Based Camp - Based Camp： Spencer Greenberg on Trying to Fix Science

00:00:00.000 Okay, here we go. Hi, everyone. We have a very, very special guest today who we have known

00:00:07.720 actually almost as long as we've known each other. We met Spencer Greenberg back in like around 2015

00:00:14.280 when he was first working on some of his projects that are now pervasively used, which is really,

00:00:20.860 really cool. He is someone that we've profoundly respected for many years. He has been running

00:00:26.580 Clearer Thinking for a ton of time, but more recently, he launched the Clearer Thinking podcast,

00:00:32.320 which is a series of interviews with incredible people that we really enjoy. I'm addicted to it

00:00:36.380 personally, so please check it out. I'll just summarize. The important point is he's probably

00:00:42.600 one of, if not the most respected social figure in the EA and rationalist movement in the New York area,

00:00:49.940 which is a very big thing because it's one of the major hubs of the movement.

00:00:53.020 Yeah. And Spencer, could you tell us what your top projects are right now?

00:00:58.120 Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. So one of the projects I run is called Clearer Thinking,

00:01:02.420 which you mentioned at clearerthinking.org. And what we do is we take interesting ideas from

00:01:07.540 psychology, economics, math, and so on that people might learn in passing. Maybe they'll learn them

00:01:13.200 in blog posts or reading books, but they don't generally apply them to their lives. And so our goal

00:01:17.360 is to make it really easy to apply these ideas to your life to try to achieve the things that you want

00:01:21.600 to achieve. So we have these interactive modules with over 70 of them right now, and you can use

00:01:25.400 them all for free. And I also do the Clearer Thinking podcast, as you mentioned. In addition

00:01:29.280 to that, we have a bunch of other projects for accelerating social science. So our goal is to

00:01:33.200 try to help psychological research go faster, be more robust, be more reliable, and help unlock

00:01:39.160 important ideas about human nature that can be a benefit to society.

00:01:44.600 Speaking of that, what we wanted to focus on this podcast is you recently did some research into

00:01:49.080 the replication crisis, how bad it's gotten, and I think you have some theories on how it could be

00:01:53.740 fixed. So I'd love for you to just dive into that. First, explaining what the replication crisis is,

00:01:58.720 its scope, and your research, and then going through potential solutions.

00:02:03.720 Sure. Yeah. It's a topic I think about a lot. So basically, there are many really interesting

00:02:08.660 findings in psychology that have unfortunately failed to replicate, which means that basically when

00:02:13.180 people try to redo the same study, collect a new sample of study participants, they just don't get the

00:02:17.920 original answer. And that's been very disturbing. A bunch of findings that were in textbooks and that

00:02:22.840 are really famously known just don't work, it seems. So some examples of this would be from the social

00:02:28.880 priming literature, where they do things like have someone hold a warm cup of coffee, and then people

00:02:34.360 would find that there would be rated as more warm, or they'd rate things as more warm, because we make

00:02:39.020 these psychological metaphors. Well, it's a really cool sounding idea, but it doesn't necessarily replicate.

00:02:43.600 Or another example, when you prime people with words that are related to being older,

00:02:48.420 the people then walk slower. Well, again, a really cool concept, but it didn't replicate when

00:02:52.740 people tried it again. And so the question is, why are so many findings not replicating? And how

00:02:58.460 pervasive a problem is this? And so looking at the many different replication studies that have

00:03:03.440 occurred, my best guess is that from top journals, from very top journals, probably about 40% of the

00:03:08.840 results don't replicate. That's enormous. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty shocking. Some people,

00:03:16.980 their response is, well, science is hard, human nature is complicated. What do we really expect?

00:03:21.780 But my view is that no, 40% not replicating is way, way too high. It should be something

00:03:26.920 on the order of 5% to 10%. I think that might be reasonable. But the problem with 40% is it's almost

00:03:31.540 a coin flip. If you read a paper, will this result hold up, right?

00:03:35.140 Yeah. So do you think that this is, one thing that might be fun to go into for the audience

00:03:41.300 is how does this system work? Like the scientific system that gets things in these journals,

00:03:48.060 and where do you believe it's failing? Yeah. So it's an interesting question why

00:03:53.940 this is happening, because you might think, isn't this what peer review is designed to prevent,

00:03:58.540 right? People are submitting to these top journals, experts in their fields are reviewing the papers.

