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Based Camp: Spencer Greenberg on Trying to Fix Science
In this insightful discussion, Spencer Greenberg delves into the replication crisis plaguing academic psychology research. He discusses projects aiming to improve reliability through replications and details warning signs like questionable statistics. Spencer advocates raising scientific standards to restore public trust. He also champions "renegade science" by independent researchers and highlights tools enabling robust studies outside academia. Overall, Spencer makes a thoughtful case for multiplying skill with truth-seeking to unlock discoveries that benefit society.
Links:
https://www.positly.com/
https://www.guidedtrack.com/
Simone: [00:00:00] Okay, here we go. Hi everyone. We have a very, very special guest today who we have known actually almost as long as we've known each other. We met Spencer Greenberg back in like around 2015 when he was first working on some of his projects that are now pervasively used.
Simone: Which is really, really cool. He is someone that we've profoundly respected for many years. He has been running Clearer Thinking for a ton of time, but more recently he launched the Clearer Thinking podcast, which is a series of interviews with incredible people that we really enjoy. I'm addicted to it personally.
Simone: So please check it out.
Malcolm: I'll just summarize the important point is he's probably one of, if not the most respected social figure in the E. A. And rationalist movement in the New York area, which is a very big thing because it's one of the major hubs of the
Simone: movement. Yeah. And Spencer, could you tell us what your top projects are right now?
Spencer: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. So [00:01:00] one of the projects I run is called clear thinking, which you mentioned at clear thing dot org. And what we do is we take interesting ideas from psychology, economics, math, and so on, that people might learn in passing, maybe they'll learn in blog posts or reading books, but they don't generally apply them to their lives.
Spencer: And so our goal is to make it really easy to apply these ideas to your life to try to achieve the things that you want to achieve. So we have these interactive modules, we have over 70 of them right now, and you can use them all for free. And I also do the Clear Thinking Podcast, as you mentioned. In addition to that, we have a bunch of other projects for accelerating social science.
Spencer: So our goal is to try to help. Psychological research go faster, be more robust, be more reliable and help unlock important ideas about human nature that can be of benefit to society. Speaking of that,
Malcolm: what we wanted to focus on this podcast is you recently did some research into the replication crisis, how bad it's gotten, and I think you have some theories on how it could be fixed.
Malcolm: So I'd love you to just dive into that first, explaining what the replication crisis is, its scope and your [00:02:00] research, and then going through potential
Spencer: solutions. Sure, yeah, it's a topic I think about a lot. So basically, there are many really interesting findings in psychology that have unfortunately failed to replicate, which means that basically when people try to redo the same study, collect a new sample of study participants, they just don't get the original answer.
Spencer: And that's been very disturbing. A bunch of findings that were in textbooks and that are really famously known just don't work, it seems. So some examples of this would be from the social priming literature where they do things like have someone hold a warm cup of coffee. And then people would find that there would be rated as more warm, or they'd rate things as mo
Published on 2 years, 4 months ago