This absolutely beautiful blog post describes the author receiving an “alien in a can” at age 8 and was told to never open it lest the alien dies. He compares his experimentations to efforts in psych science to draw inferences about psych states. www.davis-stober.com/post/alien-i...
An intergalactic journey to discover the gap between psychological theory and data. I celebrated my eighth birthday while visiting my aunt and uncle in Minneapolis one summer, and received the most in...
This is my favourite part: "Pre-registering my hypotheses, using sophisticated model selection methods, and replicating the experiment over and over doesn't help..."
I’d def use this as reading for students were I to teach a class on this. Introduces latent variables, causal inference, the coordination problem and other issues.
Many thanks for this! I am currently developing a new undergrad methods course and there is some serious gold here! I wasn't familiar with the Kellen paper, that's a real gem.
I like the post but I feel like the idea of the alien actually makes the problem seem a lot easier than it is. The alien is a physical real thing, you just don't get direct access to it due to experimental constraints. The true problem of psychology is different because...