If only we could save organized science from itself.

I happened to come across this post from 2015 (linked from here), and I liked the P.P.P.P.S. enough to repeat it here:

I feel bad that the whole field of psychology gets tainted by this sort of thing. The trouble is that Psychological Science is the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which I think is the main society for psychology research. The problem is not haters like me that draw attention to these papers; the problem is that this sort of work is regularly endorsed and publicized by the leading journal in the field. When the Association for Psychological Science regularly releases press releases touting this kind of noise study, it does tell us something bad about the field of psychology. Not all the work in the field, not most of the work in the field, not the most important work in the field. Psychology is important and I have a huge respect for many psychology researchers. Indeed I have a huge respect for much of the research within statistics that has been conducted by psychologists. And I say, with deep respect for the field, that it’s bad news that its leading society publicizes work that is not serious and has huge, obvious flaws. Flaws that might not have been obvious 10 or even 5 years ago, when most of us were not so aware of the problems associated with the garden of forking paths, but flaws which for the past couple of years have been widely known. They should know better; indeed I’d somehow thought they’d cleaned up their act so I was surprised to see this new paper, front and center in their leading journal.

People are like, why am I picking on the bad stuff. And I’m like, no, it’s the Association for Psychological Science that’s promoting it. I just have this little blog; they’re the society with 25,000 members, a fancy website, and, I assume, a full-time paid staff. They’re out there 24-7 making themselves look like fools, which really bothers me, because I think psychology is important. It makes me want to cry, so I laugh.