Post #2473532
2026-03-24 15:19 UTC
@rbowen@mastodon.social I'm pretty skeptical of the original claim. Maybe it's been rigorously reproduced and I just didn't get the memo. But it seems like such a delightfully counter-intuitive yet easy-to-explain thing that the temptation for people to think they've established it -- by selectively reporting results and through selective experimentation in the first place, whether these are done consciously or unconsciously -- is very high. We should always be suspicious of results that have this property.
Replies (1)
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@rbowen@mastodon.social 2026-03-24 15:21
@kfogel@kfogel.org The first article I read about this (which was, I think a couple of years ago) they had asked farmers to guess the weight of a cow, and so, yeah, they were actually kind of experts. But then that NPR article suggested it was just random people on the internet … although I suspect that some of those people had access to … y’know … the internet, to help their guess. :shrug: