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> This article is about the author pointing out that there are multiple ways to tell this story, and this particular way is about as impossible as it gets, stat

> This article is about the author pointing out that there are multiple ways to tell this story, and this particular way is about as impossible as it gets, statistically speaking. The author doesn't cite any statistical examples for his refutation of the study. He simply says that the effect is too big, gives some examples of how big the effect is in other situations, and cites absolutely zero statistics to support his refutation. If there was a study where they compared relative conviction rates of judges who had a 10 minute snack recess every two hours, if that rate was the same, that would be some evidence. In fact, it seems as though the conviction rate goes back to normal every time that the judge takes a break, which might suggest that taking a break is the triggering thing, not the food. Would be interesting to see what would happens if the judge were allowed breaks, but not allowed to eat or drink during the breaks.

mfoy_ 9y ago
As a layman, it felt like his article was addressed at professional psychologists, not laymen like myself (or, presumably, yourself). It read like it was assumed that you'd realize how massively overblown such a result should be interpreted. It would be like if you wrote a couple tests and your tooling said you had 100% code coverage, you be like "Wait, that just can't be right. I was just writing tests for one function..." Or imagine you go to download a 100GB file from some server and the download completes in 5 seconds, you'd be like "Wait, that.... just can't be right. I don't have a SSD, allocating the disk space alone should take longer than that..." Of course, that just my assumption, and my impression.
mfoy_ 9y ago
And for what it's worth there are articles out there with more compelling alternative explanations, some of which were linked to from this article. Try this one: https://mindhacks.com/2016/12/08/rational-judges-not-extraneous-factors-in-decisions/ https://mindhacks.com/2016/12/08/rational-judges-not-extrane...
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  This makes much more sense than your previous response. When you have unexpected results, you need to examine you assumptions and the methodology behind them. You can't simply dismiss the results out of hand. In your examples of code coverage, or fast file transfers, you need to dig deeper, not dismiss the results out of hand. For instance, testing the Object.toString() function (although I'm not sure how you'd test that) is something that could result in abnormally high test coverage. Also, when you transfer a file quite quickly, is the OS doing any sort of compression on the data? Is it only for that file? How lossy is the transfer? Etc etc. Simply dismissing the results out of hand because they disagree with your preconceived notions of reality is wrong. For instance: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy-f985772c81a6 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost... Japanese scientists were convinced that the beriberi epidemic was due to germs rather than a nutritional deficiency because that was the prevailing notion of the day.

mfoy_ 9y ago

As a layman, it felt like his article was addressed at professional psychologists, not laymen like myself (or, presumably, yourself). It read like it was assumed that you'd realize how massively overblown such a result should be interpreted. It would be like if you wrote a couple tests and your tooling said you had 100% code coverage, you be like "Wait, that just can't be right. I was just writing tests for one function..." Or imagine you go to download a 100GB file from some server and the download completes in 5 seconds, you'd be like "Wait, that.... just can't be right. I don't have a SSD, allocating the disk space alone should take longer than that..." Of course, that just my assumption, and my impression.

mfoy_ 9y ago

And for what it's worth there are articles out there with more compelling alternative explanations, some of which were linked to from this article. Try this one: https://mindhacks.com/2016/12/08/rational-judges-not-extraneous-factors-in-decisions/ https://mindhacks.com/2016/12/08/rational-judges-not-extrane...

jimmywanger 9y ago
This makes much more sense than your previous response. When you have unexpected results, you need to examine you assumptions and the methodology behind them. You can't simply dismiss the results out of hand. In your examples of code coverage, or fast file transfers, you need to dig deeper, not dismiss the results out of hand. For instance, testing the Object.toString() function (although I'm not sure how you'd test that) is something that could result in abnormally high test coverage. Also, when you transfer a file quite quickly, is the OS doing any sort of compression on the data? Is it only for that file? How lossy is the transfer? Etc etc. Simply dismissing the results out of hand because they disagree with your preconceived notions of reality is wrong. For instance: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy-f985772c81a6 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost... Japanese scientists were convinced that the beriberi epidemic was due to germs rather than a nutritional deficiency because that was the prevailing notion of the day.