If psychology worked, I would expect marketing firms to use it to make millions of people buy tons of shit that they don't need and that won't make them happy.
Is there any evidence, one way or the other, as to whether marketers draw useful info from academic psychology?
More cheap evidence: marketing textbooks are stuffed full of mainstream psychological results and applications to the business of marketing.
Indeed. Case study of Freud's nephew who basically invented modern PR.
If personality psychology holds water, I would expect dating sites to use it and produce better results than Traditional Romance. Does it? From the outside looking in, it looks like it does.
It would also be useful in selecting dorm room compatibility, which I can tell you from the inside looking out does not work at all or isn't being used. I wouldn't expect it to be used in this context, though. No money in it.
There's interesting thing: Some people managed to acquire a lot of wealth via trading. That would lead you to believe their claims with regards to the methods they use being effective.
However, if you simulate the stock market with identically skilled agents, you obtain basically same wealth distribution as observed in the real world, with some few agents ending up extremely 'rich'. One can imagine that such agents, if they were people, would rationalize their undeserved wealth to feel better about themselves.
I would add to this that having a method would often (but not always) produce a clear "leader in the field" (first-mover advantage going to the discoverer). So seeing Google's share of the market is a strong indicator (even without first-hand knowledge) that "they have a serious advantage in search" vs existence of many competing diet companies does not tell me "they figured out nutrition".
Good point, but to nitpick Google wasn't a first-mover in search, it defeated AltaVista and other search competitors based on superior performance. They were a first-mover with PageRank, though.
Two issues with this heuristic:
1) It doesn't work well for credence goods.
2) Sometimes it takes a long time for sciences to find an application, two modern examples are astrophysics, and particle physics.
Tetlock's political judgment study was a test for macroeconomics, political science and history. Yet people with PhDs in these areas did no better on predicting macro political and economic events than those without any PhD. Maybe macro helps in producing good econometric models, but it doesn't help in making informal predictions. (Whereas one suspects that physics and chemistry would help in a test of quick predictions about a novel physical or chemical system, vs. people without a PhD in these fields).
Re: your examples successful spin-offs for psychology, to what extent did these therapies come out of well-established theory? Maybe someone can weigh in here. It seems possible that these are good therapies but ones that don't have a strong basis in theory (in contrast to technologies from physics or chemistry).
Physicist Ilya Prigogine developed his famous theory of dissipative systems which was expected to explain a lot of things from thermodynamics of living systems to the nature of the arrow of time. It is a very well-developed and deep theory. Yet, in my scientific life, I have never seen an actual numerical calculation of a measurable quantity utilizing any of Prigogine's concepts such as "rate of entropy production". Looks definitely like a missing spinoff!
Computer vision is suspiciously lacking in practical spinoffs, even though people have been studying it for 40 years.
If I was initially lacking in the capital to do trades, I could publish my predictions online using public key cryptography and amass an impressive track record before recruiting investors.
This is a nitpick, but this protocol is at least underspecified. Aside from the need to prove that you made the predictions before the events, you also need to be able to prove that you made no other predictions before the event.
(I've always wondered why no pump-and-dump scammers use this: after ten "buy/short " mails, 1/1024 of your mailing list will have r...
I've always wondered why no pump-and-dump scammers use this: after ten "buy/short " mails
They used to, in the days of snail-mail, and that scam became one of the common examples of selection bias and other issues because it's so nifty; why don't they with email? Probably difficulty of getting through, as pointed to.
It seems to me that there are two different heuristics here and it is worth separating them.
But first I should explain why I think my initial reading of this post suggests heuristics that I think are problematic. The mere existence of CBT does not seem like strong evidence for psychology. It is no more evidence for modern mainstream psychology than freudian psychoanalysis is evidence for freudian psychology. As I understand it, CBT is gaining market share against other forms of talk therapy, but largely because of academic authority, roughly the same way ...
I think it's interesting topics for research papers, I've read something like that here: https://essays-service.com/blog/540-argumentative-essay-topics. It's great that students conduct similar studies. There are currently no qualitative content that is interesting to learn.
I think it's interesting topics for research papers, I've read something like that here: https://essays-service.com/blog/540-argumentative-essay-topics. It's great that students conduct similar studies. There are currently no qualitative content that is interesting to learn.
If stock market economics worked, Noble prize winners would make money.
(This is slightly unfair, since the Black-Merton-Scholes theory does make other people money, to an extent. Additionally, while Merton and Scholes were on the board, LTCM was not strictly based on their theories. Still, surprised to see that this hasn't been mentioned.)
Follow-up to:
Parapsychology: the control group for science
Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields
Recent renewed discussions of the parapsychology literature and Daryl Bem's recent precognition article brought to mind the "market test" of claims of precognition. Bem tells us that random undergraduate students were able to predict with 53% accuracy where an erotic image would appear in the future. If this effect was actually real, I would rerun the experiment before corporate earnings announcements, central bank interest rate changes, etc, and change the images based on the reaction of stocks and bonds to the announcements. In other words, I could easily convert "porn precognition" into "hedge fund trillionaire precognition."
If I was initially lacking in the capital to do trades, I could publish my predictions online using public key cryptography and amass an impressive track record before recruiting investors. If anti-psi prejudice was a problem, no one need know how I was making my predictions. Similar setups could exploit other effects claimed in the parapsychology literature (e.g. the remote viewing of the Scientologist-founded Stargate Project of the U.S. federal government). Those who assign a lot of credence to psi may want to actually try this, but for me this is an invitation to use parapsychology as control group for science, and to ponder a general heuristic for crudely estimating the soundness of academic fields for outsiders.
One reason we trust that physicists and chemists have some understanding of their subjects is that they produce valuable technological spinoffs with concrete and measurable economic benefit. In practice, I often make use of the spinoff heuristic: If an unfamiliar field has the sort of knowledge it claims, what commercial spinoffs and concrete results ought it to be producing? Do such spinoffs exist? What are the explanations for their absence?
For psychology, I might cite systematic desensitization of specific phobias such as fear of spiders, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and military use of IQ tests (with large measurable changes in accident rates, training costs, etc). In financial economics, I would raise the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in index funds, founded in response to academic research, and their outperformance relative to managed funds. Auction theory powers tens of billions of dollars of wireless spectrum auctions, not to mention evil dollar-auction sites.
This seems like a great task for crowdsourcing: the cloud of LessWrongers has broad knowledge, and sorting real science from cargo cult science is core to being Less Wrong. So I ask you, Less Wrongers, for your examples of practical spinoffs (or suspicious absences thereof) of sometimes-denigrated fields in the comments. Macroeconomics, personality psychology, physical anthropology, education research, gene-association studies, nutrition research, wherever you have knowledge to share.
ETA: This academic claims to be trying to use the Bem methods to predict roulette wheels, and to have passed statistical significance tests on his first runs. Such claims have been made for casinos in the past, but always trailed away in failures to replicate, repeat, or make actual money. I expect the same to happen here.