Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.

Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever.

这是一个合理的想法：随着过去10-15年复制危机的展开，一堆心理现象已被揭穿并永远被抛弃。

Power posing , ego depletion , growth mindset , stereotype threat , walking slower after reading the word “Florida” —all gone for good.

强势姿态、自我损耗、成长型思维、刻板印象威胁、读完“佛罗里达”这个词后走得更慢——一切都一去不复返了。

Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead.

This isn’t true.

这不是真的。

All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths.

所有这些想法都继续存在，大多数都没有因他们的死亡消息而畏惧。

Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one , this one , and this one .

现在已经没有人称之为“权力姿势”了，但是你仍然可以找到很多关于“体现”和“扩展姿势”的新研究，比如这个，这个，还有这个。

Ego depletion studies keep coming out .

自我损耗的研究不断涌现。

I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026.

据我统计，仅在 2026 年前三个月，就发表了一千多篇关于成长心态的论文。

People are even doing variations on the slow-walking study, but now in virtual reality .

人们甚至对慢走研究进行了变体，但现在是在虚拟现实中。

This leads to some absurd situations.

这会导致一些荒谬的情况。

One psychologist who used to work on stereotype threat now disavows the theory entirely : “I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.” But another psychologist claims that “stereotype threat is real and virtually universal [...] there is a lot of evidence supporting [its] existence (and impact)”.

We’re not arguing about whether stereotype threat is powerful or weak, or whether it is pervasive or rare, but whether it is obviously alive or obviously dead .

That’s literally the premise of a Monty Python sketch .

这实际上就是 Monty Python 草图的前提。

It might seem like the way to resolve these disputes is to weigh up all the evidence, meta-analyze all the data, deploy your p- curves , your moderator analyses, and your tests for heterogeneity, maybe even run a big, multi-lab, preregistered replication.

Do all that and then we’ll finally know whether these effects are real or not!

做完这一切，我们最终就会知道这些效果是否真实！

This is a trap.

这是一个陷阱。

We have spent the past decade doing exactly those things , and yet here we are.

在过去的十年里，我们一直在做这些事情，但我们却做到了这一点。

Clearly, no amount of data-collecting, number-crunching, or bias-correcting is going to lay these theories to rest, nor will it return them to the land of the living.

We need a different approach.

我们需要一种不同的方法。

And so we must turn, as we so often do, to the source of all truly important ideas in the philosophy of science: the sci-fi universe of Halo .

因此，我们必须像经常做的那样，转向科学哲学中所有真正重要思想的根源：《光环》的科幻宇宙。

In Halo , Spartan super soldiers never officially die; they are only ever listed as “missing in action” .

在《光环》中，斯巴达超级士兵从未正式死亡；他们只被列为“行动失踪”。

(This is meant to keep morale high among a hyper-militarized human culture that is on the verge of being exterminated by evil aliens.) I think we should adopt a similar scheme for scientific phenomena: they never die.

They merely become embarrassing.

他们只会变得尴尬。

This isn’t how science is supposed to work, of course.

当然，这不是科学应该如何运作的。

The secret sauce of science is supposed to be falsifiability : it ain’t science unless you can kill it.

科学的秘密武器应该是可证伪性：除非你能杀死它，否则它就不是科学。

If I claim that all swans are white, and you show up with a black swan, then I’m supposed to bid a tearful goodbye to my theory and send it to that big farm upstate where it can frolic and play with all the other failed hypotheses.

如果我声称所有天鹅都是白色的，而你却带着一只黑天鹅出现，那么我就应该含泪告别我的理论，并将它送到北部的那个大农场，在那里它可以嬉戏玩耍，与所有其他失败的假设一起玩耍。

Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it.

在你真正尝试之前，伪造听起来很简单。

You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black?

你带着你的黑天鹅出现，我没有承认失败，而是说：“嗯，它真的是黑的吗？

Is it actually a swan?

它真的是天鹅吗？

Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.

对我来说，它更像是一只看起来暗淡的鸭子！”我们会发表相互对立的论文，直到生命的终结。

Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it.

And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases , few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents.

而且因为有这么多人有这么多不同的想法和偏见，所以几乎没有理论会留下零追随者。

For instance, there are still physics PhDs trying to prove that the sun orbits the Earth .

例如，仍然有物理学博士试图证明太阳绕地球运行。

That might be disturbing, but it’s also necessary—if no one was ever willing to entertain crazy ideas, we wouldn’t have any scientific progress at all.

