Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#161

Post by beaconstudios » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #154

beaconstudios wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_meditation

From the wiki article: > Of more than 3,000 scientific studies that were found in a comprehensive search of 17 relevant databases, only about 4% had randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which are designed to exclude the placebo effect. So 4% accounted for placebo. How many accounted for the "taking a break is healthy" effect? You need to show that it is different than just taking a break! Any evidence of this?

4% of 3000 is 120 - that's a lot of studies.

You're the one claiming they're the same - where's your evidence that napping causes the effects identified as caused by meditation?

If you want to believe meditation is the same as napping, you're free to do so. As somebody with a great deal of experience in both meditation and napping, my experience is that they're completely different - meditation is not just quietly relaxing, in fact it can be extremely difficult.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#162

Post by coldtea » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

>Before we define personality, it is useful to explain what it isn’t. Consider a friend who does something bad and then says, “I did it because my personality led me to do it”. In making this argument, our friend is essentially claiming that their personality is like a Gremlin in their head who steers their behaviour, telling them what to do. In reality, of course, the Gremlin doesn’t exist and we don’t usually accept this argument as an excuse for bad behaviour. Instead of invoking Gremlins, the most reasonable and widely accepted definition of personality is behaviour of an individual which is relatively constant over time and doesn’t depend on context (Perugni et al, 2016). Personality isn’t a thing, like a Gremlin, it is simply a pattern of repeatable behaviour. Using this definition, the Gremlin argument becomes circular: if someone claims that their personality made them do something, we can simply counter, “Well, yes, that is the definition of personality. All you are telling me is that you behaved in the way you did because you behaved the way you did.” The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking.

This "explanation" or "argument" is worse empirically and theoritically than what it criticizes...

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#163

Post by neltnerb » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #133

alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

> But * something * tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research. The article. The article told you that: “Maybe the only positive thing that can be said about Erikson’s theory is that it might help some people realise that not everyone thinks the same way they d…

I think another rather critical point that is buried in the article is that Erikson *lied that the person writing the article* endorsed them as a behavioral scientist!

That makes everything else all the more poignant; Erikson apparently saw the author of the article as their *strongest likely supporter* which says so, so much about their degree of self delusion. The person that says Erikson is totally wrong and causing harm is seemingly about the only actual scientist Erikson knows... and Erikson continues to push their theory anyway.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#164

Post by matsemann » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #66

nemetroid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the best selling pocket book in Sweden in 2017 and 2018. 800 000 copies have been sold in Swedish. It was pretty difficult to miss.

That’s under 8% of the population buying the book or receiving it as a gift and some percentage of them reading it.

8% of a population owning a book is friggin huge, don't try to portray it as not.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#165

Post by janto » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #117

janto wrote: post #112

> He started by placing Freud and Jung as the grounders of modern psychology, a distinction that even a someone who has studied a four-week course in the area will know is incorrect. The subject has developed greatly since the time of Freud, Jung and comic book author, Marston. The author's resistance against Freud and Jung's contributions is... myopic?

The importance of Freud and Jung to applicable psychology in the modern era is vastly overblown.

Only if you disregard the importance of belief, meaning, individuation, dialog and their influence on other psychologists.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#166

Post by hutzlibu » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #149

alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

I have a friend who's tremendously into astrology. After years of arguments etc I had a moment of enlightment when I realized she practically uses it more as descriptive model rather than predictive source of truth. I. E. She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people. From that perspective, there's a sense where a summarizing framework is beneficial. Almost every high level executive…

"She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people."

I do not know how your friend did it exactly, but my main experience with people who are into astrology is different - they get told by the astrological models/dogma on how to think of people and combination of people.

