Adam Mastroianni
Experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, and the author of the Experimental History newsletter, where he writes about how research actually gets done and why he thinks the institutions around it are failing.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Adam Mastroianni did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsInstruction is collaborative: students want to learn, and I want them to learn, too. Evaluation is adversarial: students want the points, and I have to make sure they don’t get too many.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsEvaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsIf my class is so boring that I have to devise an additional carrot-and-stick system to get students to pay attention, the problem is my class is boring.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsGrade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a cop at the same time.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 4th of 6 in this piece
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Our reading
Evaluation should be taken out of the classroom and given to people whose whole job it is.
Their wordsOne solution is to separate instruction and evaluation. Let teachers be teachers and cops be cops.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsEvery time we rank one another, we lose a little humanity.
↗I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com 6th of 6 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
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Their wordsIn the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all.
↗Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsReviewers are less likely to greenlight papers and grants if they’re novel, risky, or interdisciplinary.
↗Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThere’s no point in picking some studies that are convenient to replicate, doing ‘em over, and reporting “only 36% of them replicate!”
↗Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsYou simply can’t fit a thought into a sound wave.
↗You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com 1st of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsEven when we understand the words, and even when we trust them, we still have another eject button: we assume they don’t apply to us.
↗You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com 2nd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsTo impart wisdom, then, is to lay siege to someone’s mind-castle, because the only things worth being wise about are hidden behind the walls.
↗You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com 3rd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsWe do this all the time: we attempt to reach the brain through the ears, but all we end up doing is vibrating the air.
↗You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com 4th of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsYou cannot dump your bucket into someone else’s bucket.
↗You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com 5th of 5 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsAll we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 1st of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsScientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 2nd of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsIn fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 3rd of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsThe invention of peer review may have even encouraged bad research.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 4th of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsIf you look at what scientists actually do, it’s clear they don’t think peer review really matters.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 5th of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsMaking peer review harsher would also exacerbate the worst problem of all: just knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them makes you worse at thinking.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 6th of 8 in this piece
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Our reading
Peer review is one of the things genuinely wrong with academia, not a safeguard that mostly works.
Their wordsPeer review doesn’t work and there’s probably no way to fix it.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 7th of 8 in this piece
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Their wordsThis extremely bad system is worse than nothing because it fools people into thinking they’re safe when they’re not.
↗The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com 8th of 8 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsBut the point that gets mixed in is “now we should go back and double-check every psychology study.” And that, my dear Kyle, makes no sense to me.
↗Psychology might be a big stinkin’ load of hogwash and that’s just fineexperimental-history.com
- 2 months earlier
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Our reading
We know a good deal about how people actually learn, and almost nobody is ever taught it.
Their wordsWe do, in fact, know quite a bit about how people learn, and almost nobody learns it.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 1st of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsWhen you want to remember something you’ve read, do you highlight it, reread it, or summarize it afterward? Those strategies don’t work very well.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 2nd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsI’m here to tell you that learning is all about vibes.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 3rd of 7 in this piece
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Our reading
Knowledge decays fast when it goes unused, while the feeling a class left behind lasts for decades.
Their wordsFeelings, or vibes, on the other hand, seem to stick around a lot longer.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 4th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsAlmost all of education centers around knowledge and skills rather than vibes.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 5th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsUntangling them requires some knowledge, yes, but knowledge is cheap and easily acquired. What you really need is curiosity, self-efficacy, perseverance, perspective, and hope.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 6th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsThe students who ultimately succeed in learning R are not the ones who force themselves to memorize functions or do a bunch of coding drills.
↗You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?experimental-history.com 7th of 7 in this piece