The presentation of science and scientists in movies and television

I have been watching the new version of the Cosmos television program, and it started making me think about how science has been presented in general. In Cosmos and other educational media, science is typically presented in a positive instructive light, but other presentations of science and scientists vary in the way they construct the image of the scientist. The mad scientist is a common cultural construction that has been prevalent since at least Frankenstein created his monster. This and many other slightly less mad scientists have seemed to often present scenarios that the scientist had never considered and show how a massive problem could stem from it. Frankenstein never thought that his monster would be violent for example and never took precautions.

Then there are the scientists that are immune to human danger when something worthy of research becomes apparent. Walter in the television show Fringe acted in such a way when he experimented on children, and many scientists in media have exclaimed the opportunities for research as a grand explosion/tear in space time/contact with aliens or other such calamities begin their desolation. Scientists in these situations are painted as naive, narrow-minded, or lacking in common sense. When I was in middle school I was also told that I lacked common sense. It has sometimes made me wonder if this societal endowment of unintentional malice on the scientist is a way of aggrandizing the every-man to a higher level than the thinker because he has common sense to know that the alien is probably going to kill everyone. Militarists often get this presentation, such as in Aliens [most recently to me in Final Fantasy the Spirits Within (which notably has a rather positive presentation of scientists though they happen to practice something more akin to magic)].

Social scientists typically are presented in the media only to the extent that psychotherapists and the occasional academic appears on television. I know little about psychotherapy but their presentation in the media I consume often highlights the Freudian influenced therapies of the past due to their notable eccentricities as opposed to more reasonable modern therapies. Group psychology as it is brought up in procedural crime shows such as Criminal Minds typically centers on cases like Kitty Genovese's. She was molested and murdered while in a public area without intervention from bystanders. I have heard characters spout of other social psychy sorts of things but often guffaw at the ridiculousness of the claim. Granted, the writers of the show are most likely to have experienced a Psych 101 type course where these more shocking cases are typically presented. The hard scientists seem to sometime have an easier time in their presentation, I think often due to the physical nature of their work.

I just finished watching a short film where apparently the designers of a robot somehow allowed it to be possible for him to be abused into murdering a family. This type of plot device seems to assume ignorance on the part of the designers. A logical extension could be, we should hold back such and such work because, as we saw in such and such a film, there can be unintended consequences. We shouldn't research AI because robots might kill us. This is the type of concept that can only really slow down the work that is being done. I often wish I could talk to the creator of the art and ask "Why do you as an ignorant observer feel like you know more about a scientist's work than they do."

A recent example of this occuring in the real world would be when the Food babe exclaimed that a chemical used in yoga mats is also used in Subway's bread. Her ignorance of science was held up by many in the media and the public as a liberating force in the war against non-natural food. Subway was forced by public opinion to promise removal of this chemical though it has not been found to be dangerous. Her subsequent judgement on cookies given out freely by Doubletree appears to be based on a misreading of the chemical list. A possibly honest, but illuminating, mistake that highlights the authors lack of journalistic fact checking.


One of the more interesting presentations of a research scientist I have seen recently was actually from the 1954 film Godzilla. This was the original Japanese version though I have also seen the American version (which makes some notable changes to the character of the scientist that I will address) several years ago. In this film, the main scientist has made a decision long ago that his research should not be made public until he has found a way to use it in a non-violent way. The product of his research is the "oxygen destroyer" which will remove all the oxygen from a body of water, effectively killing any living thing in that water. The scientist, Dr. Serizawa, makes a very ethical stance in this case, if the work is revealed at this stage, it will only be seen as a force for destruction. A German colleague outs the relevance of his work to a reporter in the wake of a desolating attack of Godzilla on Tokyo. After some convincing, the scientist agrees to use the oxygen destroyer on Godzilla after he has destroyed all of his research. After he knows Godzilla has been destroyed, he ultimately commits suicide to seal the secret of the oxygen destroyer away. In the version of the movie for the US, an American reported called Dr. Serizawa to help convince him to use the "oxygen destroyer" on Godzilla. I do not recall specifics but I think the reporter, played by Raymond Burr, thinks the scientists concerns are not very credible and dismisses his hesitancy. Ultimately, Serizawa takes the only option he thinks is logical, the use of his weapon to save Japan, but the prevention of his weapon being used to destroy the world. Serizawa was always looking out for the long-term good of human life as opposed to the short-term needs of the people around him. Though this may seem as dissmissive of the current struggles, I think that this representation shows the forethought and consideration Serizawa put into his decision.

This type of representation of a scientist is very different from films like Day of the Dead where the scientist is seen as an insane and strange pseudo-villain whose work is nonsensical and dangerous with no regard for those around him. The scientist has long abandoned his work to cure the zombies but instead has sought to teach them. He is then murdered, to comical effect, for his belief that zombies could be civilized. The assumption the director is implying is that there is no solution to the problem, there is no hope except isolation. Research is pointless and can only lead to danger and death.

There is also the long line of fiction where the scientist builds some great machine that spectacularly fails, destroying the scientist and everything around him/her. In many of these works, the simple solution is the correct one. If the powers that be had only listened to the hero (who often has low status) then bad things could have been avoided (there are many examples of this in Japanese cinema, Final Fantasy the Spirits Within an example).

Dream Weaving Part 2

After an unnecessarily long delay, I am back to discuss the second study in the paper about seeing other's problems in your dreams. Before I get into the details of the study, I'd like to mention a few things that initially set off an alarm in my head. First, the researcher proposes to be testing a phenomena  but the design of the study is entirely different. From the author's own description of the dream helper ceremony, the dreamers all know the problem of the individual involved and are purportedly trying to direct their dreams toward identifying solutions. This seems to me like another spin on a typical support group as opposed to a psychic experience. It is possible that the dream helper ceremony is poorly described in the paper but I find it more likely that the researcher is merely using this ceremony as a an outside reference point to the internal craziness of the proposed concepts.

In the second study, the researcher attempted to better experimentally manipulate the participants in the study. Whereas before there was a self-selection bias where only participants that claimed to have had a relevant dream submitted their journals for analysis, all participants had to submit their journals. Also, there was an experimental condition where half of the participants were given a picture of a fictional individual though they believed it was a real person. The participants recorded 2 dreams, were shown the picture of the target person. They were told that this person had several life problems but not specifically that they were medical. The participants then recorded 2 more dreams and the dreams were then compared for content.

The new target person was a woman who had a multitude of problems. She had multiple sclerosis, her mother was dying, her husband had died in an industrial accident, her son had been in a car accident, she had been in a car accident where her cousin had died, and her new partner was going through a messy divorce. The experimenter claims to have been blind to the person that was chosen; a friend of the experimenter had volunteered her. This raises a few problems. Whereas in the pilot, the person had 1 problem (breast cancer), this still allowed for the researchers to include a multitude of related codes (torso, limbs, torso, cancer, clinical setting). This person has so many potential problems in her life that a dream about nearly anything could possibly be coded as relevant. Also, if the experimenter's friend proposed this individual, I find it unlikely that the researcher had never heard about any of this person's many problems at some point. Though the researcher may not have realized it, they may have subconsciously considered that the woman with all the problems could be the target and may have directed the students toward her particular kinds of issues.

Additionally, the codes for the person include problems that are not her own, though they are problems she experiences. Her mother's lung cancer, for example, requires a respirator. The researcher proposes that the target's conscious mind is sending out information about her problems that the dreamers are able to connect to and interpret. Why would her mind think about inanimate objects unrelated to the target's problems? It is possible that the respirator is very prevalent but I don't see why it would be sent out as a problem unless the individual was having a problem with the respirator itself. This, as far as I can tell, is not known by the researcher.

Now we get into the results. I have a few problems with the way the analyses were handled. First, the researchers combined the two pre dreams and the two post dreams into a single dream value (one fore pre and one for post), aggregating the codes across the two dreams. The researchers claim that this provides a more conservative estimate because the sample size is lower since the dreams are combined instead of kept separate. This is an irrelevant point. The dreams were about different things and could reflect life events other than a connection to the target individual. Therefore, I feel that a more accurate data treatment would be to keep the values separate. I think aggregating the dreams is probably fine for a final analysis but there is valuable information in comparing the individual dreams pre and post. It makes no sense to aggregate two distinctly different dream types. Additionally, the post treatment dreams should be more similar to one another because they are focused on the target which would give more validity to the results (if they were possibly true)

The researcher compared each code in the dreams separately by both pre and post test values. Therefore, the researcher compares the pre-test values for the torso, head, etc. between the control and the experimental group. He found that there were significant differences for the post-tests for limb problems, breathing problems, and car/driving problems. Note that this is that the mean values in the post-tests were higher for those in the treatment condition than in the control condition. Those that saw a picture of a real woman were more likely to have dreams containing these components than people that saw a fictional person. While this is intriguing, the test the researcher used is rather poor. Since there was a pre-test the experimenter should have used this value as a control. This would wash out the individual characteristics of the dreamers dreams and make a stronger case that the manipulation did something. It would test whether there was a change in the kinds of things the dreamer dreamt instead of just comparing the dreams at each period. As is, the lack of this analysis throws up red flags for me.

