What has happened down here is the winds have changed - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Someone sent me this article by psychology professor Susan Fiske, scheduled to appear in the APS Observer, a magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. The article made me a little bit sad, and I was inclined to just keep my response short and sweet, but then it seemed worth the trouble to give some context. I'll first share the article with you, then give my take on what I see as the larger issues. The title and headings of this post allude to the fact that the replication crisis has redrawn the topography of science, especially in social psychology, and I can see that to people such as Fiske who'd adapted to the earlier lay of the land, these changes can feel catastrophic. I will not be giving any sort of point-by-point refutation of Fiske's piece, because it's pretty much all about internal goings-on within the field of psychology (careers, tenure, smear tactics, people trying to protect their labs, public-speaking sponsors, career-stage vulnerability), and I don't know anything about this, as I'm an outsider to psychology and I've seen very little of this sort of thing in statistics or political science. As I don't know enough about the academic politics of psychology to comment on most of what Fiske writes about, so what I'll mostly be talking about is how her attitudes, distasteful as I find them both in substance and in expression, can be understood in light of the recent history of psychology and its replication crisis. In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth.