[HN Gopher] Not everything is behavioral science
___________________________________________________________________
Not everything is behavioral science
Author : the-mitr
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-06-27 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (behavioralscientist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (behavioralscientist.org)
| canthonytucci wrote:
| BS in the case of this article stands for "behavioral science"
| Cupprum wrote:
| I was so confused by the initial part of article. BS here, BS
| there...
| hinkley wrote:
| Does it though?
| canthonytucci wrote:
| I felt like I got click-baited and closed the article after
| the first sentence without reading it.
|
| Revisiting it...maybe the terms are interchangeable.
| digging wrote:
| Honestly the article is all over the place and appears to
| be mostly "bullshit" although I haven't afforded it a
| complete read yet (and probably won't).
| DexesTTP wrote:
| Weird choice to talk about the placebo effect in this context.
| The placebo effect is definitely used in combination with
| chemical and biological effects when administering drugs (or,
| more accurately, it always automatically happens). It's just when
| trying to test the efficacy of drugs that you need to control for
| the placebo effect, otherwise the noise of the results would
| drown the signal of the biological/chemical impact.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > here's the weird thing: if you have two dishwashers, you never
| need to unload the dishwasher, and you don't actually lose any
| storage space.
|
| They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not
| "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work
| for a lot of people.
|
| Firstly, dishwashers _have_ to live at ground level whereas
| crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are
| contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where
| most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and
| heavy pans cupboard.
|
| Secondly, plates and utensils are _way_ more spread out in a
| dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be
| cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the
| dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky.
|
| So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we
| definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher.
| And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince
| everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is
| re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and
| salespeople.
| hinkley wrote:
| In my kitchen I don't have space to hang the pots and pans. If
| I could move a wall or a cupboard then that problem would free
| up a drawer and one of those fiddly corner cupboards.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Yes. The claim "you don't lose any storage space" may not be
| barking insane, but it is drooling idiot stupid. Also, you have
| to spring for a second dishwasher.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| A second dishwasher is like a thousand bucks. Well worth the
| convenience over years of use.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Assuming that the system works exactly as the author
| describes, which it would not.
|
| And assuming that you have more money than time, which
| isn't true for everyone.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Why do they need to be at ground level? You could elevate them
| if you want.
| autoexec wrote:
| You're right. I've personally seen kitchens with dishwashers
| at counter level. Only in buildings that were once
| restaurants though.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Well, I've never seen that before but I guess it's possible.
| But in my kitchen that would mean taking up space that's used
| by the countertop, boiler, or fridge. Securing it to the wall
| and connecting it up to the water inlet I can easily imagine
| running into the several thousands to carry out.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It also assumes that you have exactly as much stuff as will fit
| into a single dishwasher, and that you go through it all at the
| same rate, such that when the "dirty" dishwasher is full, the
| "clean" one becomes empty enough that it can switch roles.
|
| Right now, our dishwasher's top rack is full of top rack stuff,
| whereas the bottom rack has two dishes and a coffee cup. I
| guess we go ahead and run it, and then... move everything from
| the second dishwasher to that one? This is definitively more
| work.
| User23 wrote:
| You just declare the other dishwasher dirty and that's that.
| If you want you can unload it to your cabinets like you would
| with only a single dishwasher. In that case you're still at
| worst the same amount of work you would if you didn't have
| two dishwashers. But ordinarily it will be far less.
|
| And yeah I thought about this years ago and ruminated on
| these issues.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| But isn't the other dishwasher that we just declared
| "dirty" still full of clean dishes?
|
| And furthermore, if I just have two dishwashers, both of
| which are considered "dirty", I no longer have clean
| plates.
|
| Unless, of course, I unload it to the cabinets. Which I do
| now. Without paying $800 for a second dishwasher.
| lmm wrote:
| > But isn't the other dishwasher that we just declared
| "dirty" still full of clean dishes?
|
| No, it's probably about three-quarters empty, because you
| probably use roughly the same crockery every day, unless
| you do something particularly bizarre like having three
| soup-based meals one day and three plate-based meals the
| next. Sometimes you wash a couple of plates that were
| already clean, sure. Or you move them into the "clean"
| dishwasher before declaring the other one "dirty", which
| is no more effort than putting them into cabinets (often
| less). And sure maybe a couple of days a year you have a
| big party, or really do eat soup every meal, or
| something, and you have to do something different. But
| the vast majority of the time it makes life easier.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Dishwashers are also somewhat gross, unless you're cleaning and
| sanitizing the filter very regularly. A dry and clean
| environment for dish storage is probably less amenable to molds
| and bacteria developing on surfaces.