From the increased likelihood of the dreamers dreaming about the 3 aspects the experimenter mentioned, he claims that this shows that individuals can accurately dream about other's problems. Though these results could be real, I don't think the interpretation the author makes really stands up. The content of the dreams is not definitively the problems of the target and even the excerpts the experimenter presents in the paper seem vastly different from the real problems of the target person.

The podcasters thought that the willingness of Psychology Today to reprint the findings of this study with little criticism was abhorrent. I honestly do not know why the author was not more skeptical of this piece when it has obvious theoretical and methodological concerns.

Dream Weaving Part 1 - My first post about pseudo science

The paper I want to discuss in this post was brought to my attention by a podcast I enjoy called "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe". This is a variety show that covers several different skeptical or science topics with a few staple segments. In the "News" section they either discuss some new scientific discovery, something from the general news, or articles they think deserve ridicule. In the last episode I listened to, they discussed an article published in Psychology Today, about a scientific paper (by a different author) that had been published in 2013. After I heard the discussion, the dismissive tone of the commentators, and the way in which they wrote off the study, I felt like they hadn't given the studys a fair shake (though the premise was fairly ridiculous).

Once I started reading the Psychology Today article and the original research paper, I started noticing some of the issues that arise when non-social psychologists try and look at our work. I still think that that the paper is ludicrous and poorly done but not for all of the same reasons as the people on the podcast. It was obvious after looking at both that the podcasters didn't have access to the original article and were using the vague generalizations about the methods that the Psychology Today article as actual methods as opposed to a summary of methods. The methods had problems in the study but the criticisms of the podcasters ended up being just far removed enough from what I saw as justifiable criticisms that the authors of either the article or the original research might be able to dismiss the "Rouges" as uninformed.

The article - titled "Can our dreams solve problems while we sleep" - is very short (840 words) and is an overview of 1 of 2 studies published in a paper called "Can healthy, young adults uncover personal details of unknown target individuals in their dreams?" The articles primary goal is to briefly describe the experiment and then provide some elaboration, suggesting that more similar work should be done in the past. As a critique of the research paper, the author seems to take the paper uncritically, praising the author as rigorous and ending the article with two paragraphs that begin "Lets say that some sort of dream telepathy is real" and suggest that there is something very real going on in this study. I am unconvinced by this paper, and the lack of a measurable mechanism in the paper.

I am now onto the 4th paragraph and I have not said what the paper was about. The research paper - published in a fairly low-tier journal called EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing" - provides a rather detailed narrative of the process of this paper's development, which is not common in many of the articles I read. The paper's sole author is Carlyle Smith, a notable researcher on sleep. His past research appears to have primarily focused on the relationship of sleep states and the amount of sleep on memory and learning. Regardless of his past work, this paper arose directly from a course that Dr. Smith was teaching on "Dreams and Dreaming", a reasonable topic of study for a sleep researcher. A student in the class brought up the topic of the "Dream Helper Ceremony" and the instructor decided to do a pilot test in the class. The paper mentioned that this was a senior-level psychology class. From my experience in similar classes, the interests of the students often drive the class and there are sometimes not rigorous syllabi provided, so this seemed reasonable to me.

The "Dream Helper Ceremony" is essentially the idea that a group of individuals come together, hear about the life problem of an individual, and then all go to sleep, focusing their mind on the other's life problem and hopefully dreaming about said problem. The dreams are then shared with the target, who hopefully takes some value from this process. The researcher then decided to design a study that would get at one of the factors of this scenario, whether individuals can dream about the problems of others. In the dream helper ceremony description, the author suggests that the problem is discussed before dreaming, so the jump to looking at whether the content of the problem can come across a dream seems a large one to me.

