12 ms·

Not everything is behavioral science

108 points by the-mitr 2y ago

DrScientist 2y ago
Or, thinking out of the box (sic), you could have zero dish washers, a decent sink and a draining rack. Much more flexible. ie the way to fix the problems with dishwashers is not to get another one, but to get rid of the one you have :-)
the_real_cher 2y ago
[flagged]
canthonytucci 2y ago
BS in the case of this article stands for “behavioral science”
- Cupprum 2y ago
  I was so confused by the initial part of article. BS here, BS there…
- hinkley 2y ago
  Does it though?
  - canthonytucci 2y ago
    I felt like I got click-baited and closed the article after the first sentence without reading it. Revisiting it…maybe the terms are interchangeable.
    - digging 2y ago
      Honestly the article is all over the place and appears to be mostly "bullshit" although I haven't afforded it a complete read yet (and probably won't).
DexesTTP 2y ago
Weird choice to talk about the placebo effect in this context. The placebo effect is definitely used in combination with chemical and biological effects when administering drugs (or, more accurately, it always automatically happens). It's just when trying to test the efficacy of drugs that you need to control for the placebo effect, otherwise the noise of the results would drown the signal of the biological/chemical impact.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- burning_hamster 2y ago
  > it always automatically happens This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus deserves no consideration, when designing the treatment. However, the placebo effect is malleable, and can be improved [1], In scientific studies, this is typically done through suggestions and conditioning [2]. However, this is not standard clinical practice (AFAIK). Where the author is wrong, is that people that are designing drugs, aren't thinking about using the placebo effect more optimally. It is fairly well known, that the efficacy of drugs correlates with the severity of off-target side effects: say that you are taking an analgesic that acts by binding receptor A, but which also induces nausea by also binding an unrelated receptor B. During drug development, the structure of the drug is often tweaked to reduce or abolish binding to such off-target receptors, thus limiting side effects. However, these structural changes also often reduce efficacy, even if the affinity of the drug to the intended target isn't altered at all. My colleagues and I (working in pharmacology but in academia) have often wondered to what degree drug companies try to actively keep non-severe side effects as part of the response profile, given that they may be beneficial for the treatment outcome. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395902002051 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439590...
Modified3019 2y ago
[flagged]
n4r9 2y ago
> here’s the weird thing: if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space. They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work for a lot of people. Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level whereas crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and heavy pans cupboard. Secondly, plates and utensils are way more spread out in a dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky. So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher. And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and salespeople.
- hinkley 2y ago
  In my kitchen I don’t have space to hang the pots and pans. If I could move a wall or a cupboard then that problem would free up a drawer and one of those fiddly corner cupboards.
- gweinberg 2y ago
  Yes. The claim "you don't lose any storage space" may not be barking insane, but it is drooling idiot stupid. Also, you have to spring for a second dishwasher.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    A second dishwasher is like a thousand bucks. Well worth the convenience over years of use.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Assuming that the system works exactly as the author describes, which it would not. And assuming that you have more money than time, which isn't true for everyone.
ijxjdffnkkpp 2y ago
This article is an example of the Shirkey principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution. Of course behavioralscientist.org wants you to think that everything is behavioral science. If it was, then we would need to keep the behavioral scientists employed.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  I think that's definitely very common. Though it's possibly tricky to distinguish from "<domain expert> will see the world through their lens," which is a bit more innocent, I think. I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Bagged2347 2y ago
  I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed. > Is there no value in observing human behavior? The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
  - petsfed 2y ago
javier123454321 2y ago
This can be extrapolated to say something a little more like, every field of study can be used to analyze the world. It means that partially, everything is connected to anything else like the Holographic Theory of Learning[1] states. Creating a field of study is creating a framework for tackling problems. Architecture for spatial and material problems, software for logical and procedural problems, history for causal problems, chemistry for material, etc. Any one of those fields gives you a tool for addressing any problem, and some of those tools are extremely useful in some narrow definition of a problem. Everything has a historical, material and spatial dimension, and everything is processed through our logic and behavior. The goal is to know which hammer to use when, I suppose. [1]. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765
risenshinetech 2y ago
If the title were "Is Everything Behavioral Science?" I certainly would have answered the question myself with a "no" and then moved on with my day. Instead, I was fooled into clicking on the article with the false hope that this would be an interesting take on the rise of bullshit. Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?