00:04:02.600 But I think the fundamental problem there, it's not that peer reviewers want to let in garbage

00:04:07.240 papers. They don't really have any reason to let in garbage papers. They don't get paid more if

00:04:11.060 they let in bad papers. They don't get more prestige if they let in bad papers. No, the reviewers are

00:04:15.000 reading the papers and trying to let in the good stuff. The problem is that whether something

00:04:19.280 replicates or not is not generally visible from reading the paper.

00:04:23.440 Oh, because I was going to ask, are there warning signs?

00:04:26.020 Yeah. Well, in recent years, there's been a lot of interesting things learned about the warning

00:04:32.480 signs. But people didn't really know what the warning signs were necessarily in the past. And

00:04:38.400 it's very difficult for people to tell what is a legitimate paper and what's not. I can tell you

00:04:42.340 about some of the warning signs. One is about p-values, which are a rather technical subject and

00:04:48.120 something that is confusing people. But the basic gist of a p-value is when you're testing a hypothesis

00:04:52.800 using statistics, let's say you say, well, if I give people this psychological treatment,

00:04:58.280 then they'll have less anxiety at the end of the study on average than if I don't give them the

00:05:01.780 psychological treatment. And then you want to know, well, did the result that I got exceed what

00:05:07.460 you'd expect by chance? So let's say you find that people who got the psychological treatment had

00:05:12.240 an average anxiety rating of 5 out of 10, whereas those that didn't get it had an average anxiety

00:05:16.200 rating of 7 out of 10. So that looks good. It looks like the psychological treatment worked. But the

00:05:19.940 question is, well, it's 5 compared to 7. Is that really good enough that we can conclude the

00:05:24.000 treatment works? And so what you do is you compute what's known as the p-value. And the p-value is

00:05:28.840 basically saying, what's the chance I would get a result that's this different? So a difference this

00:05:33.680 large or larger, if in fact there was no effect. So if the p-value is really small, let's say it's 0.01,

00:05:41.220 that means there's only a 1% chance you get a result this extreme or more extreme if there was no effect.

00:05:45.720 And so that probably is not due to chance. Whereas if you get a higher p-value, like 0.3,

00:05:51.440 that means there's a 30% chance you'd get a result this extreme or more extreme if there was no effect.

00:05:56.040 And so maybe it might be due to chance. So the idea of the p-values is the smaller they are,

00:05:59.780 the less likely the result is to be due to chance. Now, one of the really interesting things that has

00:06:03.800 been found empirically, and we've actually looked at this, we looked at over, I think it was over 200

00:06:08.440 different replication studies looking at what traits actually predict what replicates and what

00:06:13.440 doesn't. And smaller p-values in the original paper are associated with better replication.

00:06:18.880 So if the p-value was, let's say 0.04, that's still considered statistically significant because

00:06:25.740 by the definition of statistically significant, anything below 0.05 is considered statistically

00:06:29.740 significant. And so it may well have been published as a true finding, but it's less likely to replicate

00:06:34.820 than if the original p-value had been 0.001. And so part of the reason this is believed to be the case

00:06:40.420 is that people do kind of fishy statistics to get the p-value down to be just below 0.05 so that they

00:06:46.060 can go publish the paper. So my question is, I mean, do we ever see with really low p-values,

00:06:51.780 they're not being replicable as well? Because I mean, my understanding is that you just should

00:06:56.100 almost never see that. I mean, that seems like such an obvious thing. If the p-value is low,

00:07:00.240 it's more likely to replicate. But are we still seeing instances in which the p-value is low and it's

00:07:04.740 failing to replicate? That's a really good question. Because let's say you had a really low p-value.

00:07:08.480 There's only a one in 100,000 chance you get a result this extreme if in fact there was no effect,

00:07:13.980 right? Well, that's really strange. Does that mean there's definitely an effect? Well, it turns out

00:07:18.760 there can be other reasons besides just a statistical fluke, a false positive, why something

00:07:25.760 wouldn't replicate. For example, there could have been a mistake in the original study, either a

00:07:29.680 mistake in the analysis, right? Maybe they just screwed up the Cisco analysis and it wasn't really a low

00:07:33.760 p-value. Or maybe there was a mistake in the design where people weren't allocated their groups

00:07:38.100 properly or other things like this. Of course, there's also the possibility of fraud. That could

00:07:41.440 be another reason. They could have just made up the data, right? So there could be various reasons why

00:07:45.040 even with a small p-value, it won't replicate, but it's certainly more likely to replicate.

