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meta science
My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all. However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I certainly was.
In 2011, an American psychologist named Daryl Bem proved the impossible. He showed that precognition — the ability to sense the future — is real. His study was explosive, and shook the very foundations of psychology. University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht was shocked to find that research papers in his own area of research no longer held water. They could not be replicated under the filter of more rigorous methodology.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies self-control, has found that when people report deliberately using willpower, they succeed about half the time. When they do not report making that deliberate effort, they still succeed about one-third of the time.
When researchers asked people whether they’d rather get an empathetic response from a human or from AI, human responses won by a wide margin. When the same researchers actually showed them the responses, AI won by a wider one. People who said they preferred human responses rated the AI replies as more empathetic, more validating, and even better at making them feel heard.
The most recent evidence comes from a Penn State and University of Toronto team led by Joshua Wenger, published in January in Communications Psychology. Across four studies, participants were given the choice between receiving an empathetic response from a human or from ChatGPT. They picked humans 57% to 62% of the time.
My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all. However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I certainly was.
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