
The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - IntronExon
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown
======
ironSkillet
My wife is working on a PhD in psychology (she intends to do clinical work)
and after hearing about the mathematical "training" they receive in order to
do research, I was astonished at the lack of rigour. One personal anecdote
stands out. Myself being a professional statistician, she would sometimes come
to me for help with her assignments. On one assignment, her professor had
misunderstood one particular statistic and had given then a problem that
wasn't well defined. I helped her craft a polite email to her professor
explaining the ambiguity and asking for a resolution. The professor got
extremely defensive and did not answer the question, and none of her
colleagues realized that the question was incorrect either. And don't get me
started on the conclusions they draw from the smallest of trials... /rant
Sorry.

~~~
olivierlacan
Related to your last point, the slow-burning controversy about P-hacking/Data
Dredging:.

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging)
\- [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-
broken/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/)

One particular favorite (used in the above):
[https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/)

~~~
tensor_rank_0
quick question, how well does pre-registration protect against p-hacking?

~~~
equanimitivity
P-hacking can be done by analyzing the data in different ways until a
significant effect is found, and then failing to report all of the analyses
done. There is no universal way to analyze data (especially what collected
data to include); there are choices that are made and this leads to a “garden
of forking paths” where if you look around the garden enough noise alone will
give you ‘signicance’. Preregistration makes this impossible by declaring your
analysis before collecting data.

------
virissimo
"The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that "Your will needn't be
affected by an incident unless you let it". In other words, we can be masters
and not victims of fate because what we believe our capability to be
determines the strength of that capability."

That is absolutely _not_ what Epictetus meant. In fact, like other Stoics, he
taught his students a technique called negative visualization that is
_literally_ the opposite of positive thinking. The author couldn't have picked
a worse example of an ancient precursor to positive psychology.

~~~
bitexploder
I have read almost all of the biographies and works covering Epictetus. Just
want to confirm you are correct. Stoicism at it's true core was how to react
to a life that was foretold. Most stoics believed their date was predetermined
but now how they dealt with it. In context, Stoicism was the cure to being
dealt a rough hand by "fate". It holds up so well that many modern therapies,
such as CBT, can be directly connected. Now, we of course don't think probably
believe in destiny here on HN (in general). Anyway just providing some color
for how off the author was.

Stoics lived with death as a way to take the right course of action. E.g. if I
knew this was my last day with my daughter how would I act? Could I claim to
have made good choices or would I have regrets.

------
Bucephalus355
It’s interesting how positive psychology is coming under attack from all
directions, and I think reflects many of the shortcomings that have been
festering in the field.

From the very liberal / progressive side, Barbara Ehrenreich (author of
“Nickel and Dimed”) has been making the case for the last 10 years that
positive psychology is simply the last ditch effort of capitalists to
“maintain morale” while Western living standards triumphantly continue their
5th decade in decline.

From a conservative side, a lot of religious leaders have made the case that
positive psychology is simply an attempt by secularists/humanists to dethrone
the notion of morals, suffering (a big thing in Christianity) etc. and put
human pleasure as the highest of all goals.

~~~
IanCal
> while Western living standards triumphantly continue their 5th decade in
> decline.

Are living standards really lower continually over the last 50 years? At least
in the UK I think that absolute poverty is down over a shorter time, median
household incomes at up significantly, life expectancy is up. What's
continually gone down?

~~~
throwawayjava
All of those things for white men, at least since 2008.

Which you can read either way ( _oy, I must have karma to burn?_ ). On the one
hand, the anti-capitalist left in the US has historically had a contingent
with racial undertones. On the other hand, literally every other group's
station was improved at least in part through government mechanisms (equal
protection under law, civil rights, etc.) rather than market mechanisms.

~~~
PopsiclePete
As a pasty white man myself, life has been improving steadily since 2008. My
income I think has doubled since then, I’ve lost about 20lbs of fat and I’ve
picked up some cool new hobbies!

True, I did have to get a relevant degree and not be an idiot at work to
advance, but life is pretty good overall.

Now if you mean that being a White Man by itself isn’t enough anymore to get
you a cushy life style, then yes, it’s not. Welcome to the place _everyone
else has been in since forever_.

