 upgrading your status from getting something published and adopting the

 what the vestments of being a scientist is just so compelling

 arjun i think what you did was incredibly 

 gutsy and i love it and good on you for sticking

 by what you believe and doing something productive about it

 conversation is the topic of public distrust of science and

 psychological studies in general because 

 me when i look at a piece of media like some

 scientific paper that says oh we proved 

 and so and so and so oh this is amazing like

 first thing that comes to mind is all of the um 

 like the podcasts i listen to people who mention

 oh the problem is this the problem with the mice

 and they're not actually like using the right 

 methods and so it brings up up the question of

 who you can trust i guess and that's like 

 an unanswered question that's been on my mind

 recently so i would love to know your thoughts about it

 John thing I've ever heard You're the best man. This is fucking awesome

 There is no single source you can trust, no single person you can trust, no single

 research study that you can trust. The general public can rely on, and this is

 something that we need to preserve, the error-correcting mechanism of science and the scientific community.

 So, it's not like you're taking some scientist's word for it. You're not taking quote-unquote

 scientist's word for it. Believe in science is totally an oxymoron. And I recently read

 a tweet which said, research shows has become the new the Bible says.

 So, any or all of these research studies and any scientific theory, all of our knowledge

 is not confirmed, it is not verified, none of it is infallible.

 They're all prone to error and this doesn't mean that all these things, all this knowledge,

 it doesn't say something about the world, it totally does and that's why science works

 and you poke something and something pops out and yeah, it works but it isn't infallible

 and so, I mean, it's possible that there's a single person who disagrees with an error

 that all of the experts are making and that single 

 person is closer to truth than the senses on that matter.

 But still when push comes to shove, we're not 

 all physicists and we, like the general public,

 generally accepts the expert consensus view on a 

 particular matter and they accept it as a theory.

 It's not that they're believing, like it's not that they're taking science's word for it.

 What they're actually doing is that they are relying on this error correcting mechanism

 that the scientific community has and that we so need to protect.

 And they're relying on that explanation, that theory in their mind,

 and using that knowledge to, you know, kind of just take, adopt that view.

 At least that's what's happening ideally. A lot of people tend to have some

 misconception about what science is and how it works and what it does and what