The researcher provided the students in the class a picture of a person with a problem (the problem was not known to the researcher or the students) but they were told it was health-related. A subset of the students returned with a dream log that they believed represented the target (12 of 65). The researcher coded the dream logs based on a set of criteria that specifically captured elements of the target's health that would be negatively affected. This is a bit of a dubious practice because if the coder has more categories that fit the health diagnosis than other categories, they will be more likely to find matches for the health categories. The podcasters noted this problem. The researcher did weight the extent to which the health mention matched the problem of the person which helps alleviate some concern.  The researchers compared earlier dreams of the 12 with the dreams that the individuals reported as having been about the target. And, surprise, surprise, there was more language that matched the health outcomes in the second dreams. As should be obvious, the students knew that the target had a health problem so they were more likely to dream about those kinds of issues. There is also a self-selection bias because the others did not think they dreamed about the target. This could mean that only those that dreamed about health outcomes reported their dreams and are included in the sample. The researcher noticed these issues and attempted to correct them in the second study.

I'll discuss this study tomorrow.

Computers and Communication

One of my interests since I first became a PhD student was the process of organization through computers. I am actually not sure where this interest comes from precisely as I haven't had a huge amount of experience organizing with others over computers. When I was in undergrad, I took a course called Organizational Communication which I found extremely interesting. The focus of the class was mostly on the ways in which we fail  or succeeded at communicating within organizations. An example in class was how poor communication has led to helicopter crashes or accidental shootdowns.

A part of this course was focused on groups that communicate over the internet. The course was taught by a researcher that studies Wikipedia and the course was partially taught through the Human Computer Interaction group. After taking this class, I became more interested in this topic, literally in the academic sense. I still don't participate in much internet organized work and am notoriously bad at keeping up with friends. While I was working on a book chapter about the rise of the globally distributed group, I was part of one as my adviser spent some time at other schools. This was a period when I severely lost my way in my focus and ended up going through one of the roughest paper proposals I think there has been in my program.

I'd like to discuss some old, but interesting work on the way that people use computers to interact with one another. Sara Kiesler is a prolific and diverse researcher. When I first met her, she discussed how she had recently returned from a trip to Africa where she was interested in their nascent educational system and acted as an adviser. She taught us interviewing techniques, how to engage with subjects and find out what their true reasons were for their actions or thoughts. She seems to have a deep interest in increasing the quality of life for people wherever they are and through many different mechanisms.

She was part of a group of researchers that were interested in how the internet would influence the lives of those that had ready access to it. In this study, the researchers gave internet access to a large number of families in the Pittsburgh area for free. The researchers then looked at the outcomes for each family member and tracked their individual usage. Initially, the signs were not good with several negative outcomes (primarily depression), specifically for adolescents in the household. After more time, however, the positive effects of the internet on the families became more pronounced. Of all possible uses for the internet, the most common was interpersonal communication. The researchers concluded that using the internet to make new ties had a relationship to increased depression but using the internet for other uses decreased depression: http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/progress/index.html

Another interesting study that Sara Kiesler performed that is even older than the Internet study focused just on the nature of the communication that individuals engaged in with one another. In this study, the researchers compared the communications of groups that did a task when the members were either in the same place or communicated over computer text messaging. The use of computers had various effects, positive and negative. Group members were more likely to get angry with one another, make extreme statements, and they had trouble coming to a collective consensus. This was partially that people seem more real when they are in person so it is harder to criticize them so heavily directly. Another way to think about the phenomena is instead that the ability to communicate distributively led the group members to speak their mind more freely.

Another interesting finding was the amount of discussion that was contributed by females in the group. In the face-to-face groups, men were dominant and their opinions were used more as the basis for the decision making process. When the groups instead used a computer, however, the women spoke more and contributed more to the discussion. The researchers suggested that the relative anonymity that the computer mediated communication allowed for let women not feel as self conscious about sharing their opinions. They also suggested that because there were fewer obvious status cues, women weren't in a position where they felt their opinions were less valuable.

Lastly, the researchers were curious if the change in the way people communicate changes the kinds of decisions that they are likely to make (instead of just their ability to make a decision). The researchers found that there was a definite 'risky shift' such that members were more willing to take on ventures that seemed risky if they were communicating online as opposed to face-to-face.

Though this research was published in 1992 (22 years before the publication of this article), we can see that people are using the internet to communicate and engage with one another in the same kinds of ways. Discussions on the internet often devolve into 'flame wars' quickly get off topic, and is full of overly superlative language about the love or hate of particular topics. Risky or at least random decisions being made by groups coordinating over the internet are not uncommon to hear about. It is comforting to a certain extent to consider that we have always found computer mediated communication to be just disconnected from others enough to be incredibly mean to one another. This is not a new phenomenon, it is inherent in human nature. Us humans who have evolved to recognize faces and see truth in one's eyes are sullied by using online communication,...but it does have its benefits. The convenience is unparalleled and studies have shown that we are much more civil when we know who the other person is we are talking to, which is something.