~~~
icantdrive55
There's a lot of people who weren't invited to the party.

The "able bodied, but aren't working number is close to an all time high. I
believe it's higher than when women stayed at home while hubby worked?

I have never seen this amount of homelessness. I see daily. Im becoming too
hardened to the suffering.

People used to have the privilege of having two shitty jobs. Now--those jobs
are coveted, as careers, by hard working immigrants--that see nothing wrong
with fitting six people in a 10 x 12 foot room.

Look at the jobs on Craigslist. Work with us for three hours a day, or on
call? So many are just rediculious. Buy a four door, late model car, we
approve of, and go into a slow debt death. Or, the amount of thieving bastards
who know they can get away with terrible work conditions, and pay that makes
showing up debatable.

Crime is down. Cameras are everywhere. People/business don't use cash like
they used too. Surveillance is everywhere. And like always, the rich seem to
get treated better by the justice system? Fees/fines have never been so high.
Only the wealthy can afford to commit crimes? Oh, and they do run afoul of so
many laws.

Look at all the young scholars who are living at home. Many living at a family
home that will probally not be passed down because mom and dad will be forced
into a reverse mortgage.

In tech--yes, the party is fierce. I do notice the new cars. I notice the
carefree attitude. There's a liberal air of "Hay--it's just hard work? I'm
just more clever than that guy?".

I hope it all lasts.

I guarantee so many of you will be right here wondering what the hell
happened, on a old device? I think a new version of the punk movement will pop
up. The hippie movement won't be the joke it currently is. Hell--the denial
might protect a lot of you when the money dries up?

------
nagVenkat
The "Amateur" is a PhD student now and has lot of citations on his google
scholar. I am happy for him to have such a good impact on the field even
though he started late.

[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&hl=en)

~~~
trendia
It seems he has found his niche: finding flags in Psychology papers. His most
recent publications are refutations of other papers:

* No Evidence That Twitter Language Reliably Predicts Heart Disease: A Reanalysis of Eichstaedt et al.(2015a)

* Through a womb, darkly: Methodological problems in a recent study of fetal visual perception

* Emodiversity: Robust predictor of outcomes or statistical artifact?

~~~
taneq
Sounds like he's directly addressing the lack of replication that we bemoan so
much.

------
thaumaturgy
Sigh.

"British semi-retired network engineer educated in mathematics at Cambridge
finds mathematical flaw in popular psychology paper and enlists Alan Sokal's
help to debunk it."

Sure wish folks would quit sucking on the "amateur vs. the establishment"
teat.

That aside, this was a fun read, and I think it's another example of why
scientific progress in the future is going to have to be more
multidisciplinary than it has been in the past.

~~~
AlexCoventry
> Sure wish folks would quit sucking on the "amateur vs. the establishment"
> teat.

I think it's an awesome narrative. What do you dislike about it?

~~~
biofox
The problem I have with it is that it helps to legitimize the view that an
uneducated person's opinions and intuitions are more valid than expertise. In
the current political climate, it's dangerous to continue stoking that
narrative. As the parent said, the guy was hardly an amateur, but an
antivaxer/global warming denier/etc. will view it as confirmation that
establishment science is corrupt.

~~~
adrianratnapala
> it's dangerous to continue stoking that narrative.

What, even in cases where it is right? You are steering dangerously close to
saying "We the Elite should close ranks". And that sort of thing is the fuel
of the very fire that you are trying to put out.

The fact is as humans we have no option but to trust our own judgement on
things: either by studying them directly or by judging which experts to trust.
And this article shows you can't assume experts are right just because society
puts them in a particular position.

In the article we told that Nick Brown, an IT guy who knew high-school level
maths, who discovered that an important paper by well respected psychology
prof was BS when it was presented to him at a university psych class.

Why had the profession swallowed it? Apparently because their maths is so bad
that they just swallowed what they were told, and (according to _The Guardian_
) the few with qualms didn't feel anyone would be interested in hearing the
contrary view.

