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Aug. 15th, 2018 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I read once again about the replication crisis in psychology
where only like one in three experiments can be replicated, and probably not the famous ones
https://thenib.com/repeat-after-me (thanks conuly for link)
and I'm just like
people's entire lives are shaped by the popular perception of these experiments
the story gets written around shit that was maybe true that one time with a tiny group of people
and nobody replicated
and humans just... rewrite themselves in light of these fictions
which scares me more than the fiction presented as fiction influencing people we studied in cultural studies
and the idea humans have a programming language is pretty inherently scary
because what goes in and what results it has are very not simples.
Meanwhile I remember my ongoing frustration with science fiction not changing the world
and how science has solved so many problems but only in theory because in practice there's just... just noise, and wrong, and stuff not getting distributed.
I was thinking maybe students should have to have a year replicating studies before they can do a new thing
just a solid year of taking the last year's studies and replicating the hell out of them
the same way we grant pieces of paper to say someone thought of something new, a true master of the discipline has copied all the things, and had Thoughts about them.
don't know if that would work. but building it in to the system is necessary. because at the moment making flashy results from small studies is built in to the system, and that's a problem.
Also what the things even mean is never so simples as the science reporting makes it. I mean, I poke autism experiments sometimes and they reveal more about the experimenters. The world in their head is weird.
The world has changed a lot though.
Just... like, it has been so long since school for most people, and it takes so long for most people to attain positions of power, that the stuff I studied in school a generation ago, is still not the stuff many decision makers studied in school, because it's too new. And they decision makers roll along secure in their existing knowledge until something bumps them with a perceived need to update. And power reacts so ponderously slowly to this new stuff.
Discovering new stuff is neat
but we need to get it out there so humans, in general, know things
and that's not something we and our systems are good at yet
partly because the communicating people and the science people usually took different tracks in school since the age of about 16.
not always, just pretty often.
And I think about how long it would take to get control of a tv series or a movie budget
and just
the people doing the deciding there, they're maybe almost as young as me. maybe. just now starting to be, which is why my nostalgia is making reboots.
and changing viewpoints take a while to filter through that way.
There's so much one to many stuff now though. Like in theory seven billion plus people can read this that I'm typing as soon as I hit post. ... if I think about that I will lock everything.
But people can just make stuff and stick it on the internet now.
they can even get a decent budget together by asking the world in general for it, rather than gatekeepers.
so there's a massive flood of stuff now, some of it by people just as frustrated as me but much more knowledgeable.
and that's great
except
now I can't find any damn thing in all this noise.
If it don't turn up at the supermarket after I've seen my online friends chatter about it
I very seldom know about it.
So these systems have problems both ways up and I have no answer.
But science is many to many and the journals problem has demonstrated the fails of some approaches to this who needs to know what problem, and also started working on fixes for it.
It's a mess though.
This is why I find Space Colony stories intuitively appealing, because they are Small and Orderly and one could in theory know Everyone and how the systems fit them together. But also that would usually go Horribly Wrong.
Also also the minimum size colony for genetic viability in the long term is forty thousand distinct genetic lines. https://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html Ten thousand if you assume no disasters ever happen. https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10369/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-colonize-another-star-system-16654747/
(both articles are quoting Cameron Smith, an anthropologist at Portland State University in Oregon. but they contain different numbers. so that's a thing.)
You get some people suggesting 80 if they have children late in life, without considering the impact of known risks of having children late in life, which is stupid. Or 160 if no waiting. But those studies assume meeting a larger group at the end of it, as far as I could find out. So I like it fine for a ship's crew, but for a colony? Nuh uh, big numbers please.
So you can't really make something Small where you can know Everyone
it would really need to be bigger than my town
where it only feels like you know everyone
and that's without accounting for how small you can pack a culture or tech level
But it seems like you could fix a system with 40K people in it so it worked the way you want it to.
Billions? Hah. Millions? Nuh uh.
And realistically even smaller groups is going to include people you can't be having with pretty darn quickly.
Psychology and sociology are pretty important to figuring out how to make this stuff work.
But, apparently we continue to know less than we think we do.
I like imaginary worlds better.