Sensemaking in Organizations

In the Fall of 2010, I was taking a seminar in organizational behavior. It was a morning class, and in a much different format than I was used to. We read what, at the time, seemed like a ludicrous number of papers and then proposed questions we had about each to the professor. The professor then spent 15-20 minutes per paper summarizing and discussing the significance of each paper, answering our questions as he went along. It was a small and intimate class which made the moments that I dosed off that more embarrasing. It was a very interesting class, but the lecture-like format was not engaging enough at 9 in the morning when I had stayed up until 1-2 to read all of the required papers.

One day we read a paper that deeply impacted my perception f how research can be done and explained in organizational behavior. The paper was called "The collapse of sensemaking" by Karl Weick, an influential but controversial individual within the field. Van Mannan argued in the article I mentioned yesterday that the article I am about to describe was extremely powerful but never would have seen the light of day under Pfeffer's system. Pfeffer shot back that Weick was not formally rigorous enough which only stoked Van Maanan's dislike for Pfeffer.

The article is very, very different from what you typically see in academic literature. It is a narrative about the Mann Gulch disaster that holds some information to its chest in order to make the impacts of the revelation of Weick's theory that more convincing. The article has nearly 2500 citations according to Google Scholar. There are no formal hypotheses, no statistical anlayses, but it's also not quite a theory paper. It is a kind of paper that I have only seen Karl Weick write. I mentioned the argument between Pfeffer and Van Maannan to a professor at my institution about their discussion of Weick's style. I do not remember the specifics, but they were clear that his pursuits are only possible after tenure and that few besides him can write these narrative theoretic pieces.

The paper begins with a description of the Mann Gulch disaster. Weick relies on a book "Young Men and Fire" written by Normal Maclean who interviewed survivors of the event.  As a very brief summary, a group of young firefighters parachuted into a forest where a fire had been reported. Their role was to act quickly to prevent the fire from spreading by digging fire lines as well as repairs damage from a fire. The men unfortunately were unprepaired for a large active and fast moving fire. They found themselves in a position where fire was rapidly approaching and they needed to act fast to survive. 13 of the 16 men died that day. Of those that survived, two found a way through a rock crevice, the other survived by lighting a brush fire at his feet and lying down in the ashes. The actions of this last individual, Wagner Dodge, led Weick to begin his theorizing about the collapse of sensemaking within this group of men.

Sensemaking is the way in organizations act in ways to create order in their environment through their actions based on their purpose and culture. The theory of sensemaking apparently arose as an alternative to focusing just on the decision making process itself (as proposed by March of the Carnegie School). In other words, the organization's actions are in response to the way reality is perceived in order to maintain their perception of reality. Weick's primary argument is that the actions of the firefighters were in line with their incorrect perception of reality and when they were faced with a new reality, they were unable to 'make sense' of the situation. Their training became useless because they were no longer in a situation they could understand. Dodge was able to make sense of the situation when others could not and essentially set a fire line where he stood. This prevented the fire from coming as close to him as the ground was already burned. His command to the others to join him in the fire seemed to go against their identity as firefighters.

I don't want to get into the details of the paper as it is extremely dense and it is certainly worth a read. This paper is particularly important to me because of the way it is presented. It is intuitive and rigorous within the setting. Even though there is no data, you can tell that an extraordinary amount of thought went into the construction of the paper. I don't use sensemaking in my research and I'm not sure I agree with it in opposition to other concepts that it somewhat collides with (like the Carnegie School) but damn does WEick make a good argument.

Finding your niche, and then it being invaded

Social science contains is an extremely large range of things being studies. There are all these pockets of work that is being done that it can seem that it would be unlikely to run into do something identical to you.

I was walking in Boston when I was at the Academy of Management a few years ago. I stopped to chat with 2 PhD students from the Netherlands who had been at a session I had also just attended. As I talked to one student I gave a short summary of what I had been working on: "transactive memory and how structure of communication affects TMS formation." The one student mentions that her partner was studying something else involving TMS. Her topic was "How the structure of a group influences the usefulness of the TMS". Not the same question, but really very similar. It was in one way nice to somewhat randomly meet someone with such a similar topic but in another way, I felt uneasy, like this person was my competition.

