I had the exact same problem! One child and then twins, we measured our old SUV wrong and realized the night before the twins were born that we couldn't fit all our kids in one car. I was shopping for a minivan from the hospital :)
I find this response overly dismissive. Did you read the paper or just the abstract?
Dismissing the work of marketing professors out of hand isn't the right approach. What if this is one of the half of psychology papers that do replicate?
While I definitely agree that one shouldn't be overly dismissive without reading the underlying paper, the abstract can actually be surprisingly predictive.
"Beyond statistical issues, it strikes me that several of the studies that didn’t replicate have another quality in common: newsworthiness. They reported cute, attention-grabbing, whoa-if-true results that conform to the biases of at least some parts of society. One purportedly showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to understand other people’s beliefs and desires. Another said that thinking analytically weakens belief in religion. Yet another said that people who think about computers are worse at recalling old information—a phenomenon that the authors billed as “the Google effect.” All of these were widely covered in the media."
Scanned the paper too with sci hub. Nothing remarkable.
But we should be dismissive of any new results from psychology, it just doesn't have systems in place to validate claims. There is some cool stuff in psychology that has been replicated 20 times, across different cultures, and over time. But the chances of a headline psychology paper being true are, generously, 5%.
To be far to the authors, they are in a bit of a bind. In order to get their Phd, and progress in their academic career they have to do "original" research.
For psychology for the last 40 years, this means do stuff like this. Get cohorts together and test claims. When one is statistically significant, publish. They really didn't have much of a choice other than drop their career. They are probably nice people who just want to teach college classes. Misinforming people is an unintended side effect and more an indictment of academia than of them.
I think skepticism is warranted, but dismissiveness is not. Honestly it's a little offensive.
Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).
The fact that most of us already believe it is reason for increased skepticism. We have a bias towards accepting things that mesh with our existing beliefs.
That doesn't mean their results are untrue. We just have to be careful not to overestimate the strength of this evidence.
Being a little offensive is fine. The question and argument should be whether it's a corre t assessment about the field, not whether it will hurt their feelings to read this. If it's false, argue that. It can be offensive to priests to say there's no god. It doesn't by itself make it false.
That’s fair. But you are just proving my point. This research was dismissed out of hand, it wasn’t actually engaged with to see if it’s a correct assessment or not. That seems to happen whenever any sort of soft science research is posted here. There is a contingent of folks that seems to believe soft science is an oxymoron and therefore shouldn’t even be tried.
It's not necessarily bad habit to kind of purge HN of these random "paper announcements". Wait until there's a meta-analysis and let's submit that and talk about that.
Regarding the folks who are militantly ignorant about the science of soft science, alas I have to agree, they are a bit of a problem.
I read part of the paper. Note the graphs where the y axis is as short as possible to make the effect size look larger. The title is explicitly non-serious. They also represent that they can measure cognitive capacity and fluid intelligence reliably and meaningfully, instead of presenting the data more clearly in the form of... data, eg, raw text scores. It also lacks the sort of control group that has a non-smartphone distraction present, so there isn't conclusive evidence that its the smartphone itself. What if it was a chessboard or a sandwich?
They need to hold themselves to more serious standards, this makes science itself look bad
In the physics lab the T.A. will yell at you if choose a scale that starts at zero instead of a scale that shows only the relevant section. When the T.A. is tired, he/she will ask another T.A. to continue the yelling. (Or sometimes just make you redo the report until you choose the correct scale.)
The research journal have a similar policy.
For some reason people in the Internet don't like it, so a solution for a blog post is to show both graphs. One that starts at zero and other with the relevant section.
It's worse than half. In some areas it's 2/3rds of the best!
No one is actually replicating the mass of research, they are trying to replicate highly cited results. Of those its half.
The vast majority of social science research is unreplicable, primarily because it uses dramatically under-powered association modelling to make causal claims. It's dressed-up astrology.
Ding Ding. This is exactly it. Mostly people don't understand the economic model of fast growth SaaS companies, even when working for one. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
Does anything know if other countries have the same levels of conspiracy theory belief as the United States? I've tried to research this and largely come up empty.
from personal experience (born in Germany, lived in several EU countries, spent some time in the US), no. There are conspiracy theories that are somewhat equivalent to QAnon in spirit like the "Reichsbürger" one in Germany which asserts that the state really is some sort of corporation owned by Jews or the US or something along these lines and it has a modest following, but it is completely outside of civil society.
The US seems relatively unique mostly because it doesn't have any legal or information infrastructure to battle these sorts of misinformation. As soon as conspiracy-theories venture into anti-semitism or hate (as they regularly do), there exist legal tools to shut them down in Europe, and there is a healthy public news/broadcasting infrastructure in most countries that manages to keep a common reality intact.