... not to live in, just you can at least pretend they're less brain breaky...
where only like one in three experiments can be replicated, and probably not the famous ones
https://thenib.com/repeat-after-me (thanks conuly for link)
and I'm just like
people's entire lives are shaped by the popular perception of these experiments
the story gets written around shit that was maybe true that one time with a tiny group of people
and nobody replicated
and humans just... rewrite themselves in light of these fictions
which scares me more than the fiction presented as fiction influencing people we studied in cultural studies
and the idea humans have a programming language is pretty inherently scary
because what goes in and what results it has are very not simples.
Meanwhile I remember my ongoing frustration with science fiction not changing the world
and how science has solved so many problems but only in theory because in practice there's just... just noise, and wrong, and stuff not getting distributed.
I was thinking maybe students should have to have a year replicating studies before they can do a new thing
just a solid year of taking the last year's studies and replicating the hell out of them
the same way we grant pieces of paper to say someone thought of something new, a true master of the discipline has copied all the things, and had Thoughts about them.
don't know if that would work. but building it in to the system is necessary. because at the moment making flashy results from small studies is built in to the system, and that's a problem.
Also what the things even mean is never so simples as the science reporting makes it. I mean, I poke autism experiments sometimes and they reveal more about the experimenters. The world in their head is weird.
The world has changed a lot though.
Just... like, it has been so long since school for most people, and it takes so long for most people to attain positions of power, that the stuff I studied in school a generation ago, is still not the stuff many decision makers studied in school, because it's too new. And they decision makers roll along secure in their existing knowledge until something bumps them with a perceived need to update. And power reacts so ponderously slowly to this new stuff.
Discovering new stuff is neat
but we need to get it out there so humans, in general, know things
and that's not something we and our systems are good at yet
partly because the communicating people and the science people usually took different tracks in school since the age of about 16.
not always, just pretty often.
And I think about how long it would take to get control of a tv series or a movie budget
and just
the people doing the deciding there, they're maybe almost as young as me. maybe. just now starting to be, which is why my nostalgia is making reboots.
and changing viewpoints take a while to filter through that way.
There's so much one to many stuff now though. Like in theory seven billion plus people can read this that I'm typing as soon as I hit post. ... if I think about that I will lock everything.
But people can just make stuff and stick it on the internet now.
they can even get a decent budget together by asking the world in general for it, rather than gatekeepers.
so there's a massive flood of stuff now, some of it by people just as frustrated as me but much more knowledgeable.
and that's great
except
now I can't find any damn thing in all this noise.
If it don't turn up at the supermarket after I've seen my online friends chatter about it
I very seldom know about it.
So these systems have problems both ways up and I have no answer.
But science is many to many and the journals problem has demonstrated the fails of some approaches to this who needs to know what problem, and also started working on fixes for it.
It's a mess though.
This is why I find Space Colony stories intuitively appealing, because they are Small and Orderly and one could in theory know Everyone and how the systems fit them together. But also that would usually go Horribly Wrong.
Also also the minimum size colony for genetic viability in the long term is forty thousand distinct genetic lines. https://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html Ten thousand if you assume no disasters ever happen. https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10369/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-colonize-another-star-system-16654747/
(both articles are quoting Cameron Smith, an anthropologist at Portland State University in Oregon. but they contain different numbers. so that's a thing.)
You get some people suggesting 80 if they have children late in life, without considering the impact of known risks of having children late in life, which is stupid. Or 160 if no waiting. But those studies assume meeting a larger group at the end of it, as far as I could find out. So I like it fine for a ship's crew, but for a colony? Nuh uh, big numbers please.
So you can't really make something Small where you can know Everyone
it would really need to be bigger than my town
where it only feels like you know everyone
and that's without accounting for how small you can pack a culture or tech level
But it seems like you could fix a system with 40K people in it so it worked the way you want it to.
Billions? Hah. Millions? Nuh uh.
And realistically even smaller groups is going to include people you can't be having with pretty darn quickly.
Psychology and sociology are pretty important to figuring out how to make this stuff work.
But, apparently we continue to know less than we think we do.
I like imaginary worlds better.
... not to live in, just you can at least pretend they're less brain breaky...