Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 340 posts

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#301

Post by teddyh »

jonex wrote: post #275
fullshark wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK i don't see this stuff as all that different from doing like a k-means clustering or factor analysis on a data set, it's just an attempt to do it on human personality, which we know has variance and correlations. We don't freak out at market segmentation analysis that involves labels like "early adopters" and "laggards" which are imperfect but informative. I think people just find the entire idea of labeling huma…

Personalities doesn't cluster so k-means would not give anything interesting. Big 5 is pretty close to a factor analysis on a questionnaire data set though, so that's a reasonable though. Four colours is not based on anything like that though. I'd say that astrology is better than DISC in that it's obviously bunk, the problem with the colours is that while some people claim to enjoy it as a pastime or conversation st…

> People reading horoscopes in a magazine wouldn't typically actually follow the advice therein.

How do you know? See also, by the way, Japanese people’s beliefs about blood types:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory#...

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#302

Post by smukherjee19 »

jonex wrote: post #266
smukherjee19 wrote: post #162

Reading the article, the various comments and the linked "Why We Sleep" criticism, I feel really disillusioned. Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong. But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/ , do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and unde…

Number of citations per paragraph is a pretty good indicator in my experience. Typically this is high (close to 1) for good text books in psychology and low (1 per page or less) in bad ones. Citations isn't everything though, many authors misrepresent the content to fit the narrative and in some areas it's not as important. For instance in math, arguments can be made based on very few axioms and you can evaluate the…

Ah, citations and "obvious" claims, and to approach everything with a skeptical mindset, I see! Thanks!

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#303

Post by smukherjee19 »

ncmncm wrote: post #180
smukherjee19 wrote: post #162

Reading the article, the various comments and the linked "Why We Sleep" criticism, I feel really disillusioned. Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong. But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/ , do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and unde…

If it presents psychology as a well-understood and rigorous field, and the author as an authority, it's bunk. Nobody is an expert in psychology, and most of the foundational experiments in the field have been found not to be reproducible.

Hm, I was not aware psychology results were not reproducible to this extent. Maybe better to take stuff with a pinch of salt everytime then. Thanks~

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#305

Post by smukherjee19 »

acqq wrote: post #269
smukherjee19 wrote: post #162

Reading the article, the various comments and the linked "Why We Sleep" criticism, I feel really disillusioned. Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong. But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/ , do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and unde…

> So let me ask the community: what heuristics do you employ when trying to decide whether you can trust a book on what it says or not? Especially if it's not your field of expertise? If one hasn't studied at the university and read the real scientific papers and learned to compared the good ones to the bad ones in one's own field (and everywhere there are enough bad ones too) my impression one has no chance to be go…

>If one hasn't studied at the university and read the real scientific papers and learned to compared the good ones to the bad ones in one's own field (and everywhere there are enough bad ones too) my impression one has no chance to be good at recognizing the difference.

True. Reading more papers seems to be more and more important.

>So it's really hard. The best bet is really learning to discover what the limits of he fields are, who are real experts in the field, then read what they write etc. It's never simple. But if you're just watching a TV where something is presented as a "debate" learn to recognize what's "behind" the two only people who are shown as two "sides": behind a real scientists could be the whole scientific community, effectively all the experts in their field, and behind the guy who "sounds" better in the show can be simply... money from some specific interest group which finances an "actor" who looks good.

I see. So basically try to look beyond the curtains even if it's a different field.

And thanks for the recommendations! Both War of Science and Merchants of Doubt look interesting!

>In short, there are definitely enough people who earn money by "selling" falsehoods. It was never an accident.

So people selling falsehoods is not limited to present era eh. I see!

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#306

Post by tim333 »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #221
achow wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really bizarre that I now only see 26 ratings in the Amazon page, as opposed to 113 that I saw earlier. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behaviour-Understan... Anyone know what is happening? Is that the sudden burst of traffic from HN triggered some kind of Amazon's fake review analysis and they took down bunch of reviews?