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| I find it even more bonkers than that, even. Let's
| "frictionless vacuum" the problem: I live in a home in which
| all we eat is breakfast cereal. We need one spoon and one bowl
| per meal per person. But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we
| run out of bowls (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is
| running with a complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher
| still contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a
| spoon and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty
| dishes in... Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
|
| It becomes absurd faster when you consider what a realistic
| household would own and eat and use. "There's no unloading
| necessary," he says. Absolutely ridiculous.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well I guess in this weird household you _wouldn 't_ have
| that many, you'd just have the dirty one and the clean/using
| one each?
|
| But you have to go to something close to 'we only eat cereal'
| for it to sort of work, which is crazy (and not healthy).
|
| It's a bit like telling people to be like Steve Jobs and have
| a single outfit, your laundry will be so much easier, your
| wardrobe so much neater: sure, but it turns out most people
| actually don't want that... So it's really neither here nor
| there what problems it might solve.
| novok wrote:
| 2 dishwashers idea works more in a single person or 2 people
| household depending on habits. The dishes in the 2
| dishwashers are the ones you use frequently, and for
| occasional times, you get the extras in the cupboards. It's
| also a decision you make during construction. The difference
| in cost between a dishwasher and a full bottom row of drawers
| is not much different, especially if they are beside each
| other and you already wired up one dishwasher.
| lmm wrote:
| > But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we run out of bowls
| (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is running with a
| complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher still
| contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a spoon
| and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty dishes
| in... Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
|
| So you end up washing those 15 spoons again. Big deal. Or you
| notice that you consistently have leftover spoons in the
| clean dishwasher and put some into storage, or get rid of
| them.
|
| On average you use more or less the same dishes each day, so
| you reach equilibrium pretty quickly. You wash a bit of stuff
| that was already clean. It's no big.
| canthonytucci wrote:
| I have been advocating for multiple dishwashers for a long
| time, but the reality is that many times when preparing a meal
| you dirty more dishes than fit in a single load, and dirty
| dishes will still pile up in the sink.
|
| At least 3 dishwashers are needed.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, his advice fails to consider that people aren't all the
| same as he is. For example I like to cook, and I have _a lot_
| more dishes /pots/pans than could fit in two dishwashers. What
| do I do with the rest, store it on the ground?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It seems a lot of these issues could be solved by just running
| the dishwasher after every meal.
| alwa wrote:
| Like everything in this piece, this example seems to overlook
| major aspects of human experience and preference in its rush to
| draw smug "one little trick" conclusions.
|
| Independently of cost and space considerations, why would you
| want such a "system" as this dual-dishwasher setup?
|
| I take aesthetic pleasure in unloading the machine in the
| morning and restoring my cabinets to a condition of full,
| orderly, clean stock. My relationship with the machine is as a
| tool that transitions items from dirty to clean, and it's
| aesthetically displeasing to mix those purposes with the
| ordered, dry, clean cabinets. Those are places where you know
| you'll always grab a clean item without having to check a post-
| it note first.
|
| I take pleasure in owning the right cutlery and servingware for
| a wide variety of food and situations, and in using the correct
| subset for the correct occasion. The idea that I would use
| everything from the Clean Washer every time I fill the Dirty
| Washer utterly confuses and repulses me.
|
| This, like essentially all of this person's examples, reminds
| me of this Chesterton's Fence kind of thing the rationalist
| types get on about: if a bunch of people are doing a thing,
| take the time to ask why before you assume your One Bright
| Trick is something new under the sun.
| ijxjdffnkkpp wrote:
| This article is an example of the Shirkey principle: Institutions
| Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution. Of
| course behavioralscientist.org wants you to think that everything
| is behavioral science. If it was, then we would need to keep the
| behavioral scientists employed.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think that's definitely very common. Though it's possibly
| tricky to distinguish from "<domain expert> will see the world
| through their lens," which is a bit more innocent, I think.
|
| I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially
| the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our
| experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
| Bagged2347 wrote:
| I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way.
| But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an
| outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly
| dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human
| behavior?
| pessimizer wrote:
| You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently
| predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study
| better than others who have no familiarity with their
| theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by
| any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look
| for reasons to redeem the dismissed.
|
| > Is there no value in observing human behavior?
|
| The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only
| ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could
| in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no
| value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the
| origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in
| looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in
| the legends of the past?"
| petsfed wrote:
| I think the article does a pretty good job of dismissing
| itself.
|
| The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a
| convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends
| a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a
| lot of words on being _right_ , which makes the reader
| believe that behavioral science important, without doing any
| of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
|
| Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g.
