Thread by @AchilleasK

Amusingly (or not), five decades later, Barbara Fredrickson, a famous psychologist, and Marcial Losada, an unknown mathematician, decided to use Lorenz’s equation to solve the perennial philosophical question: how can I be consistently happy?

https://twitter.com/achilleask/status/1396543792128401409

Whether one can (or should) always be happy is a different question, and one would have assumed that the psychologists in question would have reflected on this, but they didn’t.
(@emmyzen has written a lot of interesting stuff on this; so you might want to follow up on her work)

Anyway, what they did find out after they had run their equations was that if you had exactly 2.9013 more positive experiences than negative ones, you would be able to flourish.

Which means that if you drink then perfect latte, catch the bus on time and have a good lesson on the day your dog dies, you should still flourish. Says the math.

What the authors did not understand was that the equations they were using would always produce that particular number. Oblivious to that, they called it the “critical positivity ratio” and began raking in citations and money from pop science writing.

In Fredrickson’s view "Just as zero degrees Celsius is a special number in thermodynamics, the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

theguardian.com/science/2014/j…

Until one day, @sTeamTraen a maths-literate reader called them out. Nick Brown has gone on to do lots of impressive work, but at the time he was a postgraduate student not afraid to talk about the emperor’s new clothes.

Although Fredrickson was unwilling to fully withdraw what was a debunked paper, and she was too powerful for the journal to retract the publication, she did admit that she had no understanding of the math; and Losada simply vanished.

retractionwatch.com/2013/09/19/fre…

Nevertheless, positive psychology, the kind of pseudoscience that Fredrickson specialises in, remains fashionable for reasons that cannot be explained with reference to the underlying science.

Disturbingly, we still see a lot of it in TESOL, maybe because it’s easier to ask teachers to practice mindfulness and to grow their resilience, rather than cater to the social conditions that make them stressed.

And that’s another example of the butterfly effect: “can a 1972 paper on meteorology be used to perpetuate unjust orders in language teaching in 2021?”. Yes, but only if we let it happen.