00:07:49.200 So what was your study in this space where you recently did a study in this space? Can you

00:07:53.100 elaborate on that? So we launched a project called Transparent Replications. If you want the

00:07:58.200 details, you can find on our website, clearthinking.org. And the idea of our project is we want to

00:08:03.360 replicate new psychology papers coming out in the top general science journals. So the Journal of

00:08:09.060 Science and the Journal of Nature, which are just incredibly famous journals that lots of people

00:08:12.220 want to publish in. And our goal is that we want to get to the point where we're doing so many of

00:08:16.960 these replications that if you are a psychologist going to publish in these journals, that there's

00:08:20.860 more than 50% chance we're going to replicate you. And if we can achieve that goal, then it means that

00:08:26.860 people submitting to these journals are suddenly going to have to grapple with the fact that there's a good

00:08:31.360 chance they're going to be replicated. And therefore, they're going to have a different incentive to do

00:08:34.860 their research in a way that makes sure it replicates. Because if it doesn't replicate,

00:08:38.100 people are just going to find out. Now, this is really interesting. So one question I have is,

00:08:43.720 have you guys worked with, I mean, if there are still really no repercussions for being unreplicable,

00:08:49.840 what are the extent of the repercussions you expect with a project like this? And how do you expect

00:08:55.760 the academic field to react more broadly? I mean, if you call out high status people within the

00:09:01.040 academic field, the academic field is going to begin to frame you like a villain or negatively

00:09:06.020 because you are a threat to them, like you're this new exogenous threat. How have you seen them react

00:09:11.420 to it? And do you think that they will apply heavy penalties to the people who publish unreplicable

00:09:18.640 findings? Yeah, those are really good questions. A lot of interesting things to dig into there.

00:09:22.900 First of all, we've seen a really positive response largely from the academic community about

00:09:26.280 our project, which was really nice to see. I think there's a lot of acknowledgement and an

00:09:30.540 increasing acknowledgement that there's a real problem and the standards have to change.

00:09:34.420 The reality is, while it might be good for one individual researcher to push through crap,

00:09:38.880 it's really, really bad for the field. If you're a psychologist, the value of you being a psychologist

00:09:45.120 has declined and declined and declined as the general public has become aware of all these issues

00:09:49.460 to the point where some people are just not trusting the papers anymore. That's terrible for the field.

00:09:53.600 So although it is kind of a collective action problem, it is really good for the field to raise

00:09:57.800 its standards and it will actually benefit academic psychologists as a group. So I think

00:10:02.120 that many of them realize, wait a minute, if we raise our standards and we can show the public

00:10:06.600 that our standards are raised, it will actually raise our prestige and raise our credibility.

00:10:10.220 That being said, it's never fun to be told that your paper doesn't replicate, right? Nobody likes to hear

00:10:16.320 that. Even truth seekers, it's upsetting to hear that. But we really try to be fair to researchers and we try to make

00:10:22.480 it clear that we're being fair. So what we do is we contact them. We tell them that we're running a

00:10:26.640 replication, that their paper was selected through this systematic process we use. We're not singling

00:10:31.740 them out. We use this process to select them. That's kind of clear, clearly defined. And then we

00:10:36.900 say, here's our exact rebuilt copy of your study. Please look at it and tell us if in any way it deviates

00:10:43.080 from your original research. Because we want to be 100% fair to your research. And we want to make sure

00:10:48.040 that if it doesn't replicate, it's because the original paper didn't replicate, not because we screwed

00:10:51.300 something up. And we also give them a chance to respond on our final report if they want to give

00:10:55.420 any comments. And if they find any mistakes in our work, they can of course tell us and we'll correct

00:10:58.500 those mistakes. And so how is all this funded? So we, thankfully we have a grant. We're really

00:11:05.140 grateful to the, we've actually got two grants. We're really grateful to those that gave us grants

00:11:08.900 to help us do this. What's the end goal in terms of how you hope academia is going to shift going

00:11:16.700 forward, at least like social science research. Is it like, are people going to have different

00:11:21.440 methodologies? Are you also trying to, I don't know, make alternate processes available or show

00:11:29.440 people better ways of doing things? What's your goal?