ESL/EFL teacher here. Yes. A Spanish engineer who was my student recently thinks the moon landing was faked. A Puerto Rican accountant thinks the CIA has weather-controlling satellites and steers hurricanes to PR. Many Europeans think 9/11 was done by Bush. Many, many Arabs that I've taught say the holocaust never happened, and that Jews are responsible for a hundred unrelated things.
> if other countries have the same levels of conspiracy theory belief as the United States?
From what I am aware of, at least in western Europe a lot of new fake stories indeed have their origin directly from the internet and English speaking sources.
It's that bad: even different politicians, who theoretically should have some people in charge of checking what they should talk about, repeat publicly things that they probably get from the internet.
Additionally, I'm aware of more than one medical practitioner also spreading misinformation about the pandemics, obviously also after reading initially English-originated fake stories.
Internet is more powerful than most would like to accept in spreading false beliefs internationally.
"BERLIN — Thousands of protesters, some waving flags with the symbol of the QAnon conspiracy movement, gathered in the German capital Berlin on Saturday to demonstrate against social restrictions in place due to the coronavirus pandemic."
A report from the Switzerland (German, the relevant part translated to English follows):
"It was hardly a coincidence that QAnon fanatics marched publicly for the first time in Switzerland in May. The big Q on T-shirts and signs was omnipresent at the corona demos of radical anti-vaccination opponents and right-wing esotericists in Bern and Zurich.
Celebrities also acted as a fire accelerator for the growing movement in Europe: vegan chef Attila Hildmann, musician Xavier Naidoo and pop singer Robbie Williams. They all spread QAnon propaganda. Xavier Naidoo said in a Telegram video: “I've slowly been able to put the puzzle together. Because that is an industry, a huge industry that tortures and murders children. " Now one could dismiss these horror stories as outrageous nonsense if the story did not have concrete consequences. Because radicalization on the internet is increasingly leading to real violence."
"The politician in this video is Italian Parliament Member Sara Cunial. She’s part of Italy’s “5 Star Movement,” a political party that has been blamed for a rise of measles in Italy after pushing an anti-vaccination agenda. Cunial, who was briefly suspended from the party in 2018 after likening vaccines to “free genocide” in a Facebook post, was fined in April 2020 for violating one of the country’s shelter-in place policies to visit a beach. (Cunial claims she was never fined.)
Cunial’s speech before the Italian Parliament hit on a number of popular (and discredited) conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19. For instance, she linked the spread of the disease to the rise of 5G technology, claimed that Gates was working to de-populate the world, and said that the “ID2020” coalition was working to secretly implement digital microchips via mandatory vaccines."
Edit:
The link to the second article by Robert Guffey on Salon:
Even thought this is good news, I don't think it'll do much about getting us back to normal life. The high sensitivity rate they report is after "symptom onset."
We really need a test with a high sensitivity rate for presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers to make a big difference day to day.
Certainly a step in the right direction, but only a step.
Did you read this article? There are now 4 cases (all in one family), after 102 days without any. They are reinstating restrictions for 3 days so authorities can properly do contact tracing.
Of course pandemic isn't over, but I think some level of self congratulation is appropriate.
There are a total of four detected cases, with no known ties to any obvious potential source of infection like overseas travel, border enforcement, isolation facilities or anything like that, after 102 days without any. Covid-19 cases don't just spontaneously generate - they had to catch it from someone. Which implies there is some unknown number of undetected infections out there spreading for an as-yet-undetermined amount of time during the 102-day period where no cases were detected. This is not a good sign and definitely calls into question the self-congratulation. I suspect their PM knows this.
(I've also heard claims that their testing numbers were quite low during the period when zero cases were reported. Didn't get any mainstream media coverage, but stuff which doesn't fit the narrative generally doesn't.)
Yeah the message was always to get tested if you had any symptoms but that may not have always happened in practice. There was sentinel testing of border workers, but not widespread testing of the asymptomatic public.
If they can’t definitively contact-trace the origin of this family’s infection, then we’re probably going to have to lock down for two transmission cycles, ~4 weeks. That would be disappointing and difficult. We’re in the middle of an election campaign cycle right now, so I hope that doesn’t strain our unity.
Why not just go used? I picked up a road bike for a great deal in LA recently. I just checked LA craigslist, and there are over 400 results for "mountain bike" and > $1000.
Once you filter out pieces of junk, bikes that don't fit my specific height and aren't within an hour drive, that list unfortunately gets a lot smaller. I expect that filtering to become more relaxed as time goes on though. :)
