[HN Gopher] Critique of Freakonomics interview with psychologist...
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Critique of Freakonomics interview with psychologist Ellen Langer
Author : nabla9
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-10-28 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| donogh wrote:
| I appreciate this is intellectually lazy but is there a tl;dr?
| It's a clickbait headline followed by a conversation that's, at
| least initially, not good at conveying context.
| posterman wrote:
| not only is it intellectually lazy, its just plain lazy. this
| is hackernews, surely you've heard of artificial intelligence?
| 8note wrote:
| The tl;dr
|
| You should be skeptical of surprising results, and see to
| disconfirm them rather than accepting and repeating them at
| face value
| gs17 wrote:
| They had a guest on who has a history of surprising results
| published from studies with flaws in methodology (although the
| author of the post is clearly a little biased). The complaint
| is about the podcast not being very critical of her, while
| framing the discussion with the question "How do you know
| whether you should believe surprising results?".
| civilian wrote:
| I mean, they were right to be fans of Sulfur dioxide injection
| into the atmosphere. And so far ahead of their time!
| mjb wrote:
| These problems in popular science communication seem to come down
| to a disconnect between what gets audiences excited (unexpected
| results! surprising data!) and what the process of science
| actually looks like (you need to take extra care with unexpected
| results and surprising data). The process of doing good science
| and the process of getting audiences excited about new science
| seem to be fundamentally at odds. This isn't new - the challenges
| where the same when I was reading Scientific American as a kid 30
| years ago.
|
| It's tough, because communicating science in all it's depth and
| uncertainty is tough. You want to communicate the beauty and
| excitement, but don't want to mislead people, and the balance
| there just seems super hard to find.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Nit: It goes a bit deeper than that.
|
| Note this talk by another Pop Sci personality Robert Sapolsky,
| where he talks about the limitations of western reductionism.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo
|
| Yet his latest book on free will exclusively depended on an
| reductionist viewpoint.
|
| While I don't know his motivations for those changes, the fact
| that the paper he mentioned was so extremely unpopular that I
| was only one of a handful that read it surely provided some
| incentive:
|
| > "REDUCTIONISM AND VARIABILITY IN DATA: A META-ANALYSIS ROBERT
| SAPOLSKY and STEVEN BALT"
|
| Or you can go back to math and look at the Brouwer-Hilbert
| controversy, which was purely about if we should, universally,
| accept PEM a priori, which Church, Post, Godel, and others
| proved wasn't a safe in many problems.
|
| Luckily ZFC helped with some of that, but Hilbert won that war
| of of words. Where even suggesting a constructivist approach
| produces so much cognitive dissonance that it is often branded
| as heresy.
|
| Fortunately with the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence you can
| shift to types or categories with someone who understands them
| to avoid that land mine, but even on here people get frustrated
| when people say something is 'undecidable' and then go silent.
| It is not that labeling it as 'undecidable' wins an argument,
| but that it is so painful to move on because from Plato onward
| PEM was part of the trinity of thought that is sacrosanct.
|
| To be clear, I am not a strict constructivist, but view this as
| horses for courses, with the reductionist view being insanely
| useful for many needs.
|
| If you look at the link that jeffbee the mention of "garden of
| forking paths" is a way of stepping on egg shells around the
| above.
|
| https://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/heali...
|
| Overfitting and underfitting are often explained as symptoms of
| the bias-variance trade-off, and even with PHDs it is hard to
| invoke indecomposablity, decidability, or non-triviality; all
| of which should be easy to explain as when PEM doesn't hold for
| some reason.
|
| While mistaking the map for the territory is an easy way for
| the Freakonomics authors to make a living, it can be viewed as
| an unfortunate outcome due to the assumption of PEM and abuse
| of the principle of sufficient reason.
|
| While there are most certainly other approaches, and obviously
| not everything can be proven or even found with the
| constructivist approach, whenever something is found that is
| surprising, there should be an attempt to not accept PEM before
| making a claim that something is not just epistemically
| possible but epistemically necessary.
|
| To me this is just checking your assumptions, obviously the
| staunchly anti-constructivist viewpoint has members that are
| far smarter and knowledgeable then I will ever be.
|
| IMHO for profit or donation based Pop science will always look
| for the man bites dog stories... I do agree that sharing the
| beauty while avoiding misleading is challenging and important.
|
| But the false premise that you either do or do not accept
| constructive mathematics also blocks the ease in which you
| could show that these type of farcical claims the authors make
| are false.
