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Re:Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech by majormajor on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @01:56PM (#28224790)
There's a big, important difference between "fake fraudulent findings" and "not-replicable findings." The latter suggests problems stemming from a big nasty complicated poorly-understood world, and can be improved with introspection and change over time. The first step is the greatly increased discussion over it now than in the past - we're discovering the size of the problem. The next step will be to do things with that. Publishing negative results, getting everyone to have a better understanding of prob/stat... I think those are the directions to go in.

If, on the other hand, you just dumped all those psychology researchers out of the academic environment and sent them to marketing and advertising companies... are we better off?

Re:Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech by TapWaterBandit on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @08:04PM (#28228785)
> If, on the other hand, you just dumped all those psychology researchers out of the academic environment and sent them to marketing and advertising companies... are we better off?

Honestly? Very possibly.

The reason is that regardless of your opinion of marketing/advertising (mine is not overly positive while acknowledging that informing consumers of new products etc is a worthwhile endeavour broadly speaking) at least if the psychology researchers were trying to implement whatever their pet theory is in a company the market will quite quickly let them know whether or not it is horseshit. Markets have faults of course but at least if the psychological theories were implemented at companies you could reasonably easily tell if they were effective or not simply based on do they increase sales etc. If they turn out to be nonsense, this acts as a signal to the individual as well as others that this avenue of study is not worth further exploration.

Whereas Academia can often act as an artificial greenhouse environment for theories/hypotheses that won't survive contact with the real world but seem quite successful in the artificial environment.