~~~
taneq
I don't think it's necessarily that everyone in the whole psychology
profession has worse than highschool level math skills. I think it's more just
that, at some level, you have to trust that your colleagues have done their
work correctly. You focus on the important parts of the paper (ie. the
hypothesis, the method, and the results) because there's not enough time in
your life to give full scrutiny to every detail of every paper you read. So
sometimes, something slips through the cracks, until it's caught.

~~~
OrganicMSG
At which level in the sciences are you ever supposed to trust that your
colleagues have done their work correctly? That sounds more like the opposite
of what you are supposed to be doing.

~~~
taneq
At the level where it takes more than one lifetime's research to reinvent your
field from ground zero, it's literally impossible to progress the field
without taking _something_ on faith.

Well before that, though, it becomes impractical to re-check every single
thing. And the longer-established a field is, the more you have to take on
faith.

~~~
OrganicMSG
So then you have to go to other people in that field and have them look at it.
Sure, you have to take them on faith too, but a little bit less each time
unless they all wildly disagree, and they can explain their reasoning to you
in layman terms when you canvas their opinion. Now, none of this guarantees
success, but it is a long way from trusting others to just do their work
properly.

------
Maybestring
>"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote
Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic
number in human psychology."

Well this statement still stands.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I don't understand, what is the special status of 0C?

~~~
trendia
The author is confused. 0C is special to _us_ because it is the freezing point
of water, but that doesn't really make it special within thermodynamics --
it's just the freezing point of some arbitrary substance at an arbitrary
pressure (ATP). 0C isn't even the _only_ freezing point of water -- if you add
impurities or change the pressure, you can change the freezing point!

Maybe 0K (Kelvin) is special, since that implies zero gas entropy, but 0C
doesn't have any magical properties.

~~~
dsubburam
Interestingly, unlike the boiling point, the melting point is not that
dependent on the atmospheric pressure: for a wide range around 100kPa, it
stays at 0C [1].

[1] Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point)

------
throwaway0312
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7006.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7006.pdf)
Such an amusing read!

~~~
emmelaich
You have to respect (fear?) a paper that Sokal and Pinker have helped with.

~~~
meow1032
With Gelman in there too? Definitely fear.

------
roywiggins
Fun fact, one of the big guys in positive psychology accidentally inspired the
Bush torture program, which was similarly based on scientific-sounding
nonsense.

[https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-
psy...](https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-psychology-
justified-torture/amp)

~~~
AlexCoventry
That's like saying that our understanding of respiratory anatomy inspired
water boarding.

I'm glad _New Yorker_ has improved its journalistic standards a little since
then.

------
NPMaxwell
Typically in U.S. psychology majors, statistics is required and is taken in
the Spring of the student's senior year. I've been playing with the idea of
having statistics be the second course (after intro) in a psychology major so
that all other courses could build on the students' quantitative
understanding.

~~~
lopmotr
It seems to me that stats and scientific method are the core of psychology.
All the domain-specific content is just common sense. This quote from Brown
says something "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and
statistics you have to do as a psychologist.". Perhaps even rename psychology
to "statistical study of fuzzy ideas" or something.

~~~
olympus
Statistics is not the core of psychology, it is the core of having a
publishable result. Psychologists want to do just enough statistics that they
can claim to have a p-value<0.05 so they can get it into a journal. They don't
care if their assumption of normality is correct, or if their assumption of
independence is correct, or if the question they asked on the survey is
actually measuring the thing they want to measure (spoiler alert: it usually
doesn't, but we have a hard time measuring the brain). So they willfully
ignore the assumptions because acknowledging that they were violated would
mean that they would have to learn more complicated statistical methods. The
current use of stats in psychology is just an attempt to make it look like
their research is rigorous, when in reality it is usually broken.

