Comment by DrewADesign
19 hours ago
Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.
19 hours ago
Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.
The Karl Popper in me says: Its barely useful science because its not falsifiable.
Its like a horoscope, it applies to everyone.
Its closer to a tautology "Its raining or its not" than a contradiction "Its raining and its not".
The closer to contradiction limits the possible realities, which makes it better science.
Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
How is it not falsifiable? They found a correlation between susceptibility to bullshit and the result of a previously established cognitive tests.
> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
That's a terrible example of your point. As long as you can define a metric for "worse at their jobs" (it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to) then you have a really clear and testable hypothesis.
You have the word 'falsifiable' backwards.
>it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to
This is the problem, you didn't you can find 100000000 ways for it to be correct. 'They didn't eat breakfast, and they spent 1 second on HN. Therefore breakfast would have been better.'
It looks to me like they designed a test to measure someone’s susceptibility to corporate bullshit, and then administered tests that were correlated with job performance in other studies. If the results were not different on the cognitive tests, then it would be false. If the people who scored higher with their bullshit scores did better on the cognitive tests, then it would be false. If you disagree with the methodology then criticize that, but saying it’s not falsifiable is simply false.
> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
As long as you can define some measure of "worse at their jobs", which corporations routinely do, this seems like an easy thing to falsify.
Go get employee eval scores and poll everyone on whether they eat breakfast.
And they did use cognitive tests that were correlated with job performance. If the people did not perform differently on those tests, or performed better on those tests… well there you go. Is it the most rigorous study in the world? Obviously not. Does it indicate what it purports to indicate? It sure does.
That sort of method has proven problematic, as the thing that matters could be something correlated with breakfast, and the breakfast itself could be irrelevant.
You usually have to ask people to change their behavior. Pretty straight forward in this case though.