- dang 2y ago
  I've taken a crack at it but I'm not sure it's much better. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. accurate and neutral, and preferably using language from the article itself), we can change it again.
Tao3300 2y ago
> if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space. I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.
- cnity 2y ago
  For all the logical arguments both for and against di-dishwashing, I think the main problem is actually aesthetic (at least for me). There's something quaint and appealing to me to know that my dishes are neatly stacked in a cupboard compared to sweating it out on the innards of a dormant appliance.
  - Tao3300 2y ago
    > Di-dishwashing Love it. Let's just call it didishwashing
pavel_lishin 2y ago
Can someone explain the aside about solar panels to me? The article makes it sound like nobody is buying them despite the advances made, but half the houses in my neighborhood are covered in solar panels, and the only reason we don't have any on our house is because no company will sell to us because our roof is shaped weird! The engineering solutions absolutely made people willing and interested in installing solar panels.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  This. Almost half of my neighborhood has panels, and we're in the midwest, I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%. I'd probably have them, but all of the companies that are in my neighborhood use annoying door to door sales and I hate to reward companies that do that.
  - digging 2y ago
    > I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100% Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've never convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an apartment and I don't think I know of a single apartment building in my city that has panels.) Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar installation.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      I do know that some companies lease them, which is a bad financial decision for a homeowner - not only do you not own them, which is bad, but the contract stays with the house, which may make it harder to sell. After all, why would I buy a house that's somehow weirdly indebted to some fly-by-might solar installation company I've never heard of ?
      - digging 2y ago
        Wow, yeah. I suppose I can sort of see the motivation, insofar as solar panels have a finite lifespan, the homeowner might think it's better to not be on the hook for handling end-of-life. But in reality, as you say, I would not want to lease them. I would prefer to purchase them outright and trust that either the original installation company or another company could remove the old ones correctly.
morsch 2y ago
I can't really say why, but every paragraph of this article left me annoyed. It's full of under-examined half-truths, told in the smug manner of someone who doesn't have to care if they're right or wrong.
- freestyle24147 2y ago
  Absolutely true. The article is a BS spewing BS.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gweinberg 2y ago
If I had to go by this article, I would have to conclude that behavioral science is indeed pure bullshit. Example: "Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water." Or, with much less effort, you could put it on top of a burning stove. Claiming that bringing the water to the edge of space still counts as using only the candles isn't being clever, it's bullshit.
- petsfed 2y ago
  And also, it takes forever to boil water at high altitude, for a variety of reasons. The air is usually colder (which means the candle consumes more of its fuel just warming itself up), the oxygen content of the air makes the candles less efficient, and also less oxygen means the candle burns slow enough that radiative cooling of the water becomes a factor, not to mention that while air is generally a poor thermal conductor, low density air is an even worse conductor. I can boil a quart of water in about 5 minutes on my jetboil at sea level, but it takes about 15 minutes at 10,000 feet. I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly wrong this guy is.
throwanem 2y ago
Behavioral science has lately shown itself susceptible to a great deal of BS! The defensive crouch is reasonable, and entirely earned in my view given the question of how much of the field's basis may well fail to replicate. The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of perspective.
csours 2y ago
Since finishing Blindsight, I've been thinking about juggling (real physical juggling, not a metaphor). Specifically, I can teach someone to learn to juggle, but I can't teach a person to juggle directly. My thinking brain cannot juggle, but my body can juggle. I can't make decisions fast enough to juggle. --- This is kind of a silly example, but I think the same is true for reading (what happens when you see an unfamiliar word), speaking, etc, etc. So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
- throwanem 2y ago
  You can, though, reflect on the juggling you observe yourself doing with sufficient precision and accuracy to both distill the essentials for others and further improve your own practice. This also generalizes.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of. Like for example, forming accurate beliefs about the quality of ideas our minds lack familiarity with! Perhaps like juggling (and unlike walking, etc), it is a skill that is not innate, so must be learned? And perhaps unlike juggling, it isn't easy to know when you lack the skill (because of the nature of it).