| why you can't _simply_ model traffic flow as a fluid, or why
| you can 't _simply_ model economics as a system of
| oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this
| article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very
| smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to
| actually chase down and verify their claims.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wait...I just read on HN that everything is architecture... so,
| is BS architecture, or is architecture BS? Or are they both the
| same thing?
| dunekid wrote:
| Not sure if you have seen it already :
| https://youtu.be/uvU5dmu4sl8?si=cCQ7ZOriFp4rdmQM. As much as
| I love architecture and design, this take is pretty funny and
| relatable to many BS architecture.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| This can be extrapolated to say something a little more like,
| every field of study can be used to analyze the world. It means
| that partially, everything is connected to anything else like the
| Holographic Theory of Learning[1] states. Creating a field of
| study is creating a framework for tackling problems. Architecture
| for spatial and material problems, software for logical and
| procedural problems, history for causal problems, chemistry for
| material, etc. Any one of those fields gives you a tool for
| addressing any problem, and some of those tools are extremely
| useful in some narrow definition of a problem. Everything has a
| historical, material and spatial dimension, and everything is
| processed through our logic and behavior. The goal is to know
| which hammer to use when, I suppose.
|
| [1]. Discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765
| risenshinetech wrote:
| If the title were "Is Everything Behavioral Science?" I certainly
| would have answered the question myself with a "no" and then
| moved on with my day. Instead, I was fooled into clicking on the
| article with the false hope that this would be an interesting
| take on the rise of bullshit.
|
| Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?
| dang wrote:
| I've taken a crack at it but I'm not sure it's much better. If
| anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. accurate and neutral,
| and preferably using language from the article itself), we can
| change it again.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the
| dishwasher, and you don't actually lose any storage space.
|
| I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but
| something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels
| because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.
| cnity wrote:
| For all the logical arguments both for and against di-
| dishwashing, I think the main problem is actually aesthetic (at
| least for me). There's something quaint and appealing to me to
| know that my dishes are neatly stacked in a cupboard compared
| to sweating it out on the innards of a dormant appliance.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Can someone explain the aside about solar panels to me? The
| article makes it sound like nobody is buying them despite the
| advances made, but half the houses in my neighborhood are covered
| in solar panels, and the only reason _we_ don 't have any on our
| house is because no company will sell to us because our roof is
| shaped weird!
|
| The engineering solutions _absolutely_ made people willing and
| interested in installing solar panels.
| Suppafly wrote:
| This. Almost half of my neighborhood has panels, and we're in
| the midwest, I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to
| 100%. I'd probably have them, but all of the companies that are
| in my neighborhood use annoying door to door sales and I hate
| to reward companies that do that.
| digging wrote:
| > I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%
|
| Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and
| solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've _never_
| convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost
| nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an
| apartment and I don 't think I know of a single apartment
| building in my city that has panels.)
|
| Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm
| pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar
| installation.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I do know that some companies _lease_ them, which is a bad
| financial decision for a homeowner - not only do you not
| own them, which is bad, but the contract stays with the
| house, which may make it harder to sell. After all, why
| would I buy a house that 's somehow weirdly indebted to
| some fly-by-might solar installation company I've never
| heard of ?
| digging wrote:
| Wow, yeah. I suppose I can sort of see the motivation,
| insofar as solar panels have a finite lifespan, the
| homeowner might think it's better to not be on the hook
| for handling end-of-life. But in reality, as you say, I
| would not want to lease them. I would prefer to purchase
| them outright and trust that either the original
| installation company or another company could remove the
| old ones correctly.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I'm sure some of them are leases, but mostly what I see
| is that you either buy them, often over a long time with
| a loan, and keep all the 'profits' or you agree to let
| the company place them on your roof but they keep most of
| the 'profits'. The profits generally coming from selling
| the electricity back to the grid. Leasing them may make
| financial sense in some situations, like places where you
| can't sell back to the grid but still use a lot of
| electricity and the lease price is still less than buying
| from the grid directly.
| Suppafly wrote:
| The solar rollout in my neighborhood has mostly been
| recent, but I think part of it also depends on the local
| contractors and your area might just be underserviced
| still.
| svachalek wrote:
| That was bizarre. I think we're outliers here in Southern
| California, but the main problem with solar panels here right
| now is the huge differential in daytime vs nighttime available
| power, due to the popularity of solar. And power companies
| trying to totally reinvent billing in order to stay in
| business.
| morsch wrote:
| I can't really say why, but every paragraph of this article left
| me annoyed. It's full of under-examined half-truths, told in the
| smug manner of someone who doesn't have to care if they're right
| or wrong.