The ideas of the scientific method are fine in psychology, but since most
studies use WIERD samples, don't be surprised that many of those results don't
generalize to other demographics.

------
sTeamTraen
I am the person featured in the Observer article (for "proof", see the account
with this username on Twitter). AMA. :-)

~~~
et1337
What are your thoughts on the "rest" of Frederickson's research? You seem
content to debunk only Losada's math (charitably characterized as a "brain
fart"), where this article seems more willing to lambast positivity research
on the whole as self-serving mumbo-jumbo.

~~~
sTeamTraen
At the time that interview was published I didn't know too much about it.
Since then I have published about 5 articles critiquing various other work
from the same lab. It mostly seems very weak, but I'm not sure if it's any
worse than most of research in the wider field of social psychology (and
peripheral subfields that use similar underpowered research methods). For
example, I have also been involved in looking at the work coming out of the
Cornell Food and Brand Lab (GIYF) and much of that seems to be
catastrophically bad.

~~~
sTeamTraen
Link to the Cornell story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15351006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15351006)

------
sghi
It's great that this has been picked up recently, it's something I've been
following along with for a while. If anyone is interested, James Heathers runs
a podcast called Everything Hertz
([https://twitter.com/hertzpodcast](https://twitter.com/hertzpodcast)) with
Dan Quintana and Nick has been a guest on it - it's well worth listening to if
you're interested in science full stop.

These guys aren't researchers in my area of interest but the topics they cover
are interesting and done very entertainingly!

------
codeulike
Nice to see Sokal's name come up, he's the first person I thought of when the
article outlined the obvious bullshit use of advanced maths in a psychology
paper. It's amazing how far stuff like this can get within a field before
someone gets round to calling it out.

~~~
truculation
Another physicist, David Deutsch, also does a good job in _The Beginning of
Infinity_ , Chapter 12 'A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy'. I can't do
it justice here but part of the problem is that we don't understand what
'happiness' is yet and therefore it's a problem how to measure it, let alone
self-report it.

------
ChrisSD
An amateur who did the work. He was doing a relevant degree and collaborated
with people with more experience or expertise in relevant fields. That's how
you provide useful critique of scientific theories.

------
meow1032
One thing I'm confused about is why most of the criticism has come on the
Positive Affect paper and not the original "The complex dynamics of high
performance teams" paper, which the most of the math is drawn from.

------
internetman55
A common topic I see is the surfeit of trained scientists, and how many of
them are unable to find employment in their field (professor or other
acceptably remunerative research position). Maybe many of these guys out there
are simply not good enough to do science, and we should raise the bar for
entry to these training programs if so many of their graduates fundamentally
misunderstand the mathematics their analyses rely upon.

------
stareatgoats
> "Each of them appeared to quote and promote one another, creating a virtuous
> circle of recommendation."

There should be a word for this - is there? It runs like a red thread in all
sorts of dubious endeavors in the public sphere.

~~~
soneca
_self-congratulatory ring_?

~~~
vasilipupkin
Circle jerk?

------
bigbluedots
I read to the end of the article hoping to find out what exactly the error in
the math and/or reasoning was. Apart from some vague mentions of how the
"tipping point" might be influenced by other factors, there was no detail.
This article is largely content-free.

------
nanis
95% of published papers are bulls __t and you know it the moment you read the
abstract. The problem is having the time and energy along with a healthy
disregard for the gatekeepers on your academic path to keep pursuing this.

That's why it usually takes an outsider to publicize this stuff.

~~~
hinkley
When I think about how most papers are written by a student, with credit given
to their professor, and I think of what a mess is code written by developers
the same age as those grad students... It’s amazing we get as much right as we
do.

And I know we are getting things right because I have a phone in my pocket
that has surmounted thousands upon thousands of puzzles in physics and
chemistry over the last twenty years to do what it does.

~~~
empath75
I’d wager that most papers in most fields are bullshit, but it doesn’t matter
because no one reads them or bothers to attempt applying them or building on
them.

------
ukulele
> If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative
> emotion you were flourishing in life.