这可能令人不安，但也是必要的——如果没有人愿意接受疯狂的想法，我们就根本不会取得任何科学进步。

We have to keep some kooks around because occasionally, as the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “a crackpot hits the jackpot”.

我们必须保留一些怪人，因为正如经济历史学家乔尔·莫克尔所说，“一个疯子偶尔会中大奖”。

1

The persistence and necessity of kookiness means we’ll never be able to say that a theory is well and truly dead.

怪异的持续性和必要性意味着我们永远无法说一个理论已经彻底死亡。

We can, however, say when a theory is embarrassing .

然而，当一个理论令人尴尬时，我们可以说。

If I deny the possibility of a black swan, and you produce something that looks awfully like a black swan, it’s still possible that I will prevail—maybe we’ll discover your black swan is actually a white swan covered in soot, or DNA analysis will vindicate my “dusky duck” theory.

But if I didn’t expect a black swan-looking thing to exist at all, my hypothesis is a lot less plausible than it was before, and it’s much more embarrassing to believe in it.

This is the situation we appear to be in with many theories in psychology.

这就是我们在心理学中的许多理论所面临的情况。

We can’t say whether they’re “real” or not.

我们不能说它们是否“真实”。

Somewhere out there, the Spartans may live on.

在那里的某个地方，斯巴达人可能会继续存在。

But if we’ve been studying something for decades and people look at all the evidence and they still doubt whether it exists at all, we have to admit: that’s cringe.

但如果我们研究某件事几十年了，而人们在查看所有证据后仍然怀疑它是否存在，我们就必须承认：这是令人畏缩的。

Cringe doesn’t mean wrong!

畏缩并不意味着错误！

Continental drift was cringe.

大陆漂移令人畏缩。

2 Germ theory was cringe.

2 细菌理论令人畏惧。

3 Smallpox vaccination was cringe.

3 天花疫苗接种令人畏缩。

4 All of them went from mortifying to undeniable.

4 所有这些都从令人羞愧变为无可否认。

Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory.

也许真正革命性的理论必须遵循这个轨迹。

If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise.

如果一个科学想法还很年轻，而且并不令人畏惧，那么它可能没有希望。

But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit.

但如果它老了而且仍然畏缩，它可能没有任何优点。

That’s why I am not optimistic about any big-name theory in psychology that has gone the wrong direction on the Cool-Cringe Continuum over the past ten years—it’s not impossible for them to make a comeback, but it’s not the way things usually go.

Still, no matter how ropey things get for these theories, it makes no sense to write them off as “not real”.

尽管如此，无论这些理论变得多么棘手，将它们视为“不真实”是没有意义的。

If stereotype threat truly doesn’t exist, that means you could never, under any circumstances, run a study that produces results in line with the theory.

That’s a crazy claim to make!

这是一个疯狂的主张！

We don’t have nearly enough evidence to support such a conclusion, and we never will.

我们没有足够的证据来支持这样的结论，而且我们永远不会。

5

In fact, insisting that certain effects are “not real” merely provides an incentive for people to keep studying them, because it makes their results newsworthy: “Look, we’re proving the existence of a supposedly nonexistent effect!” But of course it’s rare for anyone to actually prove such a thing.

In fact, insisting that certain effects are “not real” merely provides an incentive for people to keep studying them, because it makes their results newsworthy: “Look, we’re proving the existence of a supposedly nonexistent effect!”但当然，很少有人能真正证明这一点。

Instead, they are almost always “proving” that, given infinitely flexible theories and infinite ways to test them, you can produce some small effect that kind-of sort-of accords with some version of the hypothesis, broadly construed.

No one should claim that this is impossible, and no one should get credit for showing that it is possible.

没有人应该声称这是不可能的，也没有人应该因为证明这是可能而受到赞扬。

If we appreciated how hard it is to kill a theory for good, maybe we’d stop wasting our time trying to do exactly that.

如果我们认识到永远扼杀一个理论是多么困难，也许我们就不会再浪费时间试图做到这一点。

For instance, ego depletion—the idea that willpower is a “muscle” that can get “fatigued” by overuse—has been the subject of at least three big replication attempts.

This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2016 found no effect (N = 2,141).

从 2016 年开始的预注册多实验室复制没有发现任何效果 (N = 2,141)。

This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 also found no effect (N = 3,531).

从 2022 年开始的预注册多实验室复制也没有发现任何效果 (N = 3,531)。

But oops, this other preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 did find an effect (N = 1,775).