|
| That simply doesn't exist today where the many worlds ideas are
| popular in the press, but pointing out that many efforts appear
| to be an attempt to maintain the illusion of Laplacian
| determinism, which we know has counterexamples, is so counter
| to the Platonic zeitgeist that most people bite their tongues
| when they should be providing counterexamples to help find a
| better theory.
|
| I know that the true believers in any camp help drive things
| forward, and they need to be encouraged too.
|
| But the point is that there is a real deeper problem that is
| helping drive this particular communication problem and
| something needs to change so that we can move forward with the
| majority of individuals having larger toolboxes vs dogmatic
| schools of thought.
|
| </rant>
| jedberg wrote:
| In a quick skim, I couldn't actually find the complaint.
|
| The freakonomics guys have been proven wrong before, and update
| their texts when they can to reflect those things. I'm sure if
| some contrary evidence were presented to them, they would gladly
| consider it, and maybe even have this person on their podcast to
| refute it!
| idle_zealot wrote:
| The complaint is that they're consistently irresponsibly
| gullible.
| randomdata wrote:
| The complaint seems to be that Freaknomics and related
| Podcasts, which are created for the sake of entertainment,
| are not the peer-reviewed journals he wishes they were.
| cholantesh wrote:
| This is an utter cop-out that is a hair's length away from
| "this interviewer was combative and biased". In fact, it is
| entirely possible to thread the needle of being engaging
| without also being a total rube.
| randomdata wrote:
| It's not a cop-out to complain, but one has to remember
| that complaints only mean so much. McDonald's isn't
| becoming a Michelin Star restaurant because you complain
| its food isn't fancy enough either.
|
| It not like there can only be one Podcast. If you see
| that the world is missing something, create it! Nobody
| else is going to do it. If they would, you already
| wouldn't have found it lacking.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The author has a long-standing beef with the statistically
| insignificant and irreproducible claims of the subject Langer.
| See for example this latest paper:
| https://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/heali...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That paper is actually worth the read (and if you don't
| want/have time to read the whole thing, ChatGPT does a great
| job of summarizing it IMO). Langer's research appears to
| generally be in the "mind over matter" genre, and this genre
| seems to be especially rife with the misuse of statistics. It
| actually seems very similar to me to what happened with Amy
| Cuddy's "power posing" research (made famous by this TED
| talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_
| may_s...), which was eventually pretty thoroughly disproven
| and even repudiated by some of the original coauthors of
| Cuddy's papers.
|
| The other question I have is that the paper you linked gives
| makes some very clear, "no gray area" arguments about why
| some T-values that Langer calculated for one of her papers is
| just flat out wrong. He's saying "I'm a statistician, and you
| did the statistics wrong." I'm very curious if Langer ever
| responded to this, because the argument seems pretty black-
| and-white.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I'm no fan of Freakonomics and their whole genre of "wow isn't
| that surprising" pop science (Ariely, Gladwell et. al.) but I
| agree with you here.
|
| He goes through several paragraphs of criticising Levitt for
| believing his interviewee without mentioning what claim the
| interviewee is making. So some chambermaids were told their
| work is exercise, didn't change their behaviour and then....
| What?
| kenjackson wrote:
| Isn't most science in the "wow isn't that surprising" genre?
| I feel like my whole life science has pretty much been
| "hmm... wouldn't have guessed that". Basic facts like fire
| burning oxygen -- I remember literally as a kid thinking --
| of all the things it consumes what we also breathe? Or
| gravity being a function of mass -- that one still trips me a
| little bit.
|
| I think what these authors do is apply science to human
| interactions -- a tilt toward social science -- but science
| to me is usually surprising. (Or I'm just really bad at
| science).
| vundercind wrote:
| Freakonomics is less "check out this surprising science!"
| and more "economist makes spurious but cute connections
| based on way too little information over and over--the
| book!"
| k4j8 wrote:
| The author disagrees with Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer,
| whom Levitt interviewed on his podcast, People I Mostly Admire,
| which is part of the Freakonomics radio network but not the
| main show, Freakonomics. The author thinks Levitt should have
| been more critical of his guest. Perhaps, but this is a podcast
| and not a peer review.
|
| In my opinion, Levitt didn't even say he agreed with Langer,
| although he did compliment her work.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a hug fan on all the Freakonomics shows. I
| appreciate the author pointing out some opposing views and
| think the post is well-written, although exaggerated and overly
| emotional.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The author disagrees with Harvard psychologist Ellen
| Langer,
|
| He might, he might not. What he definitely does think is that
| there have been several in-depth critiques of Langer's work,
| and that it does the listener of Freakonomics a disservice by
| apparently not taking them into account in an way (certainly
| not mentioning them).
|
| The critiques are not of the form "Langer is wrong". They are
| of the form "the experimental design, sample size and
| statistical analysis do not support the claims Langer is
| making".
