[HN Gopher] The gloves are off, the pants are on
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The gloves are off, the pants are on
Author : luu
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-09-06 19:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cold-takes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cold-takes.com)
| breckenedge wrote:
| When I started getting into reading pop psychology in my mid-20s,
| I was very lucky to have a dad who reminded me to be skeptical of
| this stuff, despite it all sounding very confident. Doubly lucky
| to have a brother-in-law who eagerly criticized Gladwell's
| "Outliers."
| smitty1e wrote:
| I was very appreciative of the Scott Adams podcast[1] when he
| pointed out that any story or study that is too "on the nose",
| that is, hits our confirmation biases too perfectly, needs to
| be approached with extra caution.
|
| [1] https://www.scottadamssays.com/
| hobs wrote:
| Advice he should have probably taken when referring to 4d
| chess.
| perl4ever wrote:
| That idea didn't originate with him.
|
| I can't recall enough of a quote to find it right now, but
| someone said something like "any story that's good enough to
| be repeated should be regarded with skepticism'.
|
| It's the sort of thing that might be attributed to Mark Twain
| or Robert Heinlein, whether or not they said it.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| I find it wonderfully self-referential that the quote in
| question can't really be attributed reliably. It's perfect.
| ksaj wrote:
| That's a great quote. I tried and failed to find the
| source, but if it comes to mind some time between now and
| before you've forgotten you ever mentioned it, please
| consider adding it to the thread.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Radio stations near me seem to always be playing John Tesh
| "intelligence for your life" I've often wondered a) how many
| people take that advice and apply it and b) if you tried to apply
| all the advice what would become of you. I'd wager that you would
| have to start getting ready for bed immediately upon waking to
| just handle all the things that are recommended to do "before
| bed"
| jpfed wrote:
| >One person argues that the Prison Experiment was a case of
| subjects behaving as their experimenters clearly wanted them to.
|
| Is that to say that the Prison Experiment is actually explained
| by the Milgram obedience experiments? :-)
| Joeri wrote:
| I'm sort of skeptical about these "turns out" stories. Generally
| when you follow the trail of turns out the original statement is
| kind of right but for the wrong reasons. It's sort of like high
| school physics, kind of wrong, but right enough to be useful.
|
| Take dunning-kruger for example. Yes, it was not shown that
| people of low ability rank themselves higher than those of high
| ability. But it was shown that people of low ability rank
| themselves higher than they should, and that makes dunning-
| kruger's popsci version right enough in many circumstances where
| it is used to make a point.
|
| Or take the findings on happiness. Yes, money can make you
| happier, contrary to prevailing opinion. But other factors affect
| happiness as well if not more, so if you have to choose between
| money and other things, often times the other things will make
| you happier. Again, the popsci version of "money doesn't make you
| happy" is right enough to be useful.
|
| Same thing with climate change skepticism. When you first start
| digging into the better skeptic arguments they seem to be onto
| something, but as you dig down into the details and peel back the
| layers of the onion, the popsci consensus view of climate change
| turns out to be right enough to be useful.
|
| I've come to the conclusion that these false trueisms hang around
| because they are "good enough". It turns out the turns outs are
| much less insightful than they seem.
| bussierem wrote:
| Like every other popular thought/meme/idea though, it can be
| equally true that they stick around, not because they are "good
| enough" but rather because they support the opinion the person
| (or people) already held. "money doesn't make you happy" could
| just as easily be commonly believed because it helps people
| stay happy when they don't have much money, and to explain away
| not achieving more because "those rich folk aren't REALLY
| happy, but I am". Same with the statically typing -- we all
| know how opinionated people are about code, this just helps in
| the echo chambers too.
|
| But also, just because something is "true enough" isn't the
| issue -- the issue is that these are touted as ways SCIENCE
| proved someone right, when in fact they are absolutely not
| "facts" like many believe, and so that can erode belief in
| science.
| derbOac wrote:
| FWIW, I don't think the timescales are correct with the
| longitudinal twin-exercise studies. I don't think anyone would
| predict that exercise today would have anything (or rather, very
| little) causal to do with mood 2 years from now. Sustained
| exercise over the course of a couple of weeks or more might for
| that period or for maybe a month or two afterward, but I doubt
| anything more than that.
|
| I also am not entirely sure that twin studies are the best way to
| get at causality in terms of exercise and mood, because the
| exercise is nonrandom. I think someone might object in the sense
| that that's the point, but my perspective is that it's still not
| the same as randomly assigning exercise. There's a lot buried in
| their acknowledgment that a third factor could still account for
| the results, as that means a lot given the design.