00:11:33.060 So my personal goal is to make psychology into a science that is better at figuring out

00:11:38.820 important truths so that those truths can come out and better society and better human lives.

00:11:45.040 Right. So that's really what I want to happen. And academia is really the only game in town,

00:11:49.600 pretty much. There are some companies that do some psychological research, but a lot of it is

00:11:52.480 locked away. It doesn't ever get out there in the world. And so if without academia producing

00:11:57.760 important truths about humans, like we're just not getting a lot of them. Right. So my hope is that

00:12:02.960 with a project like this, we can help work in the right direction to get scientists to produce more

00:12:08.420 robust findings that then can benefit society. Now I will say also with something like this,

00:12:15.440 it really does hinge on a change in incentives, right? So in order for our project to work,

00:12:20.180 we need it to be the case that people do their research differently. And I think that while people

00:12:25.340 are often resistant to hearing that their own work didn't replicate, I do think that other researchers,

00:12:30.280 when they see that and they say, ah, this paper didn't replicate, it does really greatly diminish

00:12:34.400 their belief in that paper. And I think they're much less like it is cited if they know it hasn't

00:12:38.800 replicated. They're like, ah, that didn't replicate. So my hope is that it really does act as a

00:12:43.340 significant incentive to doing better research.

00:12:46.060 I really admire the work you're doing in reforming this kind of academic research,

00:12:50.320 but I also kind of want to touch on what we might call like renegade research or like the

00:12:55.080 resurgence of gentleman scientist research, specifically because you're kind of one of

00:13:00.020 our heroes on that front. You've done a ton of research through clearer thinking. You also,

00:13:04.680 you created guided track and positively, which have really made it possible for many people to

00:13:11.500 do research on their own without being.

00:13:14.600 Quick side note. So these softwares, if any of you like to do your own research or you want to go

00:13:19.460 out there and inexpensively run a study, they make it possible to get participants at reasonable costs

00:13:25.540 and they make it possible to run and design a study reasonably.

00:13:29.260 Yeah. So guided track specifically enables you to create these surveys. It even includes,

00:13:34.620 and this is, you don't need to learn how to code. It's so easy to use. And this is what Spencer was

00:13:38.500 working on when we first met him. People like Ayla use it for her surveys and then positively enables

00:13:44.020 you to recruit audiences to fill out those surveys. So if you're not famous like Ayla and you can get a

00:13:49.000 large sample size. In fact, she, I think still even uses positively for sample sizes as well,

00:13:53.060 like for participants. So yeah, like these two things together are really making it possible

00:13:57.880 for gentlemen or gentlewomen scientists to do these things. Like what are your thoughts on

00:14:03.100 the future of renegade science? And are you thinking about additional tools or processes

00:14:09.320 to give to people outside of academia? I mean, clearly you're trying to reform academia. I think

00:14:13.560 that's beautiful, but what can non-academics learn about doing good social science and other research

00:14:18.840 using your tools and other tools to do these things?

00:14:23.280 Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned our tools because that is part of our mission is to get

00:14:26.260 answers to these important questions, not just through academia, but through all means. And that

00:14:30.680 also means to independent researchers who might be doing stuff outside of academia. So yeah, we

00:14:35.660 created positively and got a track to make it easier. We have a new tool working called hypothesize to help

00:14:39.620 with the data analysis as well. So if you think about doing research, you've got to build your study,

00:14:44.840 which is what guided track is for. You've got to recruit your sample, which is what positively is for.

00:14:47.940 You've got to analyze your data and that's what hypothesis is for. So we're trying to create the

00:14:50.820 trifecta there. Yeah. I think there's just a ton of potential to do interesting research.

00:14:55.280 For example, you mentioned AILA. I mean, AILA has done a really interesting research on sexuality

00:14:59.340 that is just really different than what academics have done as far as I can tell.