For me, I get 117 ratings on amazon.co.uk and 26 ratings on amazon.com

I get 117 on .co.uk and 115 on com. I think I'm logged in on both so maybe that's the thing. Going incognito its 117 and 26.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#307

Post by tim333 »

oefrha wrote: post #56
achow wrote: post #2

Couldn't help but check that it is rated 4.6/5 (113 reviews) in Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behavior-Effectivel... Excerpt from one of the top review.. The book really helps you to understand why 'blues' ask 100 questions, want to problem solve all the time, always ask for more information, and can be cold and distant instead of being emotional creatures. Yellows on the other hand are always day…

Hah, this reminds me of zodiac signs, which every single non-scientist female friend of mine seems to take very seriously (not sure about male friends since this topic seems to never come up). No wonder it sells.

Unlike zodiac signs there probably is some reality to catogrising people as say people oriented or analytic in their typical behaviour in the manner of the Idiots book.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#308

Post by oefrha »

SkyBelow wrote: post #283
oefrha wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a physicist so I can say for certain that a typical college graduate majoring in physics but not looking into a Ph.D. isn’t equipped to discuss any advanced topic (say, quantum field theory). They are usually fifty to a hundred years behind frontier research. That doesn’t necessarily translate to psychology, which I have no idea.

In matters of layman discussion, would you trust their input more than someone with no formal education in physics? To go with a more practical example, say a news report comes out that some new exercise called joopies are better than burpees. Then say someone with a B.S. in Exercise Science says the article is wrong and says burpees are better than joopies. Without either peer reviewed research nor an expert with a…

Thus far the discussion has focused on non-Ph.D. posing as field expert and coming up with original research. However, if you’re trying to evaluate some pop science in media (which is likely garbage, so always start with negative points) and have a friend or family member with a B.S. to talk to, they’re often qualified to debunk a large class of bullshit. For instance, if there’s a news report of a perpetual motion machine, and a physics major tells you it’s obviously bullshit because it violates the first and/or second law of thermodynamics, they’re likely correct. In less obvious scenarios, hopefully they would try to track down the source and try to make sense of it, and tell you if the source is garbage (in case they’re qualified to evaluate it), and/or if the source is misrepresented in media. This isn’t always possible and assumes a humble person who don’t brag about things they don’t understand, though; if the person is known to be boastful then you probably won’t place too much trust on them anyway.

The above is probably more useful for hard sciences though. Honestly when it comes to psychology I take theories endorsed by actual field experts with a grain of salt.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#309

Post by aidenn0 »

ncmncm wrote: post #249
aidenn0 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meyers-Briggs claims that 1. We all have specific preferences in the way we construe our experiences, and these preferences underlie our interests, needs, values, and motivation 2. The MBTI is an accurate measure of #1 There's also an implicit claim that each of the 4 dichotomies are well represented by a binary value. There are far more claims made about it by Meyers and Briggs, but those 3 are baked into the MBTI t…

I have never encountered anyone who claimed either of the above. The test results indicate a spectrum on each axis. Horoscopes are useful to people otherwise inclined to get stuck in a rut. Likewise, the I Ching. You don't need to believe either one for it to be useful. Not believing is an intelligent response, but not everybody is so equipped. Intelligent people get stuck in ruts, too.

Well you are the first proponent of the MBTI I've encountered who has disagreed with those two statements. We clearly have very different experiences.

When I took the MBTI in secondary school, it was stressed that the specific point was to discover which of the 16 types you were, and that knowing which type you were would be helpful in life.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#310

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

mrkwse wrote: post #11

I applied to Volvo when looking for graduate schemes in my final year of university and recall having to complete a personality test there. I'm not sure whether or not that particular test corresponded to the referenced 'method', however it was a series of very arbitrary statements that one had to either agree or disagree with. None of them seemed particularly useful for determining my aptitude as a software engineer…

I'm guessing this was in Göteborg. I also worked on a team in Göteborg and was presented with this nonsense. I ended up telling the HR manager that this "method" is obviously pseudoscience and a waste of my time, and I ended up leaving the team.
Post reply on HN