但哎呀，这个从 2022 年开始的其他预注册多实验室复制确实发现了效果（N = 1,775）。

At this point, maybe we should cut it out with all the preregistered multi-lab replications and just admit this theory is never going to die, and to spend any more effort investigating it would be embarrassing for all involved.

Science snobs love to claim that this problem is unique to the social sciences, as if falsification is a breeze everywhere else.

科学势利小人喜欢声称这个问题是社会科学所独有的，好像在其他地方证伪都是轻而易举的事。

But it isn’t.

但事实并非如此。

For example, when Arthur Eddington went out to test the theory of relativity by photographing an eclipse in 1919 , he ended up throwing out several pictures that “didn’t work”.

例如，1919 年，当阿瑟·爱丁顿 (Arthur Eddington) 出去通过拍摄日食来测试相对论时，他最终扔掉了几张“不起作用”的照片。

He reasoned that the sun had heated the glass of his telescope unevenly, throwing off the results.

他推断太阳对望远镜玻璃的加热不均匀，导致了结果的偏差。

Was that fair?

这公平吗？

Was it right?

是对的吗？

Were those pictures legitimate and failed tests of the theory, or were they tainted by faulty equipment?

这些图片是合法的但没有通过理论测试，还是被有缺陷的设备污染了？

Now that other results have independently supported Einstein’s theory, Eddington’s choice to ditch the disconfirming data seems appropriate and wise.

既然其他结果已经独立支持了爱因斯坦的理论，爱丁顿选择放弃那些不一致的数据似乎是适当和明智的。

But in the moment, it sure looked like p -hacking (where the p in this case stands for “photograph”).

但目前来看，它确实看起来像 p 黑客（这里的 p 代表“照片”）。

6

When you omit the inconvenient details, Eddington’s adventure seems like a classic case of falsification.

当你忽略那些不方便的细节时，爱丁顿的冒险似乎是一个典型的伪造案例。

That’s probably why it partly inspired the philosopher of science Karl Popper to come up with the idea of falsification in the first place .

这可能就是为什么它首先在一定程度上启发了科学哲学家卡尔·波普尔提出证伪的想法。

7

The Eddington affair isn’t unique.

爱丁顿事件并不是独一无二的。

Knock-down, drag-out disconfirmations are rarer than we would like to admit.

彻底的、拖拖拉拉的否定比我们愿意承认的要少。

Francesco Redi performed the first experiments “disproving” spontaneous generation in the 1660s, but Louis Pasteur was still “disproving” it in the 18 60s!

Remember during the pandemic, when people were arguing about whether respiratory viruses can spread via aerosols, whether masks work, and whether UV light can protect us from infection?

还记得疫情期间，人们争论呼吸道病毒是否可以通过气溶胶传播、口罩是否有效、紫外线是否可以保护我们免受感染？

It seemed like those arguments arose around the same time that a novel coronavirus jumped down someone’s windpipe, but in fact they had been going on for a hundred years.

这些争论似乎是在新型冠状病毒从某人的气管中跳出来的同时发生的，但实际上它们已经持续了一百年。

8

Here’s a fun one: in 1906, when Camillo Golgi won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, he used his acceptance speech to argue against the “neuron doctrine”, the idea that the brain is made up of functionally independent cells.

有趣的是：1906 年，卡米洛·高尔基 (Camillo Golgi) 获得诺贝尔生理学或医学奖时，他在获奖感言中反对“神经元学说”，即大脑由功能独立的细胞组成的观点。

This was surprising to the neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who happened to be the biggest proponent of the neuron doctrine, and who also happened to be in the audience, sharing the other half of the prize.

这让神经解剖学家圣地亚哥·拉蒙·卡哈尔感到惊讶，他恰好是神经元学说的最大支持者，而且也恰好在观众席上，分享了另一半的奖金。

Ramón y Cajal, for his part, would later retort that Golgi’s images were “artificially distorted and falsified”.

拉蒙·伊·卡哈尔后来反驳说，高尔基的图像是“人为扭曲和伪造的”。

9

These disputes didn’t end because someone recanted their beliefs or committed scientific seppuku.

这些争论并没有因为有人放弃信仰或进行科学切腹而结束。

Max Planck famously quipped that science advances one funeral at a time 10 , but that’s not quite right, because nothing changes if everyone at the funeral vows to continue the legacy of the dead.

马克斯·普朗克有一句名言，科学一次一次推动一场葬礼的进步 10 ，但这并不完全正确，因为如果葬礼上的每个人都发誓要延续死者的遗产，一切都不会改变。

It seems to me that science actually advances one young person’s decision at a time.