00:15:03.800 And I think it really adds something to knowledge of the topic. So I'd love to see more of this. And

00:15:08.300 we do a lot of our own research at Clear Thinking. For example, we ran a randomized control trial on

00:15:12.720 habit formation where we implemented a habit formation intervention. We tested it where we tracked

00:15:17.700 people over, I think it was about six weeks to see if they stuck with their habit using our tool

00:15:21.160 versus a control group that didn't have access to our tool. And we were able to show that way

00:15:25.280 that our tool actually improved people's habit formations. You can actually use it for free

00:15:28.640 on our website. It's called the daily ritual tool, clearthing.org. So that's the kind of study

00:15:32.920 we like to run, but we have a bunch of studies running most of the time testing a whole bunch

00:15:36.820 of hypotheses. You know what I'd really like to see emerge is a gentleman scientist network

00:15:43.900 of the various people like Ayla, like you, who are running studies outside of academia and then

00:15:49.820 disseminate them through social media. Because I would really, I mean, the core reason I was

00:15:54.980 thinking it'd be really great if there was a network like this is one that makes it easier for people

00:15:58.180 to find these and potentially even create like a collated journal that's just specifically these

00:16:02.340 types of people. But I would really love if your service at one day could run to see if these

00:16:09.620 studies replicate at a higher or lower rate than the studies coming out of academia and traditional

00:16:14.820 journals. Because I would suspect that, for example, Ayla studies would replicate at a higher rate due to

00:16:21.060 her large sample sizes, despite the fact that there's a perception that it's lower quality research

00:16:26.740 than what's coming out of academia. It's interesting. So when someone is self-taught, I mean, I think

00:16:32.220 there are advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that there may be methods they don't understand

00:16:37.200 very well or best practices that they just blow past because they haven't been taught about them.

00:16:43.060 And I think that is a real concern. And I think if you ask Ayla, I bet she'll say that her earlier studies

00:16:47.240 are much worse than her ones today because she's picking up on some best practices and learning some

00:16:51.340 of the things that maybe she didn't know going into it. On the other hand, a really nice advantage of being

00:16:55.340 outside of academia is you don't have certain pressures on you to write certain kinds of papers.

00:16:59.980 You don't have pressures to constantly publish. And so you can kind of take your time more.

00:17:04.480 For example, in one of our lines of research, we ran something like 15 different studies

00:17:09.100 before we put anything out as a result, because we just really wanted to figure out what was true

00:17:13.860 about the topic. And that's how long it took us to feel confident we knew the answer. We just didn't

00:17:17.560 feel the pressure to just put something out immediately just because, oh, wow, we need three

00:17:21.180 papers right now in order to be on the tenure track, right? So I think that's a big advantage.

00:17:25.820 When I think about really good research, I think of it as a few different things coming together,

00:17:30.660 really high level skill, which might involve training, but also might be self-taught skill

00:17:35.920 and really high levels of truth-seeking and those things kind of multiplying together.

00:17:41.760 So if you have someone who has no skill whatsoever in doing research, I think it's fair to say they're

00:17:45.920 going to have no output. So zero times anything is zero. On the other hand, if you have someone

00:17:49.700 who's absolutely no truth-seeking, they're completely indifferent. Well, they're essentially

00:17:52.920 going to just make up information, right? And so again, you get a zero. And so it's like this

00:17:57.120 truth-seekingness times a skill that come together to create good research. And I think

00:18:00.840 one thing that independent researchers often have going for them is they tend to be really

00:18:03.720 truth-seeking because it tends to be why they're motivated in the first place, right? They don't

00:18:07.400 have the career pressure. They just really want to know about this topic. Yeah. Paul Graham recently

00:18:12.460 released an essay on doing great work. And like the TLDR of it is get into fields where you have a good

00:18:19.700 aptitude and where you're super self-motivated and curious, which there's the truth-seeking,

00:18:23.840 there's the skill and aptitude. And then specifically look for the gaps in current

00:18:28.200 knowledge where there seems to be not good explanations or just not a lot of research

00:18:33.440 or attention. And I think what's really telling there is this really points toward or in favor

00:18:38.760 of the renegade scientist camp because in academia, it's hard sometimes to get funding, to get academic

00:18:45.480 support, to get someone to work with or to get funding when it is one of those gaps because that

00:18:51.460 that may not be where the money is. That may not be where the institutional support is or the

00:18:55.240 attention or the prestige. So it gets us really excited. The one final question I wanted to ask you

00:19:00.900 is of the studies that you have ran, which was the most surprising result to you or the result that

00:19:06.580 changed your world perspective most? Oh, that's a great question. I meant to think about it for a moment.

