There is a well known separation between the theorist and the experimentalist mindset. He was one of the best of the experimentalists. A "soft science" guy with the math and computing skills to teach the "hard science" guys a lesson or two, despite the poor reputation of soft science guys in that area. My possibly mistaken observation is you're trying to apply theoretician morality (consensus building, rabid conformity, name dropping) to a guy who was nearly the cultural archetype of the ideal ultimate experimentalist.
Not surprisingly all his posts began with "So I temporarily doubled my daily butter intake while taking standardized psych intelligence tests before, during, and after the dietary change and the results were ..." and practically none of his blog posts began with "Like everyone else, I agree with Dr Phil's strategies for weight loss and anyone who doesn't agree with everyone else, all of the time, is inherently wrong ..."
Your judgment of his work is accurate and correct if you use theoretician criteria on his work. But he was focused on the near exact opposite, in experimentalism. And if you use the more appropriate experimentalist criteria on his experiments, he was Awesome for a soft sciences guy and could teach the supposedly elite math/CS skilled hard science guys, a thing or two about data analysis and presentation.
> There is a well known separation between the theorist and the experimentalist mindset. He was one of the best of the experimentalists.
He was a terrible experimentalist. He never used randomization or blinding; he never took into account any covariates like travel or smog (he lived in China and flew back and forth! and would still report A/B/A comparisons); he didn't even try to correct for time trends; and all of this was deliberate since he knew why you need good methodology and how abandoning all this stuff leads to systematically false results, and he went and did it all anyway. Roberts as critic was very different (and much superior to) Roberts as experimentalist.
There is a well known separation between the theorist and the experimentalist mindset. He was one of the best of the experimentalists. A "soft science" guy with the math and computing skills to teach the "hard science" guys a lesson or two, despite the poor reputation of soft science guys in that area. My possibly mistaken observation is you're trying to apply theoretician morality (consensus building, rabid conformity, name dropping) to a guy who was nearly the cultural archetype of the ideal ultimate experimentalist.
Not surprisingly all his posts began with "So I temporarily doubled my daily butter intake while taking standardized psych intelligence tests before, during, and after the dietary change and the results were ..." and practically none of his blog posts began with "Like everyone else, I agree with Dr Phil's strategies for weight loss and anyone who doesn't agree with everyone else, all of the time, is inherently wrong ..."
Your judgment of his work is accurate and correct if you use theoretician criteria on his work. But he was focused on the near exact opposite, in experimentalism. And if you use the more appropriate experimentalist criteria on his experiments, he was Awesome for a soft sciences guy and could teach the supposedly elite math/CS skilled hard science guys, a thing or two about data analysis and presentation.