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CA
The Beauty Of Settled Science
['Scott Alexander']
Astral Codex Ten
Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research.
The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied.
It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation.
This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area.
(I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science.