"I cannot be with this person, he is a lion and I am [whatever]"

"Why are you together, your signs do not match each other"

In other words, they "help" by simplifying things. Avoiding thinking to make decisions. But in my experience that always hurt them in the long run. And it probably destroyed many relationships as people went with the simple astrological explanation, instead of a real analysis what went wrong. Or rather, it often went wrong, because of negative self fullfulling prophecy.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#167

Post by gherkinnn » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #135

gherkinnn wrote: post #126

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Powerpoint > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Word > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Excel > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> Outlook Interestingly enough, these colours map quite well to the Office suite of old.

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Outlook, for the email-heavy executives. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Excel, for the quants > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Word, for those who like to cozy up with a book or write a short story > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> PowerPoint, for those who want to make a Ted talk

I just don't see the four programs that way. But that might just be the point. And that point is taken.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#168

Post by Jensson » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #161

Jensson wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the wiki article: > Of more than 3,000 scientific studies that were found in a comprehensive search of 17 relevant databases, only about 4% had randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which are designed to exclude the placebo effect. So 4% accounted for placebo. How many accounted for the "taking a break is healthy" effect? You need to show that it is different than just taking a break! Any evidence of this?

4% of 3000 is 120 - that's a lot of studies. You're the one claiming they're the same - where's your evidence that napping causes the effects identified as caused by meditation? If you want to believe meditation is the same as napping, you're free to do so. As somebody with a great deal of experience in both meditation and napping, my experience is that they're completely different - meditation is not just quietly re…

> 4% of 3000 is 120 - that's a lot of studies.

Accounting for placebo is the minimum you should do, that doesn't mean that the rest of the study is well done.

> You're the one claiming they're the same - where's your evidence that napping causes the effects identified as caused by meditation?

You are the one coming with the extraordinary claim, that meditation does something fundamentally different.

> meditation is not just quietly relaxing, in fact it can be extremely difficult.

Right, meditation isn't even a defined concept, it is whatever you want it to be. In some practices it is strenuous as you say, in others it is just relaxing. Bundling all of that under a common name makes research around this topic even less trustworthy.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#169

Post by mherdeg » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #7

I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course. After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it cam…

I took what is probably the same all-day training course with my extended team at Microsoft about 10 years ago.

I had some deep qualms about this -- "this cannot possibly have any scientific basis, right? What is the point of this? How can anyone possibly assert that there are four basic kinds of personalities, that they respond consistently, or that they way they interact matches consistently?"

A colleague's view was something like -- okay, yes, stipulated it's bullshit. But what's important is that we managed to get 100 people into a room together to talk about how they like to work with each other. The "colors" are canned, not-quite-true insights that can jump start the conversation about how people like to work. We gave people some shared vocabulary, however limited, for talking to each other, and they then spent hours working with each other to discuss how their communication and work styles have strengths and weaknesses. So it was a good team bonding exercise because it felt like people would try to work together more afterwards.

I'm still a little torn about using a likely-false concept as a pretext for people to get together and connect with one another -- but there's plenty of this in human history.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#170

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

>> The “Big Five” didn’t come from a theory but through statistical analysis of thousands of personality questionnaires consisting of hundreds of questions. These reveal five properties that are relatively constant over time: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

How these Big Five "properties" where derived is that people thought there was some pattern to questionnaires about behaviour and they ran a PCA on it. They noticed that PCA tended to bring up five principal components, so they interpreted them as five dominant personality traits that are shared by all humans.

This is not very good statistics: they basically used PCA to identify latent variables. But PCA cannot find latent variables. There is some criticism of this, but very rarely because "The Big Five" is basically accepted truth by the psychological community nowadays. In 20 years from now they'll probably debunk it and then hold up some other "model" of "human personality" and then the cycle will repeat.

Here's one critical paper:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/

Whence I quote:

Consider, for instance, the personality literature, where people have discovered that executing a PCA of large numbers of personality subtest scores, and selecting components by the usual selection criteria, often returns five principal components. What is the interpretation of these components? They are “biologically based psychological tendencies,”; and as such are endowed with causal forces (McCrae et al., 2000, p. 173). This interpretation cannot be justified solely on the basis of a PCA, if only because PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one (Bollen & Lennox, 1991; Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003).