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > What he definitely does think is that there have been
| several in-depth critiques of Langer's work
|
| And one of those in-depth critiques, which is linked to in
| the post, is by the author of the article himself.
|
| > The critiques are not of the form "Langer is wrong". They
| are of the form "the experimental design, sample size and
| statistical analysis do not support the claims Langer is
| making".
|
| This seems like a distinction that's not really worth
| making. The author of the post is a statistician, and he's
| published a detailed critique (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974050 ) that says
| that Langer did the stats wrong. So sure, he is saying "the
| experimental design, sample size and statistical analysis
| do not support the claims Langer is making", which seems
| equivalent to "she is wrong" when you're a statistician.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Gelman leaves the door reasonably ajar on the possibility
| that Langer is right about effects in the world, but
| firmly closes it on the possibility that the statistical
| analysis Langer presents supports this belief.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Well, we'll just have to reasonably disagree with the
| final interpretation, then. I will say that from reading
| this closing section of Gelman's paper, it's about as
| harsh a condemnation as I've ever seen in an academic
| paper - he essentially says it's not science that's
| masquerading as science. Written from one academic to
| another, that's basically the equivalent of "you're full
| of shit":
|
| > 4.4. Statistical and conceptual problems go together
|
| > We have focused our inquiry on the Aungle and Langer
| (2023) paper, which, despite the evident care that went
| into it, has many problems that we have often seen
| elsewhere in the human sciences: weak theory, noisy data,
| a data structure necessitating a complicated statistical
| analysis that was done wrong, uncontrolled researcher
| degrees of freedom, lack of preregistration or
| replication, and an uncritical reliance on a literature
| that also has all these problems.
|
| > Any one or two of these problems would raise a concern,
| but we argue that it is no coincidence that they all have
| happened together in one paper, and, as we noted earlier,
| this was by no means the only example we could have
| chosen to illustrate these issues. Weak theory often goes
| with noisy data: it is hard to know to collect relevant
| data to test a theory that is not well specified. Such
| studies often have a scattershot flavor with many
| different predictors and outcomes being measured in the
| hope that something will come up, thus yielding difficult
| data structures requiring complicated analyses with many
| researcher degrees of freedom. When underlying effects
| are small and highly variable, direct replications are
| often unsuccessful, leading to literatures that are full
| of unreplicated studies that continue to get cited
| without qualification. This seems to be a particular
| problem with claims about the potentially beneficial
| effects of emotional states on physical health outcomes;
| indeed, one of us found enough material for an entire
| Ph.D. dissertation on this topic (N. J. L. Brown, 2019).
|
| > Finally, all of this occurs in the context of what we
| believe is a sincere and highly motivated research
| program. The work being done in this literature can feel
| like science: a continual refinement of hypotheses in
| light of data, theory, and previous knowledge. It is
| through a combination of statistics (recognizing the
| biases and uncertainty in estimates in the context of
| variation and selection effects) and reality checks
| (including direct replications) that we have learned that
| this work, which looks and feels so much like science,
| can be missing some crucial components. This is why we
| believe there is general value in the effort taken in the
| present article to look carefully at the details of what
| went wrong in this one study and in the literature on
| which it is based.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > In a quick skim, I couldn't actually find the complaint.
|
| I agree (I think) with what you're getting at, but then I
| reread TFA and I've come to see it from the author's point of
| view.
|
| That is, reading between the lines of what you've written, I
| think you're saying that TFA doesn't actually talk in specifics
| about (a) what Ellen Langer's research purports to say, and (b)
| what the particular objections to the conclusions of her
| research actually are. And I totally agree that I think talking
| in specifics, giving real examples (and beyond just links to
| dense, 18-page studies and research where the point is buried
| somewhere within), etc. makes it much easier for the reader to
| actually figure out why I should care about this in the first
| place.
|
| But on the other hand, I think the author of TFA is
| purposefully trying to refrain from "getting into the weeds" as
| he puts it because his main point is really along the lines of
| "extraordinary results should require extraordinary evidence".
