I’d say “useful folklore” is by definition better than useless.
The original quote was a scientist talking about finding deep theories of how people work. You can statistically validate such a theory, but the statistics themselves do not tell you anything about how something works.
More specific example: the recent link about how expressing your goals leads to them failing in a certain number of cases. This is a nice statistic to quote, but it doesn’t really say why, despite the attached theorizing about social energies and so forth. In my comment on that post, I mentioned several mechanisms I’ve observed for how a public commitment can lead to failure, and NONE of them were the social mechanism posited in the original article. (Which isn’t to say I haven’t also seen that mechanism at work.)
The point is that without a good idea of what to look for, vaguely obtained statistics are not very useful. You can potentially validate a good model with statistics, but by their very nature, statistics are a measurement of what you don’t know.
If X% of people fail when they make a public commitment, what does that tell us about the other 100-X%? What about those same people under different circumstances? Such statistics say nothing about HOW the failure or success actually occurs, which is the one thing we most want to know in the scientific/epistemic context—a true model of behavior.
In contrast, marketing, pickup, and self-help are instrumental fields, where not having a “true” model is not necessarily a problem. But the quote is from a scientist, talking about scientific usefulness.
The original quote was a scientist talking about finding deep theories of how people work. You can statistically validate such a theory, but the statistics themselves do not tell you anything about how something works.
More specific example: the recent link about how expressing your goals leads to them failing in a certain number of cases. This is a nice statistic to quote, but it doesn’t really say why, despite the attached theorizing about social energies and so forth. In my comment on that post, I mentioned several mechanisms I’ve observed for how a public commitment can lead to failure, and NONE of them were the social mechanism posited in the original article. (Which isn’t to say I haven’t also seen that mechanism at work.)
The point is that without a good idea of what to look for, vaguely obtained statistics are not very useful. You can potentially validate a good model with statistics, but by their very nature, statistics are a measurement of what you don’t know.
If X% of people fail when they make a public commitment, what does that tell us about the other 100-X%? What about those same people under different circumstances? Such statistics say nothing about HOW the failure or success actually occurs, which is the one thing we most want to know in the scientific/epistemic context—a true model of behavior.
In contrast, marketing, pickup, and self-help are instrumental fields, where not having a “true” model is not necessarily a problem. But the quote is from a scientist, talking about scientific usefulness.