This point is critical. A study can have a good methodology. But if nobody tries to replicate it, you have no chance of finding out that you are missing something critical. And with something as complex as people, "missing something critical" is something that we need to figure out.
And this isn't exactly a new problem for psychology. Feynman somewhat famously questioned a lot of classic research with http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html. I say somewhat famously because people in areas like physics have all read that essay. But in my experience psychologists are a little less inclined to read the criticism.
But with psychology it is even worse. We lump people together by symptom, not by root cause. It is like lumping together people with migraines, head injuries, and caffeine headaches together. Then you find out that coffee beats a placebo for helping headaches, and give them all coffee!
You think I'm exaggerating? Read http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia... for verification that the NIH considers it a high priority research item to come up with classifications based on root causes, so that we have a chance of even being able to do useful research!
Yes, psychology has a lot of well-meaning people, and they stumble across a lot of interesting stuff. But it should be read with a critical eye, because the field as a whole does not perform reliably enough to compel our trust.
> But with psychology it is even worse. We lump people together by symptom, not by root cause. It is like lumping together people with migraines, head injuries, and caffeine headaches together. Then you find out that coffee beats a placebo for helping headaches, and give them all coffee!
This happens (in medicine, not just psychology), and there's definitely room for hypothetical improvement. But in many cases, it's hard to blame people, because there's no way to do better without doing an unknown but gargantuan amount of research. For example, lupus is (or was when I had the discussion with my mother) defined as exhibiting X of a list of Y symptoms, where Y > X. This leads to situations like the following:
1. You, the patient, present with X-1 symptoms of lupus. By definition, you don't have lupus, and treatment for lupus is not warranted.
2. Time passes.
3. You, the patient, come back to your doctor with one additional symptom of lupus. Medical doctrine now states that you have lupus (not so interesting) and that, more interestingly, those X-1 earlier symptoms are symptoms of lupus (which you didn't have when you developed those symptoms), not of some other yet-undiagnosed problem. You can now be treated for lupus.
Obviously, that satisfies no one and is crying out for a more "reality-based" definition. The problem is that no one has a candidate for the actual physical causes of lupus. The best anyone's ever been able to do is recognize that the same set of treatments are broadly effective against a constellation of symptoms, which may seem to be related to each other or not, but which co-occur to some degree in people who respond to these treatments.
Of course it's a high priority to learn what the root causes of symptoms are, but that doesn't mean it's easy or even, in the general case, possible. You have to start somewhere.
Oh no, I'm well aware of those -- but academic computer science is even worse! It's very new to have artifact evaluation at all, meaning almost any published result that represents an evaluation of a system (as opposed to something purely theoretical) is probably bunk. Almost no academic systems are released publicly for evaluation, so reproduction isn't just something that should be done, but isn't -- it's entirely impossible.
This is basically the same as publishing a psych paper with a Methods section including a line that says "and then magic occurs". It's like an unsafe cast in a programming language -- you totally escape the guarantees provided by the wider structure of the academic system.
Academia in general has serious problems. There's a fundamental problem of incentive, and until that's solved, nothing's really going to change. But psychology is definitely unfairly maligned.
(It doesn't help that plenty of people doing doing what's almost psuedoscience are still harbored in a lot of psych departments, but their methods are still more rigorous than HCI research in most cases.)
have a look at what happens to indigenous groups that are given handouts.. massive alcoholism.. obesity.. huge problems.
Those problems are far more complex than you're making them out to be. Besides that, your claim of handouts is simply false. The social assistance given to Status Indians comes with a great deal of stipulations, some of which are extremely harsh such as restrictions on who you can marry. Further complicating the issue are the problems of reservation living conditions, cultural alienation and simple boredom.
Universal Basic Income sidesteps these issues because it doesn't come with any crippling lifestyle restrictions. It's simply a form of income security that benefits all people by raising them out of poverty and reducing the fear and hopelessness associated with unemployment.