在我看来，科学实际上一次能推动一个年轻人的决定。

Do they choose to keep carrying the banner for increasingly cringe hypotheses, do they enter into endless disputes over the aliveness or deadness of theories, or do they take a another page from the Monty Python playbook, and decide to do something completely different ?

他们是选择继续扛起日益令人畏缩的假设的旗帜，还是对理论的生死存亡进行无休止的争论，还是抄袭巨蟒剧团的剧本，决定做一些完全不同的事情？

When the replication crisis kicked off a decade ago and “classic” psychological phenomena started looking shaky, we could have asked ourselves, Talking Heads-style , “Well, how did we get here?” 11 When we run a study and get a result, what does that mean ?

当十年前复制危机开始，“经典”心理现象开始显得摇摇欲坠时，我们可以像《Talking Heads》那样问自己，“那么，我们是怎么走到这一步的？” 11 当我们进行一项研究并得到结果时，这意味着什么？

Which studies should we be running in the first place?

我们首先应该进行哪些研究？

What the hell are we doing?

我们到底在做什么？

What’s it all for?

这一切是为了什么？

We did not ask ourselves these questions.

我们没有问自己这些问题。

Instead, we checked “have a reckoning” off our our to-do lists and then we went back to business as usual, just with bigger sample sizes and occasional preregistration.

相反，我们从我们的待办事项清单中划掉了“算一算”，然后我们又像往常一样恢复正常工作，只是样本量更大，偶尔进行预先注册。

I fear that we are concluding our come-to-Jesus moment without interrogating any of the mistakes that put us face-to-face with the Son of Man in the first place.

我担心我们在结束我们来到耶稣面前的时刻时，没有质疑任何当初让我们与人子面对面的错误。

We seem to believe that tighter stats, more transparent methods, and time-stamped analysis plans will separate the true ideas from the false ideas, like Jesus separating the sheep from the goats on the Day of Judgment.

我们似乎相信，更严格的统计数据、更透明的方法和带有时间戳的分析计划将把正确的想法与错误的想法区分开来，就像耶稣在审判日将绵羊与山羊分开一样。

Unfortunately, it turns out that some of the sheep and goats are hard to tell apart.

不幸的是，事实证明，有些绵羊和山羊很难区分。

And some of the goat-owners are absolutely insisting that their goats are sheep.

一些山羊主人绝对坚持认为他们的山羊是绵羊。

12

We could spend the rest of time trying to get to the bottom of this.

Or we could admit that, if we’ve argued about it this long and we’ve gotten nowhere, maybe we’ve crossed into cringe territory and it’s time to call it quits.

或者我们可以承认，如果我们争论了这么久却一事无成，也许我们已经进入了令人畏缩的领域，是时候结束了。

We can’t say the Spartan is dead.

我们不能说斯巴达人已经死了。

But we can say he’s probably not coming back.

但我们可以说他可能不会回来。

Further discussion of it [continental drift] merely encumbers the literature and befogs the minds of fellow students.

对它[大陆漂移]的进一步讨论只会阻碍文献的发展并迷惑同学们的头脑。

[It is] as antiquated as pre-Curie physics.

[它]与前居里物理学一样古老。

It is a fairy tale.

这是一个童话故事。

There is no end to the absurdities connected with this doctrine.

与这一学说相关的荒谬之处是无穷无尽的。

Suffice it to say, that in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no proof, such as would be admitted in any scientific inquiry, that there is any such thing as ‘contagion.’

我只想说，从这个词的普通意义上来说，没有任何科学探究所承认的证据表明存在“传染”这样的事情。

Extermination [of smallpox] will be proved to be impossible, unless the vaccinators be mightier than the Almighty God himself

消灭[天花]将被证明是不可能的，除非接种者比全能的上帝本人更强大

Imagine you read that some guy in your city was murdered.

想象一下，您读到您所在城市的某个人被谋杀了。

Then the next day you find out that, actually, the guy’s fine; he merely faked his death for tax reasons.

然后第二天你就会发现，实际上，这个人很好；他的身体很好。他只是出于税收原因伪造了自己的死亡。

You would not conclude, “Ah, turns out murders never happen, and could never happen!” Similarly, when a result fails to replicate, it doesn’t mean that every possible version of the theory is invalidated forever.

你不会得出这样的结论：“啊，原来谋杀从未发生过，而且永远不会发生！” Similarly, when a result fails to replicate, it doesn’t mean that every possible version of the theory is invalidated forever.