| freestyle24147 wrote:
| Absolutely true. The article is a BS spewing BS.
| gweinberg wrote:
| If I had to go by this article, I would have to conclude that
| behavioral science is indeed pure bullshit. Example: "Because the
| boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to
| a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well
| boil the water." Or, with much less effort, you could put it on
| top of a burning stove. Claiming that bringing the water to the
| edge of space still counts as using only the candles isn't being
| clever, it's bullshit.
| petsfed wrote:
| And also, it takes _forever_ to boil water at high altitude,
| for a variety of reasons. The air is usually colder (which
| means the candle consumes more of its fuel just warming itself
| up), the oxygen content of the air makes the candles less
| efficient, and also less oxygen means the candle burns slow
| enough that radiative cooling of the water becomes a factor,
| not to mention that while air is generally a poor thermal
| conductor, low density air is an even worse conductor. I can
| boil a quart of water in about 5 minutes on my jetboil at sea
| level, but it takes about 15 minutes at 10,000 feet.
|
| I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get
| tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly
| wrong this guy is.
| throwanem wrote:
| Behavioral science has lately shown itself susceptible to a great
| deal of BS! The defensive crouch is reasonable, and entirely
| earned in my view given the question of how much of the field's
| basis may well fail to replicate.
|
| The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also
| to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism
| has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any
| other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to
| distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of
| perspective.
| csours wrote:
| Since finishing Blindsight, I've been thinking about juggling
| (real physical juggling, not a metaphor).
|
| Specifically, I can teach someone to _learn to juggle_ , but I
| can't teach a person to juggle directly.
|
| My thinking brain cannot juggle, but my body can juggle. I can't
| make decisions fast enough to juggle.
|
| ---
|
| This is kind of a silly example, but I think the same is true for
| reading (what happens when you see an unfamiliar word), speaking,
| etc, etc.
|
| So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or
| critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
| throwanem wrote:
| You can, though, reflect on the juggling you observe yourself
| doing with sufficient precision and accuracy to both distill
| the essentials for others and further improve your own
| practice. This also generalizes.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the two dishwashers thing has occurred to plenty
| of people. But dishwashers cost more money than a cabinet and
| they require a dedicated water line. This means you can't simply
| install a second dishwasher in a pre-existing house without first
| tearing up the walls to add new pipes from your water main to
| wherever you're going to put the dishwasher, and if you wanted to
| do this in a brand new house, you'd be asking whoever you're
| trying to sell it to to pay for an extra dishwasher.
|
| And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo
| effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or
| not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle
| you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't
| simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive
| predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is
| extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient
| have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it
| a _good_ predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it
| does no better than placebo, that isn 't to say that placebo is
| useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated,
| expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some
| person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a
| patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give
| them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're
| trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Plumbing isn't always challenging.
|
| If having two dishwashers instead of one is the goal, then it
| can be trivially easy to put a second dishwasher next to the
| first one.
|
| (It is possible to think in terms that aren't exclusively
| flippant and extreme.)
| richrichie wrote:
| Behavioural Science is contradiction in terms much like Military
| Intelligence.
| more_corn wrote:
| I really wanted this to be an essay about "is everything
| Bullshit?"
| biomcgary wrote:
| This article is perfectly meta and should be read as performative
| art capping a lifetime of work. i.e., "I am so rich and
| successful that I can write _transparent_ absurdities that are
| labeled as such and get lots of nodding agreement. " Even the HN
| response of dissecting the absurdities fits nicely into the
| author's oeuvre.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| >> If you look at medicine, one of the slightly strange things
| about it is that they subtract the placebo effect. Now, given
| that the placebo effect can contribute to a cure, or to the
| efficacy of a treatment, you'd think people would be trying to
| actually maximize the placebo effect.
|
| Is this a joke?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It's only a joke because doctors _will_ prescribe placebos. He
| 's unable to distinguish between testing medicine and treating
| diseases.
| EduardLev wrote:
| What's it called when someone asks you a question with certain
| parameters, then makes fun of you for trying to keep your answer
| within certain parameters because you didn't think outside the
| box?
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Reading the commentary on here reminds me how much Rory rubs
| techie people (and I count myself as one) the wrong way. You have
| to realise: he's not presenting an _alternative_ to rationality
| /science/economics/whatever; he's just pointing out where it's
| easy to miss out on seemingly silly, but ultimately far wiser,
| solutions to problems that are usually -- ultimately naively --
| positioned as technical or numerical.
|
| Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour
| into things is almost never a bad idea. Don't take it so
| seriously.
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