Mincome was an experimental Canadian basic income project that was held in Dauphin, Manitoba during the 1970s. The project, funded jointly by the Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government, began with a news release on February 22, 1974, and was closed down in 1979.
The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a guaranteed, unconditional annual income caused disincentive to work for the recipients, and how great such a disincentive would be.
It allowed every family unit to receive a minimum cash benefit. The results showed a modest impact on labor markets, with working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for wives, and five percent for unmarried women.[1] However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary.[2] These decreases in hours worked may be seen as offset by the opportunity cost of more time for family and education. Mothers spent more time rearing newborns, and the educational impacts are regarded as a success. Students in these families showed higher test scores and lower dropout rates. There was also an increase in adults continuing education.[3][4]
A final report was never issued, but Dr. Evelyn Forget (/fɔrˈʒeɪ/) conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011.[4][5] She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse.[6] Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.[7][8]
> people will have to work and improve themselves. the struggle in life is important along with risk taking.
Completely agree. I think the dynamics of getting a basic income when everyone gets the basic income are different than when a subset of people are living off of the work of another subset of people, who don't benefit (in fact, are penalized).
In the scheme I proposed, no one is penalized for success, and no one is penalized for not wanting to participate in capitalism. Society is not penalized because capitalists are out there making additional wealth for themselves.
I really do think the non-initiation of force, the lack of penalties, and the universal equality changes the dynamics of social welfare programs for the better. It's very much like The Incredibles: when everyone is special, no one is.
I firmly believe that a universal basic income won't reduce the struggle in life, it just shifts it from the bottom of Maslow's chart up a level or two or three. I think we can all agree that's a good thing, no matter your political persuasion.
Yes and no. Yes, he could say "I work for AmaGooFaceSoft on a new type of infrastructure product which most companies can't even conceive of but which makes a lot of sense when you have 10,000 engineers and several hundred thousand servers." Then the question is "Oooh ooh what kind of infrastructure product is that?" and the answer will be "Do you remember Map/Reduce or BigTable or Hiphop? It's spiritually similar to those but totally unlike any of them and if I tell you any more my boss will have my guts for garters. Really cool tech though. You'd love to hear about it... if you worked here. Of course, if I told you about it, you'd not understand half of the explanation, since it plugs into four other proprietary systems that you -- as a member of the general public -- will never know about."
That gives anyone looking to employ me an idea of what I've been up to and what skills I bring to the table without giving away the keys to what my previous employer was doing. It may provide some tantalizing hints, but there's pretty much nothing useful there for a competitor to replicate it.
The whole thing is a joke. All of the big tech companies leak like sieves and it hurts nothing. MapReduce? BigTable? GFS? Hardly secrets at the time they were being worked on, not secret at all by the time they were in use, and completely public knowledge very shortly afterwards (not a "better part of a decade" like the comment above talks about). Same is true of virtually every project of note.
The vast majority of these projects wouldn't even help a competitor if you begged them to use it. Heck, a lot of these top secret skunkworks projects end up hurting the companies they're built for. They're unpolished, highly proprietary, and shoved down people's throats. The difference is often just that they're somewhat hidden causing people outside ascribe magic powers to them.
It's no wonder at all why companies foster secrecy. It makes everyone feel special and important. Good for morale and it costs nothing. Still a total load of bs 99% of the time.
I think secrets are like startups: the vast majority of them are worth nothing, but once in a while there will be one that's worth billions, and you usually can't predict which one that will be. So big companies try to keep everything secret just so they have this large portfolio of things they know that their competitors don't.
The vast majority of stuff I've worked on has been quite useless, but some of it has made millions of dollars, and it was very often the stuff that I thought was throwaway code or an interesting diversion that survives. Usually it's little details and not broad areas of work, though.
There may be particular things blind people excel at and do very well with. Use a list of those things as your starting point.
Perhaps software engineering is on that list, but I'd make sure.