Narratively: Nick Brown Smelled Bull

From http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/nick-brown-smelled-bull/



I thought this was a fun read. I was happy to see that Nick Brown got Alan Sokal involved in his paper. No better person for a job like this!

Quote:

In scrutinizing Fredrickson and Losada's work, Brown happened upon a line in their 2005 paper that caught his attention: “Losada (1999) established the equivalence between his control parameter, c, and the Lorenzian control parameter, r. Using the above equation, it is known that the positivity ratio equivalent to r = 24.7368 is 2.9013.” “So I started looking for where that formula came from," he says. He dug out a famed 1963 paper by the American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz on nonlinear aspects of fluid mechanics, a subdiscipline of fluid dynamics—or the study of liquids and gases in motion. “I couldn’t read most of it,” Brown says. “It’s a proper physics paper. But I started digging into it, and I managed to find one equation that I could read, and which when I plugged in the numbers”—the constants that Lorenz chose for convenience in 1963—“came out with the positivity ratio.” “I thought, ‘Yes, I’ve got it.’” It seemed a case of numbers fudging. In a valid fluid dynamics problem, the numbers plugged into the equation must correlate to the properties of the fluid being studied. But in attempting to draw an equivalence between the physical flow of liquids and the emotional “flow” of human beings, Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.

Assuming I am understanding this correctly, I'm simply amazed that anyone could slip this past peer review. Apparently if one is (thought to be) like the other (way to assume your conclusion!), one can simply use a constant derived from one context, to any arbitrary level of precision, in the other context without needing any empirical backing?

Quote:

Some said they weren’t informed on the issue, and couldn’t comment. Others said they knew about the 2005 paper and had cited it, but with qualifications. “My opinion of the paper has always been that it was a metaphor, disguised as modeling,” said David Pincus, a psychologist at Chapman University who specializes in the application of chaos theory to psychology

Again, metaphor "disguised as modeling" should never, ever, ever have made it through peer review. Shameful! :mad:

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=267251&goto=newpost