Razib Khan on "Stuff I've Been Wrong About"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 238 - Razib Khan on "Stuff I've Been Wrong About"

"I used to think, if you refute the ontological argument for the existence of God and then you refute the teleological argument for the existence of God, et cetera, et cetera, you could refute the existence. I think this is very irrelevant to most people...

'“Like many people, I put too much credence in fMRI based cognitive neuroscience. Should have ignored it.”'...

'That was one of the first cases of the replication crisis. Although I think it was even before the primary replication crisis... it was these small sample sizes of brain imaging... a lot of it has turned out to be just like small sample sizes, and spurious associations because of the small sample sizes using the traditional P values. They would try to make some functional sense – like, “This is in a region of the brain associated with this, that, and this” -- but obviously, there was a lot of data dredging, lack of multiple hypothesis testing going on there.And so, I just don't know ... I assume some of it is still valid, but a lot of it was obviously just wishful thinking. And, the sexiness of the technology really sold it for a lot of people, including me... Some of it has to do with the fact that data dredging and low, bad P-value-oriented science was common in than 2000s'...

'I was recently reading some old blog posts on Overcoming Bias from I think around 2007, 2008. And it was crazy to see people, friends of mine, in the comments talking very credulously about various social science studies that we all now know are terrible.'...

'I had a friend who was a graduate student in 2006 who would tell me “All the social psychology's crap.” Everything he said was totally right... he and one other person in the field told me a lot of this stuff is not going to pan out. It's crap. People just need lines on their CV. '...

'If you just read the methodology it should be clear to you that it doesn't actually test the thing you care about... measures of whether video games cause violent behavior. And the thing they did to measure violent behavior was to measure how much hot sauce people put on a plate of food for someone else'...

'When you talk about the decline of Rome, there's been a revisionist argument that Rome didn't actually decline, and it persisted. Look at the Catholic Church… through the Dark Ages, it maintained Roman institutions.And on the surface of it that's not a totally implausible assertion. Like you could say, "Oh they became really creative in theology, and all these arguments, so Rome was still very active as an intellectual center.”

What The Fall of Rome shows is if you look at material remains -- if you look at coin hoards, if you look at architecture, if you just look at the archeology -- it's pretty obvious. You can look at the material remains as a proxy for economic surplus. And so you can see the decline in the tax base. You can see the increase in coin hoards, which means people have a certain perception of what the future is going to be like, spiking up in the fourth and fifth centuries, right when classically we did say Rome fell, right?

So whatever you think about the intellectual environment, the reality is the material environment was far poorer after Rome fell than before Rome fell.'...

'You said you now believe that some sort of complex ethical religious system was going to become dominant in the Roman empire at some point Why did you come to believe that?'

'The elite in the Hellenistic Empires tended to be ethnically Greek, and identifying only with Greek culture. And so you could assimilate to that, which happened periodically, but that's a big ask to transition your whole ethnicity.On the other hand, religion is a more discrete package, and you can still retain your ethnicity while switching your religions. So basically what I'm getting at is it allows, in an imperial system, multi-ethnic societies to bind themselves together, and have a common currency of communication, of ethical moral communication.'"