| That is, he gives quotes from Steven Levitt about how Langer's
| research is completely contrary to what he would expect, but
| then Levitt barely even challenges how she got such unusual
| results to begin with. I.e. his point is rather than give an
| unfiltered bullhorn to a researcher with questionable (or at
| least controversial) results, why aren't you pushing back by at
| least asking how she would respond to her critics?
|
| So the article is really about "How and why you should be
| skeptical of unexpected results", and much less so about any
| singular instance of unexpected results. That said, again I
| agree that going into more detail of a singular instance would
| have helped the author's argument immensely.
| nabla9 wrote:
| >Freakonomics team has never backed down on many ridiculous
| causes they have promoted, including the innumerate claim that
| beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls and some
| climate change denial.
|
| >And, as I've said many times before, Freakonomics has so much
| good stuff. That's why I'm disappointed, first when they lower
| their standards and second when they don't acknowledge or
| wrestle with their past mistakes. It's not too late! They could
| still do a few shows--or even write a book!--on various
| erroneous claims they've promoted over the years. It would be
| interesting, it would fit their brand, it could be educational
| and also lots of fun.
|
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/09/14/freakonomi...
| chollida1 wrote:
| Yep, it seems like a rant fitting of Hacker news where they
| break apart someone's text and pinpoint tiny sections to pick
| at without actually making a point in general.
|
| Not sure why this rant was posted to HN.
|
| Also the postcast wasn't freakonomics, it was an offshoot one
| where they don't critique a users work, they just interview
| them as a friendly conversation.
|
| Getting upset like the author did indicates that the author
| doesn't know the difference between a podcast and an academic
| paper.
| gs17 wrote:
| Freakonomics has a history (IMO) of being way too uncritical of
| the podcast's guests and PIMA seems worse about it. Personally,
| I think the article is a bit too harsh, but it's in the same
| direction as why I stopped listening.
|
| > First, Levitt starts out by accepting that a certain suspect
| claim "actually has been replicated a number of times." Going
| with your interviewee can make sense in a podcast, but, again,
| it's counter to Levitt's earlier goal of asking, "How do you
| know whether you should believe surprising results?"
|
| I haven't listened to the episode, but Levitt really should
| have pushed back a bit more. The conversation went
| (paraphrased) "Here's a surprising result" "Really? Has that
| been replicated?" "Yes, many times sort of, now here's another
| surprising result from myself". She really should have been
| asked about replications done by other groups at least. The
| replication question kind of gets dodged and then they drop it
| for the rest of the hour-long discussion (according to the
| transcript: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/pay-attention-
| your-body-wil... ), which is a bit odd when he made "How do you
| know whether you should believe surprising results?" a theme of
| the episode. If her work had good replications, it would be
| more believable.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and (coincidentally) related:
|
| _The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action (1978) [pdf]_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41947985 - Oct 2024 (7
| comments)
| treefarmer wrote:
| For those interested in hearing more about the criticism behind
| Freakonomics, there is an If Books Could Kill podcast episode
| going over it:
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wHpooGMRsSBrUHhQZbOZp
|
| I don't agree with all of their criticism but it contains many
| valid points
| dang wrote:
| Can anyone suggest a good [1] title that is more specific? I've
| taken a crack at it above but it seems lame.
|
| A specific title is important because otherwise specific
| discussion (i.e. about what's different in this article) is
| preferable to generic discussion. We get plenty of the latter in
| any case, but it's best if it doesn't dominate the thread.
|
| [1] in this context 'good' := accurate, neutral, and preferably
| using representative language from the article
| 8note wrote:
| A quote of the article quoting the interview:
|
| "How do you know whether you should believe surprising
| [scientific] results?"
|
| The article comes back around to that question a couple of
| times, in trying to describe that Levitt should not trust
| Langur's results because either there's not enough evidence, or
| the evidence doesn't support the conclusion
| dang wrote:
| It's a good quote but too generic for the title of this
| thread.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Using a quote from the article:
|
| > If the findings consistently surprise you, and they seriously
| challenge the beliefs of mainstream science, then maybe you
| should more seriously consider the possibility that these
| findings are wrong!
|
| It seems that "You should seriously consider surprising
| findings" could be a good title. Maybe "results" instead of
| "findings" but the article doesn't actually use that word
| outside quotes.
|
| It's more or less the conclusion of the critique that's
| mentioned in the current title.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism is the ultimate bad
| smell in my book but it sure will get you on Rogan's show.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pandering to the over-estimated intelligence of contrarians is
| the problem. People who self-describe as contrarians,
| independents, or skeptics are consistently associated with
| lower education, lower information, and lower analytical skills
| than others without these self descriptions. This extends to
| politics where people who say they are moderates or
| independents also have these markers of lower information
| compared to people who will describe themselves as having a
| position, no matter what side that position is on. But in
| popular communications we have for some reason decided to exalt
| and praise the skeptic and the independent.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > Pandering to the over-estimated intelligence of contrarians
| is the problem.
