#daniel engber

[dk-thrive]

Kahneman once said that being wrong feels good, that it gives the pleasure of a sense of motion: “I used to think something and now I think something else.” He was always wrong, always learning, always going somewhere new."

— Daniel Engber, from "Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are." The late psychologist gave the world an extraordinary gift: admitting his mistakes. (The Atlantic, March 27, 2024)

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on http://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/cybernetic-future2/

Cybernetic Future

Over coffee and conversation at the retirement center, the woman I was sitting with was in the midst of a fascinating story when she stopped and looked blank.  She seemed stuck for a word so I offered it.  Grateful, she went  on with her story, but not before observing, “Around here, it takes a v...

[pknoepfl]

Higher apparent stem cell paper retraction rates versus cancer papers

Higher apparent stem cell paper retraction rates versus cancer papers

The fast-moving stem cell field has enjoyed remarkable progress in the past 10 years despite some issues such as instances of stem cell paper retraction. This “modern” stem cell era that includes induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC) has been striking for progress despite some challenges such as issues with publications.

As a maturing field it is important to view our future through the realistic…

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[empiricaldaily]

The authors called this effect “ego depletion” and said it revealed a fundamental fact about the human mind: We all have a limited supply of willpower, and it decreases with overuse. Eating a radish when you’re surrounded by fresh-baked cookies represents an epic feat of self-denial, and one that really wears you out. Willpower, argued Baumeister and Tice, draws down mental energy—it’s a muscle that can be exercised to exhaustion. That simple idea—perhaps intuitive for nonscientists, but revolutionary in the field—turned into a research juggernaut. In the years that followed, Baumeister and Tice’s lab, as well as dozens of others, published scores of studies using similar procedures. First, the scientists would deplete subjects’ willpower with a task that requires self-control: don’t eat chocolate chip cookies, watch this sad movie but don’t react at all. Then, a few minutes later, they’d test them with a puzzle, a game, or something else that requires mental effort. (...) But that story is about to change. A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing. A zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.

Daniel Engber. 2016. (Title: Everything Is Crumbling; An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong?)

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on http://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/cybernetic-future/

Cybernetic Future

Over coffee and conversation at the retirement center, the woman I was sitting with was in the midst of a fascinating story when she stopped and looked blank.  She seemed stuck for a word so I offered it.  Grateful, she went  on with her story, but not before observing, “Around here, it takes a v...

[empiricaldaily]

Sports psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies comparing imagined and physical practice for actions such as throwing darts, juggling, and tap dancing. Overall, the research shows that mental training works. A 2012 study, for example, compared 32 amateur golfers who putted to another 32 who merely held a golf club in their hands and visualized their swings. Under the same training regimen, both groups improved their putts by getting the ball about 4 inches closer to the hole. (...) It doesn’t work for everyone, though. “If you’re a novice, the impact can be negative,” warns MacIntyre. “If you’re trying to visualize a free throw, and you don’t even know the proper handgrip and movement, then you’re probably going to mentally rehearse the wrong skill, and your skill is going to be impaired.

Daniel Engber. 2015. (Title: Will practicing a skill in your head make you better at it?)

[amfrequencygap]

Love Is Repetition

Quietly hilarious piece by Daniel Engber at Slate on Jonah Lehrer.

[otford]

Election Day thoughts, cont.

― It is often claimed, as in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that “Before Tuesday, gay marriage had never won a statewide vote anywhere in America.” That is false. In 2006, the voters in Arizona (curiously) rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. This was undone two years later, but the 2006 vote remains a fact. ― I don’t know the mind of Angus King, of course. But there are many good reasons to assume that he will caucus with the Democrats, and mostly vote with them: (1) He is a former Democrat, and apparently somewhere left of center; this is essentially the position of the Democratic caucus, while the Senate Republican caucus is quite conservative, and only getting more so. (2) His state is left of center, and far to the left of the Republican caucus. Maine voted 56-41% for Barack Obama; Obama won every age group and both genders. Democrats won the state’s two House seats 65-35% and 58-42%. The state also voted 53-47% for gay marriage. (3) His electoral coalition is probably not even left-of-center; it is probably just liberal. King won 53% of the Maine vote, to 31% for the Republican and just 13% for the Democrat. In napkin-math terms, King pulled 10 of Romney’s 41% but 43 of Obama’s 56%. King was elected by Democrats. He’ll have to vote like one to get reelected. (4) If nothing else, the Democrats are in the majority and likely to remain so. Throwing in his lot with the Democrats brings him more power, and if being in the majority is the only thing he cares about, he can switch to the Republicans if they regain the majority. In this light, it would be the best of all worlds if King had the deciding vote for the majority, à la Jim Jeffords. But I don’t think the calculation needs to get as far as #4. The first three criteria are enough. ― Daniel Engber wants to give credit for Nate Silver’s success to the pollsters. This is not fair at all. Pollsters are part of the team, no doubt, and they do the heavy lifting; but they’re not the brains. No one pollster was reliable at all. Engber seems to recognize that it was at best a collective victory for the pollsters. But each individual pollster stuck predictably with his or her own numbers. None of them was self-effacing (or honest) enough to bring in the sampling of other pollsters to improve the reliability of the numbers. That is why poll aggregators did better than individual pollsters. Someone needed to apply superior methods (and possibly superior intelligence) to the half-cooked poll results produced by individual firms. RealClearPolitics’ crude average was more reliable than the pollsters’ but less than the smart aggregators, and several aggregators predicted the correct result with (and before) Silver. Interestingly, Engber praises the discretion Silver uses in weighing polls, in a piece dismissing its broader value, and fails to recognize the crucial difference between Silver’s average and RCP’s. ― To quote the Atlantic: “With the Romney campaign conceding Florida, the final state that was undecided, Barack Obama captured a total of 332 electoral votes to win reelection”. As a reminder to them and the rest of the news media, elections are decided by voters, not by which party concedes first. I can’t begin to tell you how foolish and offensive this frequent media mistake is. ― O.T. Ford