I cannot fathom how honest, intelligent people end up thinking they've
"solved" for something like happiness or flourishing in a mathematically
meaningful way. And to 4 decimal places!

~~~
hinkley
I am just picturing someone haranguing a person for dropping them from 2.92 to
2.90 and ‘ruining everything.’

~~~
hammock
You should watch Black Mirror s3e1 "Nosedive"!!

------
joelthelion
It's too bad the field of positive psychology is left to people like this,
because it asks useful questions and would benefit a lot from serious
research.

------
ouid
>"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote
Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic
number in human psychology."

I can't tell if he does or doesn't understand thermodynamics.

~~~
jnbiche
I'm assuming she was thinking of zero degrees kelvin.

------
emmelaich
Here's the nub of it:

> _" Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many
> psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a
> psychologist."_

It's amazing -- well not at all amazing really! -- that the most successful
people in any scientific field come from an engineering and physics
background.

One of my favourite quotes is from Kelvin:

> _I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and
> express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot
> measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a
> meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but
> you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science,
> whatever the matter may be. "_

And ... mentioning Kelvin is a nice segue to this quote from the article:

> _" Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics,"
> wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a
> magic number in human psychology."_

Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very
special. Zero Kelvin is!

~~~
johnchristopher
> Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very
> special. Zero Kelvin is!

I am sorry if I give the impression of nitpicking but I live in a Celsius
world and zero c is special because it means water freezes. (and snow instead
of rain)

~~~
cdancette
It's special in our human world, but not in thermodynamics / physics. Water is
just a molecule like all the others, it's not special.

Whereas 0K is the absolute minimum temperature, so that's a really special
value!

~~~
johnchristopher
I'd say water freezing is still interesting thermodynamics/physics :). (But I
agree 0K is another kind of mark)

------
trendia
I've always thought that English / many other humanities departments learned
to avoid much of the controversy that plagued Psychology departments by simply
avoiding any data altogether.

If Fredericks and Losada had written nearly the same thing, using the same
evidence but without the fancy maths, it would no doubt be accepted and lauded
within English departments. Any attempts to fight it could be battled in the
same way the humanities departments responded to Sokal in the 90's: by
derriding him as "a pedant, a literalist and a cultural imperialist".

~~~
hackbinary
I do not think your argument fair. In fact I find it disappointing. Some
things lend themselves to collecting numbers and figures and measurements, and
other things quite simply do not. Philosophy, history, literature, and human
languages are what first come to my mind as important fields of study that
have significant impact on our outlook on the universe, but we can't
scientifically measure them. Indeed it is philosophical thought and ideas that
underpin our modernity. Moreover, much of our collective advancement is in
significant peril because 'the arts' have been devalued so much. (Although
William H. Miller just donated a significant sum to the John Hopkins
philosophy department since he felt his degree in philosophy made him so
successful.)

What you go on to speak of in your second paragraph is the art of rhetoric,
and ironically you have unwittingly engaged in the very sort of ad hominem
attack which you are complaining that you think that liberal arts scholars
would use to defend their position.

An ad hominem attack is a classic logical fallacy and that is something that I
suggest you research.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Unfortunately, in order to make certain claims, you have to have metrics. Just
because something is hard to measure doesn't mean you can forego it.

~~~
hackbinary
How do you measure the impact of John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith?

------
Myrmornis
When are we as a society going to clearly point out that psychology and
related disciplines are not science, and that young people shouldn’t confuse
them with science?

~~~
thisiszilff
Probably never given how broad the field of psychology is. The demarcation
line probably runs somewhere through the field, but to separate the two sides
between science and not science is an open problem. Hell, it cosmology and
evolution also suffer from similar problems, but those fields are far less
controversial.

~~~
upvotinglurker
Yes. As a psych major in college, I was astonished to find that the same major
included, say, quantifying the changes in neurons in rat brains after rats
were exposed to specific stimuli, and empirically unmoored speculation about
supposed universal desires to have sex with one's mother.