|
| FWIW, there's also evidence in the opposite direction using
| similar but different logic without twins, but using molecular
| genetic risk scores:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01306-w
|
| "The risk of depression was 22% higher among those at high
| genetic risk compared with those at low genetic risk (HR = 1.22,
| 95% CI: 1.14-1.30). Participants with high genetic risk and
| unfavorable lifestyle had a more than two-fold risk of incident
| depression compared with low genetic risk and favorable lifestyle
| (HR = 2.18, 95% CI: 1.84-2.58). There was no significant
| interaction between genetic risk and lifestyle factors (P for
| interaction = 0.69). Among participants at high genetic risk, a
| favorable lifestyle was associated with nearly 50% lower relative
| risk of depression than an unfavorable lifestyle (HR = 0.51, 95%
| CI: 0.43-0.60). We concluded that genetic and lifestyle factors
| were independently associated with risk of incident depression.
| Adherence to healthy lifestyles may lower the risk of depression
| regardless of genetic risk."
|
| I guess the broader point is to be careful about making claims of
| BS (or anything else) based on a single study.
| tyingq wrote:
| Similarly fun to have to spend days at work doing "Myers Briggs",
| "Clifton Strengths" or variations thereof. Then have it woven
| into unrelated conversations for months until the novelty wears
| off.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Fwiw, the Big 5 (OCEAN) personality inventory is one of the
| more robust findings in psychology (much more so than all the
| examples from the blog post)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
|
| and the four Meyers Briggs "types" are quite correlated with
| four of the Big 5.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
|
| Biggest issue with Meyers Briggs is that it gives people the
| impression that types are discrete (i.e., traits have a bimodal
| distribution) when in fact the traits are normally distributed.
| And of course it's just out of date since MB was developed
| decades ago and is entrenched in the business world.
| xcdfgvd wrote:
| Finished up at the proctologist's office?
| draw_down wrote:
| A very recent example: a made-up story about a hospital being
| overrun with patients who had overdosed on Ivermectin, such that
| they were unable to treat gunshot victims. This ran in Rolling
| Stone, the Guardian and other pubs. Your usual run of smart,
| skeptical urbane types accepted it uncritically.
|
| Be careful when something you would like to be true comes along.
|
| It's also worth examining what happens after something like this
| is shown to be untrue. Some will own up to their mistake, most
| will not. But will continue banging on about "misinformation" and
| so forth.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| On typing: "other, intangible process factors, e.g., the
| preference of certain personality types for functional, static
| and strongly typed languages" stands out.
|
| As he says, you _may_ be able to show a slight benefit, but I
| would bet that if you controlled for that "personality type",
| the strong and replicable result would be "people who program in
| a language they like do a better job than those forced to use one
| they don't like."
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The happiness/income debunking here is flawed. The use of
| logarithm for the graph axis to give the perspective of a linear
| relationship is flawed - it's also responding to a mis-summary of
| the research.
|
| Also note that the graph axis for income tops out at around..
| about that 75k/year figure. Whoops.
|
| It should also be noted that 75k figure is a median, it changes
| based on cost of living.
| srinivgp wrote:
| It is not flawed. The subject is under study, continually. The
| debunking comes from
| https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2016976118 where yes, many
| measures of happiness seem to increase linearly as log(income)
| increases. That means diminishing marginal utility of money,
| but it does not mean there's a cap - the relationship seems to
| continue at all income levels.
|
| The main reason to believe the famous previous research was in
| good faith and could still miss this result is because the
| previous research used a measure of happiness which itself
| capped out, and so _could not detect_ changes in happiness
| after a certain level. If your instruments can't register any
| changes above some amount, it is no wonder your results level
| off and stop at that amount.
|
| This new research could be wrong, of course. But there's no
| mis-summary here.
| niko001 wrote:
| That's super interesting! I can see their study included
| asking to what extent the participants are experiencing
| certain negative/positive feelings (which may give some more
| context), but isn't their core measure of happiness also
| capped? They use a continuous response scale, but in terms of
| being capped, it shouldn't matter if it's measured on a 0-100
| or 1-5 scale, no? The participants can't be happier than
| "extremely happy" in their study design as far as I can tell.
| datavirtue wrote:
| At $75k you stop sucking water with every breath. $150k is a
| whole different life.
| cjlm wrote:
| The background to a lot of this skepticism is outlined well in
| Rutger Bregman's Humankind [0]. I just finished it [1] and
| enjoyed it.
|
| [0] https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/rutger-
| bregman/humankind/... [1] https://cjlm.ca/notes/humankind/
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