The outward view of much of science seems to be that scientists are extremely collaborative, share ideas freely, and learn from one another. This is, in one way, an ideal that many strive for, but it is in another very real way the antithesis of how some of science is structured. In a recent episode of Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson explained this relationship as a great lineage of student and teacher, learning and expanding our overall knowledge. Though I couldn't quite identify it, something in his statement seemed very dissimilar from aspects on my own experience.

Within social science, possibly because there is so much space to explore, I sometimes feel very protective of my little niche. I don't want anyone to come in and publish papers similar to these ideas I have before me. One reason for that is that the more publishing in an area, the more prior material that you have to read and account for in your own paper or design. Second, if you are the first with an idea, it can be helpful in increasing your citations or just your general recognition. I don't know if this protectiveness exists in other areas of science but it is something I personally feel.

The other day a professor suggested I read a paper due to my interests. Though they go about their theorizing and methods differently than I would, they were essentially interested in the same primary question I have in my dissertation. Thankfully, I think that this paper informs mine more than replaces it but I was scared when I looked at it. My thoughts were "Oh no, if this is what I think it is, will there still be room in the literature for my research?"

There have been potential solutions for this problem raised for years within social psychology. Van Maanen and Pfeffer had an argument in a journal over a series of articles. Pfeffer was essentially suggesting that a small set of scientists should determine what the important questions are. Then all the researchers that do that kind of work (or all researchers) would pursue answering that question thoroughly. This directed approach, he called paradigm consensus, seems similar to some pushes in other sciences such as the recent push in Physics to identify the Higgs Boson.

Van Maanen made some cogent arguments against this (primarily about how the 'taste-makers' will be chosen in a field that retains some element of subjectivity). The title of his response "Fear and Loathing in Organization Studies" is particularly witty I felt. In the current model where it is a bit of a free for all, then some of us are put in this funny position that work that takes a long time to complete is successively more dangerous because someone else might get there before you. Replications are not highly valued in Social Psych either leading to some bogus concepts sticking around for much longer than they should.

Coding (in the social science sense)

I often wish that science did not occasionally use the same word to mean the same thing. In this case, the thing is coding. When the majority of people think of coding, they probably think of writing computer code. Those who write computer code are called coders and all is right with the world. But there is another kind of code that we use in social science much more often, qualitative coding. This essentially means that you take some output, communication, interview, etc. that cannot be directly translated into numbers and you create a scheme to do that translation. It could mean that you create a list of possible topics and match each sentence in an interview onto those topics. Going through this process can give you a quantitative idea of what a person was discussing.

I have already introduced one form of coding in one of the previous posts. Liang, Moreland, and Argote developed a kind of coding scheme to measure transactive memory in 1995. In that case, 2 individuals watched a video and rated the level of coordination, credibility, and expertise within the group overall. This measure was not as taxing as some versions of coding but it still requires 2 individuals to watch videos of all the groups and make a judgement. Once the two coders have finished, their codes are compared using a formula like cronbach's alpha. Cronbach's alpha determines how consistent the raters are at judging the same thing, in this case the groups i the videos.

Then we come to my personal difficulty using coding in my work. I have used coding for several projects, including some where the thing we were measuring was, I felt, objective. Therefore, using multiple coders is useful to help pickup on when one person missed a specific thing, but not to compare groups based on the coder's perception of their qualities. In my case, I say count the number of times this thing occurs. One coder sees 5 but the other only sees 3. The one that sees 5 may objectively be correct, but something like Cronbach's alpha just sees this as an inconsistency between the coders when the actual problem is either attention or honest mistake.

Whenever I start a coding process, I typically dread starting and looking at the outcomes because I just feel that the mistakes are arbitrary, that I don't need the coders to do this correctly, or that the coders are just not doing a good job. It's frustrating. But, it's frustrating in a way that feels unnecessary.

Machine learning has started being introduced which provides a more objective way of looking at a set of hard to quantify data though it may not do as a good a job as a person can. I think that, in the near future, machine learning will begin supplementing person coding when there are large data bases available. I think that this is a good way forward and also I like that it may reduce my personal reliance on other people. It becomes impersonal, removed from the imbued meaning of the words, and disconnected from theoretical constructs. But it is a slave that reduces the need for the me to act mechanically, which is something I suppose.