|
| It makes them _feel_ smart. Which I 'm sure feel's good, but
| often the signal takes precedence over being _correct_ which
| leads to the obvious issues. It 's the same mechanism that
| makes conspiracy theories so appealing to another group of
| people - knowing how things _really_ work is seductive.
|
| HN has it's own form that if you've been around long enough,
| I'm sure you can identify too.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Yeah I'm going to need to see some citations for these
| claims.
| jmpetroske wrote:
| > People who self-describe as contrarians, independents, or
| skeptics are consistently associated with lower education,
| lower information, and lower analytical skills than others
| without these self descriptions.
|
| This is an awfully large claim to make without any backing
| research. Some quick googling hasn't led me to anything
| backing this up, but I would be curious to read anything that
| says so.
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| I understand the complaints, but I don't think the Freakonomics
| podcast should necessarily be expected to meet the high standard
| of peer review. Is it really that bad for Levitt to take
| published research at face value, trusting that gatekeepers
| upriver have done their due diligence?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| What is the value in listening to an educational podcast if I
| cannot be certain that the material is factual?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Certainty is too high of a bar.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| What use is the value of reading a journal if I cannot be
| certain that the material is reliably peer reviewed?
|
| I'm not sure why the podcast author is being held to a
| standard that should be levied to other matter experts, that
| come way before he ever reaches out for an interview.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It is factual that Langer performed a study in which X was
| done, Y was measured and Z was concluded.
|
| What is less clear is whether X was good experimental design,
| whether the measurements of Y were appropriate, relevant and
| correct, and thus whether or not Z can be concluded.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Is it really that bad for Levitt to take published research
| at face value, trusting that gatekeepers upriver have done
| their due diligence?
|
| Yes, it is. There is a reason the reproducibility/replication
| crisis, especially in the social sciences, is such a hot topic.
| The podcast doesn't need to "meet the high standard of peer
| review", but there are plenty of published objections and
| discussions about Langer's unexpected results, and Levitt
| should have reviewed that and brought that up before
| essentially saying "Wow, your results are so unexpected! OK I'm
| pretty sold!"
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >there are plenty of published objections and discussions
| about Langer's unexpected results, and Levitt should have
| reviewed that and brought that up
|
| Is that expected of Freakonomics? I don't know how much rigor
| they do with their interview subjects, nor how much of a
| subect matter expert they are when it comes to pushing back.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Is that expected of Freakonomics?
|
| Umm, of course? Shouldn't that be expected of any
| interviewer? I mean, they invited a guest onto their show
| _specifically_ because they keep coming up with unexpected
| results - shouldn 't they have done at least a little bit
| of their homework to see why a gaggle of people are
| condemning their results as non-reproducible?
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Shouldn 't that be expected of any interviewer?_
|
| No? Imagine how ridiculous that would become if
| interviewers actually followed that logic. _" Great
| gameplay out there, <insert professional sports star>,
| but nevermind the sport we are all watching, my research
| identified that you erroneously wrote 1+1=3 in
| Kindergarten. What was your thought process?"_
|
| The podcast in question is known as "People I (Mostly)
| Admire" from the Freakonomics podcast network. The name
| should tell you that it is going to be about the people,
| not diving deep into their work. Perhaps there is room
| for a Podcast that scrutinizes the work of scientists,
| but one that literally tells you right in its name that
| it is going to be about people is probably not it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Your example completely and ridiculously mischaracterizes
| my point.
|
| A better example, to piggyback off your sports analogy:
| Suppose a podcast titled "People I (Mostly) Admire"
| decided to interview Barry Bonds, and the interviewer
| asked "Wow, how did you get to be so good in the second
| half of your career?" and Bonds responded "Just a lot of
| hard work!" Yeah, I would totally expect the interviewer
| to push back at that point and say "So, your steroid use
| didn't have anything to do with it?"
|
| Point being, I'm not asking the interviewer to be
| knowledgeable about the subject's kindergarten grades. I
| _do_ think they should do some basic, cursory research
| about the specific topic and subject they brought the
| interviewer on to talk about in the first place.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I would totally expect the interviewer to push back_
|
| Are you confusing expectation with desire? I can
| understand why you might prefer to listen to a podcast
| like that - and nothing says you can't - but that isn't
| necessarily on brand with the specific product in
| question.