00:19:11.960 I keep having all these different ones go through my head and I'm like, nah, that wasn't that surprising

00:19:33.620 or that one didn't change my view that much. I'm worried that every social science thing boils down

00:19:39.400 to use it or lose it. People are lazy. It's really hard to change. I can't think beyond that.

00:19:48.560 Actually, there is one result that comes to mind. We haven't released it yet because we're still

00:19:52.820 analyzing it. So I'm a little reluctant to talk about it, but I will tell, I'll talk about it

00:19:56.300 preliminarily, but like with caveat, we're still analyzing. And so what we actually end up concluding

00:20:01.200 will be seen. But we ran a study on decision-making that actually completely shocked me. We put people

00:20:07.860 through a decision-making protocol where they kind of really like had to go through every single

00:20:13.120 like kind of pro and con related decision. And again, they actually had worse, they were less

00:20:17.460 happy with their decisions as followed up like months later when they actually knew the outcome

00:20:21.900 of the decision. And so I'm still processing what exactly that means and why that came out. And we still

00:20:27.740 have a lot of work to do to understand that result. But I think if that ends up holding up, I think

00:20:31.920 that will be the most surprising one to me that that's getting some things. Yeah.

00:20:36.180 That is fascinating. And something I would tell our audience, so the way I really want to wrap up

00:20:40.200 this episode for our audience is one of the biggest studies that we've ever done in terms of changing

00:20:44.440 our world perspective was the study that we ran using data that you had collected for a completely

00:20:51.920 different study. So you had collected data to try to find out what correlated with the way that you

00:20:58.500 voted in the last presidential election cycle. But one of the things that you asked people was how

00:21:04.060 many kids they had. And it was that data set that allowed us to look at and find out what was really

00:21:08.780 correlating with high fertility. And so there's a few things I would impress upon our audience,

00:21:14.140 which is one, if you do want to do a study, you can go out there and do it yourself. We're going to put

00:21:19.620 links below here to all of these products that allow you to go out and run these studies yourself.

00:21:23.780 But two, the great thing about independent researchers, and you can do this to some extent

00:21:28.700 even with professional researchers, is if you have an idea, that doesn't mean you necessarily

00:21:33.300 need to collect the data yourself. You can reach out to someone like Spencer or someone like Ayla

00:21:38.220 or someone like us. And if we've run a similar study in the past and we still have the data in

00:21:42.460 like a shareable format, we can share it with you, which can allow you to do deeper, more interesting

00:21:48.720 digs on even subjects that might be really tangential. So that's a really fun way that

00:21:53.500 you can approach things. And if any of our listeners do like really interesting studies,

00:21:57.600 we'd love to have you on. And this is, I will say to that, there's also this norm that's been

00:22:02.240 changing where people have been getting better at publishing their data sets. We try to publish our

00:22:06.140 data sets most of the time. And a lot more psychologists are publishing their data sets. So you can just

00:22:10.780 find more and more data out there to test hypotheses that you already have. And some data might be able to

00:22:14.900 help answer a question in just 10 minutes of analyzing it. That's really exciting.

00:22:19.260 That's spectacular. Well, be sure to check out his podcast,

00:22:22.180 the Spencer Greenberg Clearer Thinking Podcast. Clearer Thinking is Spencer Greenberg. Yeah.

00:22:25.640 Oh, sorry. You can just Google it or find it in podcasty locations.

00:22:30.860 Yeah. And give it a good review because it's so good. More people need to listen to it.

00:22:33.860 Give it a good review. Yes. Skip subscribing to this one today. Just give his podcast a good review.

00:22:39.800 You're doing God's work, friends. Good. Well, I'm looking forward to our next conversation already.

00:22:44.820 Spencer, and we'll see you soon. Thanks for having me on.

Based Camp - August 08, 2023

Based Camp： Spencer Greenberg on Trying to Fix Science

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