On the stubborn attachment to wrong ideas

Great article from Experimental History, “Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing” Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing, ego depletion, growth mindset, stereotype threat, walking slower after reading the word “Florida”—all gone for good To beat the dead horse about how “studies do not reproduce,” what if there were a way to guarantee results are always reproducible? That already exists–it’s called math. Except for a small subset of math called “experimental mathematics,” math results are always true. It’s like, “Why can’t we hold an empirical science to the same rigor as math,” and it’s because they are not the same thing? W hile it’s possible to reproduce a math result in a reasonable timeframe, say typically 3-6 months, this is not practical for studies, which can run for years and involve many subjects. “Growth mindset” cannot…