|
| In the same vein, you might prefer fine dining, but you
| wouldn't expect McDonalds to offer you fine dining. It is
| quite clearly not the product they sell.
|
| So, I guess the question is: What is it about "People I
| (Mostly) Admire" that has given you the impression that
| it is normally the metaphorical fine dining restaurant
| and not the McDonalds it turned out to be here?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Are you like the king of awful, straw-man analogies or
| something? Will just say I think your attempt to redefine
| this podcast and the Freakonomics brand to just "light,
| fluffy entertainment" is BS. These other comments put it
| better:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975615
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975342
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Are you like the king of awful, straw-man analogies or
| something?_
|
| Yes...? Comes with not understanding the subject very
| well. I mean, logically, if I were an expert I wouldn't
| be here wasting my time talking about what I already
| know, would I? That would be a pointless waste of time.
| Obviously if I am going to talk about something I am
| going to struggle to talk about it in an effort to learn.
|
| _> These other comments put it better:_
|
| These other comments don't even try to answer the
| question...? Wrong links? Perhaps I didn't explain myself
| well enough? I can try again: What is it about this
| particular podcast that has given you the impression that
| it normally asks the hard hitting questions? Be specific.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The type of journalism that involves saying "This person
| makes an incredible claim" and then goes on to allow the
| person to present said claims uncritically is called
| "tabloid journalism[1]." Yes, I would expect a podcast
| hosted by a NYT Journalist and University of Chicago
| Economist to have higher standards, particularly in the
| field of academic research.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
| randomdata wrote:
| That's a fun tangent, but doesn't answer the question.
| What in particular about this podcast has indicated that
| it is not "tabloid journalism"? You clearly recognize
| that tabloid journalism exists, so you know that this
| podcast could theoretically intend to be. But what,
| specifically, has indicated that it normally isn't?
|
| The background of the people involved is irrelevant to
| the nature of the product. Someone who works on
| developing a cure for cancer by day can very well go home
| and build a fart app at night. There is no reason why you
| have to constrain yourself to just one thing.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The Frakonomics brand leans more into the info side of
| infotainment. Having listened to the show, they also lean
| into their academic backgrounds, so yes. This isn't WTF
| with Marc Maron, but even he famously excused himself to do
| some research when he found out he was interviewing the
| "other" Kevin McDonald.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| There's a lot of ground between "the high standard of peer
| review" and "tak[ing] published research at face value."
|
| The former is impractical for a lot of formats (ie podcasts)
| but the latter is clearly harmful in the context of a popular
| podcast or some other medium that amplifies the dubious
| message.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| One of the commenters on that article says how they are supposed
| to be entertaining. But I'll add one more: they're shitposters.
| It's entertaining to a certain audience who don't take them
| seriously, but causes an outrage in others who are trying to do
| proper work.
| gs17 wrote:
| I wouldn't really call the podcast "shitpost-y". It's not
| hyper-serious, but it's not a big joke typically.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Warning sign right here:
|
| > "I've got a model in my head of how the world works -- a broad
| framework for making sense of the world around me. I'm sure
| you've got one, too."
|
| Anyone with scientific training should know that you should have
| multiple working hypothesis, you shouldn't wed yourself to one
| preferred model (which leads to idee fixe, rejecting evidence
| that doesn't fit your model and even inventing evidence which
| does). People who fall into this trap start seeing their mental
| model in the world around them, thinking they're engaging in
| pattern recognition when they're really doing pattern
| _projection_. Their emotions, ego and pride all converge at this
| point - there are dozens of examples throughout scientific
| history of people falling into this trap, who end up shaking
| their fists at experimental data that upsets their apple cart.
|
| It's not that hard to hold two conflicting models in your mind at
| the same time, or more, without ending up emotionally attached to
| any of them.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The "model" under discussion here is much more fundamental than
| I think you're taking into consideration.
|
| Specifically, Langer has suggested that merely thinking about
| things can lead to physical changes in the world. This is at
| odds with not just some specific model of something, but with
| the broadest conception of post-Rennaisance science.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Your brain does burn more glucose when it's working hard and
| this should cause a noticeable if slight temperature increase
| in the surrounding environment - so a physical change does
| take place, just by thinking. Other than that, some
| extraordinary evidence would be required.
| pigeons wrote:
| Could a person cause the physical change in the world of a
| slightly different configuration of myelin in their body,
| just with their thoughts?
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