Joe Bak-Coleman: All this is to say, if 36% of claimed colors of crows fail to be observed, what can we infer? I don't think it tells us even indirectly what % of claimed colors don't exist. But it equally seems weird to conclude they all exist. And there's no direct indication about the health of crow color science

This is an interesting (if dense) read, arguing from an ontological perspective that psychological phenomena are "unsteady" and that if we view the replication crisis in that way it isn't really a crisis. Provocative, but I don't know that I can fully sign on...

"In Popperian falsificationism, falsifiability is the hallmark of science: Taking reproducibility as a defining of science was anathema to this methodology." Burgos, J. E. (2024). Getting ontologically serious about the replication crisis in psychology. doi.org/10.1037/teo0... #PhilSci #MetaSci

I get the authors decision to emphasize ontology over epistemology here, and the need to treat both as separate. But epistemology comes roaring back in when we ask how we know the observed probability (e.g. statstical whatever) maps to the propensity of the psychological phenomena.

Put differently, phenomena existing implies the potential for non-existence and if some phenomena exists others must not. There seems little reason to believe that the probabilities attached to a given experiment isolate a single phenomenon.

Whatever we observe would be a mixture of phenomena that exist, and there is no reason even to presuppose that our experiment is limited to psychological phenomena. Phenomenon a could not exist, but trying to find it dredges up propensities for b,c,d, and e to varying degrees which do exist.

I guess if wanted to keep strictly to the ontology: A white crow in green light can alter the propensity associated with green crows even if green crows do not exist.

I think, practically this winds up in a similar same place as the author where white crows exist but they don't reliably look white (failed replications for true phenomena) or they can often look green when they're white (successful rep, phenomenon doesn't exist).

Which isn't to say we cannot infer something about the existence of green and white crows but we don't get it simply from the experiment and whether it replicates or not. We may have to establish the existence of various colors of light to make sense of our green and white crows.

All this is to say, if 36% of claimed colors of crows fail to be observed, what can we infer? I don't think it tells us even indirectly what % of claimed colors don't exist. But it equally seems weird to conclude they all exist. And there's no direct indication about the health of crow color science

Dumb example that could never happen.

(We decided at the time that the camera's auto color balance system got confused in an analogue of the white&gold/blue&black dress illusion).

You need to teach crows to hold a neutral gray/grey card when you photograph them.

Imagine my confusion about what you were trying to convey here, as I scrolled by with my night filter on...

RAW files off the camera would be more useful than processed jpegs. Those are 16bit files pre-color balance. It looks like he used a telephoto so he likely has them.

Indeed. The RAW files confirmed this.

I stand by my phenomenally fast acceleration toward the bird and only the bird explanation.

Thanks what I thought the perfect temperature to cause the effect 😆

Beautiful! As if Yves Klein had painted crows!

Yah but does it replicate?

Sore subject, Joe. Four years later and I've never been able to make it happen again. I'm wondering if there is some kind of corvine effect, whereby the very action of observing corvids doing something decreases the probability that they do it again in the future.

Questionable photography practices seems more likely.

The sad part is I probably responded to this already… in a different time, 😆 when it was on twitter I mean. Many moons ago..

Probably just pressed the button wrong.

true to corvine mechanics, if you hadn't observed it it in the first place it wouldn't have happened

Likely off-topic here but emphasis on replicability in absence of tending to the omnipresent perverse incentive structures of science is a fools errand, imo.

Well could you tell forensically? I mean the way that it would have to work based off feather patterns to produce such an effect, I imagine hopefully you still have the high definition photos? they would have to be standing a certain way have a sheen to feathers for it to work I think. Idk

Sorry --- that was a bit of an inside joke. See www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

The Truth Wears Offwww.newyorker.com Is there something wrong with the scientific method?

And no worries thanks for the fun and article. 😅

I thought it was just black i could see the black and the sheen so I knew it was the suggestion to since you said blue crow .. I had already searched the internet lol it clicked haha 🤣

Maybe they really are blue, but we've learned to see them as black.

I don't know why that happened but it is cool as s hit

In part it depends on what camera -- some of them do a *lot* of reprocessing without telling the user, which can sometimes have really odd results. (iPhone cameras are getting particularly notorious for this, but straight-up digital devices may not be exempt.) 9to5mac.com/2023/01/06/m...

MKBHD claims that post-processing is ruining iPhone photos9to5mac.com YouTuber Marques Brownlee, also know as MKBHD, shared the results of his 2022 Smartphone Awards last month. And although the...

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