Testing Standard Reliability Criteria

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Notes

1. Maul conducted the experiments using Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The Wikipedia entry for AMT states that the average reward for using one’s “human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do” is $1 per hour. According to Wikipedia 80% of the mechanical turks are U.S. citizens. If this is not an indictment of the current U.S. economy, I don’t know what is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk).

2. Quantitative law, as I’m using the term, entails one or more arithmetic operations. Thus the readings from a measuring instrument are interval or ratio data.

3. This phrase will remind some readers of the closing paragraph of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. … For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.” Should it prove difficult to find empirically successful measuring instruments and quantitative psychological laws, Wittgenstein’s pessimistic evaluation provides an alternative to science without measurement.