It merely tightens the space of possibilities around the idea, which almost always leaves it less interesting and more embarrassing.

See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity , p.

参见 Lorraine Daston 和 Peter Galison 的《客观性》，第 14 页。

115-116.

115-116。

As is usually the case with quotes like these, the canonical version was said by someone else .

Even if a theory is never truly dead, continuing to publish papers on it is like putting a lot of spam into the literature.

即使一个理论永远不会真正消亡，继续发表关于它的论文就像在文献中放入大量垃圾邮件。

A lot...of spam...spam...a lot...

很多...垃圾邮件...垃圾邮件...很多...

It seems obviously true that people who are mentally exhausted tend to be grumpier and more prone to errors.

The debunking experiments also seem to be extremely feeble in terms of what they consider ego-depleting.

就他们认为的自我消耗而言，揭穿实验似乎也极其无力。

In the first study referenced above, participants engaged in one of two tasks - the control group pressed a button when they saw a word with an 'e' in it while the other cohort had to refrain from pressing the button if the 'e' was adjacent to another vowel.

在上面提到的第一项研究中，参与者执行两项任务之一：对照组在看到带有“e”的单词时按下按钮，而另一组如果“e”与另一个元音相邻，则必须避免按下按钮。

The test lasted 7 minutes and 30 seconds.

测试持续7分30秒。

This is so far removed from a real world ego depleting scenario that it has almost no bearing on reality (e.g. watching an assembly line for defects for hours at a time in a noisy factory, taking a group of rowdy children on a field trip, having a heated argument with a spouse, writing complex code while being hit with emails and support tickets etc).

这与现实世界中自我耗尽的场景相去甚远，几乎与现实无关（例如，在嘈杂的工厂里一次观察装配线几个小时是否有缺陷，带着一群吵闹的孩子去实地考察，与配偶激烈争吵，在收到电子邮件和支持票的情况下编写复杂的代码等）。

Speaking as an outsider who follows but does not work in the field, it seems there was an overcorrection in bias.

Where people were once too quick to believe an attractive theory, they then became too quick to claim it was all false.

人们曾经太快地相信一个有吸引力的理论，但后来他们又太快地声称这一切都是错误的。

Debunking became so high status that a lower standard of evidence was required for people to claim something had been debunked than to claim that the original hypothesis was true.

揭穿的地位变得如此之高，以至于人们声称某件事已被揭穿所需的证据标准比声称最初的假设是正确的要低。

I was listening to Star Talk the other day (Scientists Who Were Persecuted for Being Right, with Matt Kaplan).

They were discussing this topic and noted that science done well is very messy.

他们正在讨论这个话题，并指出科学做得很好却很混乱。

There should be point and counterpoint discussion/argument, as that is what makes the method work.

应该有观点和对位的讨论/论证，因为这才是该方法发挥作用的原因。

However, to an outsider it looks like no one knows what they are doing.

Unfortunately, since humans are involved, there are mistakes, misinterpretation, misunderstanding, poor judgement and falsification.

不幸的是，由于人类的参与，就会存在错误、曲解、误解、判断失误和伪造。

This leads the outsider into further distrusting the process.

In my experience in the chemical industry, taking data and analyzing it statistically often resulted in answers way smaller than the error bound.

根据我在化学行业的经验，获取数据并进行统计分析通常会得到比误差范围小得多的答案。

I always look skeptically at study results that claim fantastic accuracy about things that can only be measured very inaccurately.

They always explain that they corrected for the things that made it inaccurate and I think oh-oh you threw out the inconvenient data.

The scientific method is hard to do well and you have to be good at knowing when to give up on an idea because the answer you got was way smaller than the error bound.

科学方法很难做好，你必须善于知道何时放弃一个想法，因为你得到的答案远小于误差范围。

When the research summary says it was a meta analysis my alarm bells really ring.

I don't understand how any meta analysis can possibly understand the actual error bound on data taken by many different people in many parts of the world.

我不明白任何元分析如何能够理解世界许多地方许多不同人所获取的数据的实际误差范围。

Particularly when the studies they analyse often were attempting to answer very different questions.

Seems like a method to ensure finding causation where none really exists.

The facetious rule of thumb the StarTalk folks quoted was: "If you need statistics to get the answer it is not really science." There is an element of truth in that statement.

The facetious rule of thumb the StarTalk folks quoted was: "If you need statistics to get the answer it is not really science."这句话有一定的道理。