The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014)

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.

&quot;The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that &quot;Your will needn&#x27;t be affected by an incident unless you let it&quot;. 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.&quot;<p>That is absolutely <i>not</i> what Epictetus meant. In fact, like other Stoics, he taught his students a technique called negative visualization that is <i>literally</i> the opposite of positive thinking. The author couldn&#x27;t have picked a worse example of an ancient precursor to positive psychology.

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.<p>From the very liberal &#x2F; 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.<p>From a conservative side, a lot of religious leaders have made the case that positive psychology is simply an attempt by secularists&#x2F;humanists to dethrone the notion of morals, suffering (a big thing in Christianity) etc. and put human pleasure as the highest of all goals.

The &quot;Amateur&quot; 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=feMcJ4UAAAAJ&amp;hl=en</a>

Sigh.<p>&quot;British semi-retired network engineer educated in mathematics at Cambridge finds mathematical flaw in popular psychology paper and enlists Alan Sokal&#x27;s help to debunk it.&quot;<p>Sure wish folks would quit sucking on the &quot;amateur vs. the establishment&quot; teat.<p>That aside, this was a fun read, and I think it&#x27;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.

&gt;&quot;Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics,&quot; wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, &quot;the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology.&quot;<p>Well this statement still stands.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1307.7006.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1307.7006.pdf</a> Such an amusing read!

Fun fact, one of the big guys in positive psychology accidentally inspired the Bush torture program, which was similarly based on scientific-sounding nonsense.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;maria-konnikova&#x2F;theory-psychology-justified-torture&#x2F;amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;maria-konnikova&#x2F;theory-psy...</a>

Typically in U.S. psychology majors, statistics is required and is taken in the Spring of the student&#x27;s senior year. I&#x27;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&#x27; quantitative understanding.

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

It&#x27;s great that this has been picked up recently, it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been following along with for a while. If anyone is interested, James Heathers runs a podcast called Everything Hertz (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hertzpodcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hertzpodcast</a>) with Dan Quintana and Nick has been a guest on it - it&#x27;s well worth listening to if you&#x27;re interested in science full stop.<p>These guys aren&#x27;t researchers in my area of interest but the topics they cover are interesting and done very entertainingly!

Nice to see Sokal&#x27;s name come up, he&#x27;s the first person I thought of when the article outlined the obvious bullshit use of advanced maths in a psychology paper. It&#x27;s amazing how far stuff like this can get within a field before someone gets round to calling it out.

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&#x27;s how you provide useful critique of scientific theories.

One thing I&#x27;m confused about is why most of the criticism has come on the Positive Affect paper and not the original &quot;The complex dynamics of high performance teams&quot; paper, which the most of the math is drawn from.

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.

&gt; &quot;Each of them appeared to quote and promote one another, creating a virtuous circle of recommendation.&quot;<p>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.

I read to the end of the article hoping to find out what exactly the error in the math and&#x2F;or reasoning was. Apart from some vague mentions of how the &quot;tipping point&quot; might be influenced by other factors, there was no detail. This article is largely content-free.

95% of published papers are bulls<i></i>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.<p>That&#x27;s why it usually takes an outsider to publicize this stuff.

&gt; If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life.<p>I cannot fathom how honest, intelligent people end up thinking they&#x27;ve &quot;solved&quot; for something like happiness or flourishing in a mathematically meaningful way. And to 4 decimal places!

It&#x27;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.

&gt;&quot;Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics,&quot; wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, &quot;the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t tell if he does or doesn&#x27;t understand thermodynamics.

Here&#x27;s the nub of it:<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Not many psychologists are very good at maths,&quot; says Brown. &quot;Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist.&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s amazing -- well not at all amazing really! -- that the most successful people in any scientific field come from an engineering and physics background.<p>One of my favourite quotes is from Kelvin:<p>&gt; <i>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.&quot;</i><p>And ... mentioning Kelvin is a nice segue to this quote from the article:<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics,&quot; wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, &quot;the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology.&quot;</i><p>Almost Sokal-ish in its attempt to borrow some relevance. Zero C is not very special. Zero Kelvin is!

I&#x27;ve always thought that English &#x2F; many other humanities departments learned to avoid much of the controversy that plagued Psychology departments by simply avoiding any data altogether.<p>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&#x27;s: by derriding him as &quot;a pedant, a literalist and a cultural imperialist&quot;.

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?