  - csours 2y ago
    Are these two limitations of rational thought described in the literature: 1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history. 2. Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole. In each step 'down', we exclude details not relevant to that scope, but we neglect to add those details back when we consider the system. AI will certainly not save us from #1 because it will have it's own history. #2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
uththtjf 2y ago
[flagged]
nonameiguess 2y ago
I'm pretty sure the two dishwashers thing has occurred to plenty of people. But dishwashers cost more money than a cabinet and they require a dedicated water line. This means you can't simply install a second dishwasher in a pre-existing house without first tearing up the walls to add new pipes from your water main to wherever you're going to put the dishwasher, and if you wanted to do this in a brand new house, you'd be asking whoever you're trying to sell it to to pay for an extra dishwasher. And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it a good predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it does no better than placebo, that isn't to say that placebo is useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated, expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Plumbing isn't always challenging. If having two dishwashers instead of one is the goal, then it can be trivially easy to put a second dishwasher next to the first one. (It is possible to think in terms that aren't exclusively flippant and extreme.)
  - analog31 2y ago
    Sure. Get rid of the fridge or the sink.
richrichie 2y ago
Behavioural Science is contradiction in terms much like Military Intelligence.
more_corn 2y ago
I really wanted this to be an essay about “is everything Bullshit?”
biomcgary 2y ago
This article is perfectly meta and should be read as performative art capping a lifetime of work. i.e., "I am so rich and successful that I can write transparent absurdities that are labeled as such and get lots of nodding agreement." Even the HN response of dissecting the absurdities fits nicely into the author's oeuvre.
mwkaufma 2y ago
>> If you look at medicine, one of the slightly strange things about it is that they subtract the placebo effect. Now, given that the placebo effect can contribute to a cure, or to the efficacy of a treatment, you’d think people would be trying to actually maximize the placebo effect. Is this a joke?
- HWR_14 2y ago
  It's only a joke because doctors will prescribe placebos. He's unable to distinguish between testing medicine and treating diseases.
EduardLev 2y ago
What's it called when someone asks you a question with certain parameters, then makes fun of you for trying to keep your answer within certain parameters because you didn't think outside the box?
- tgv 2y ago
  Being a prick.
- mharig 2y ago
  Being a father?
xanderlewis 2y ago
Reading the commentary on here reminds me how much Rory rubs techie people (and I count myself as one) the wrong way. You have to realise: he’s not presenting an alternative to rationality/science/economics/whatever; he’s just pointing out where it’s easy to miss out on seemingly silly, but ultimately far wiser, solutions to problems that are usually — ultimately naively — positioned as technical or numerical. Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour into things is almost never a bad idea. Don’t take it so seriously.
- Baeocystin 2y ago
  He reads like smug sandpaper.
- mistermann 2y ago
  I'd say, certain ideas (his are some of them) seem to be intolerable even as a supplement. It'd be hilarious if they were actually useful ideas.
- authorfly 2y ago
  Yes he does rub technie people the wrong way, but I think it's more widely a growing didain of Nudge theory and these guys in other places like UX conferences after a lot of wasted time from these ideas - they just don't pan out in practice in the long term. I don't have a solely tech background and once believed quite staunchly and with excitement in Rorys ideas. As commented elsewhere, they did not work out for me, it turned out the mimetic nature of humans is useful - to avoid loss, and lost experience (which accumulates greater costs over time). Things like nudges, these ideas, these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot. The problem is, if you trick someone into paying twice as much for their shampoo, they have less money to spend on other things. How is it satisfying to do this? It's dark patterns with a new face. I think this applies in the positive case too. Great, something like estimating a 10 day waiting time and hitting it in 7 days makes people report on paper they are happier. When most places do this, the effect will disappear. In fact, if I have one place in my life (e.g. the dentist) where they overestimate, and one where they underestimate (doctors), I will get more annoyed at the doctors than I would have been if they both were bad at estimating. It's shifting my discontent but I'm still discontented by the fact it takes 7 days, not the difference with the estimate. This is obvious and evidence in this example from the data in England with the NHS vs the health services and their satisfaction rates in Denmark and Germany etc. It's true individual cases can have individual effects, but it's a bit like how if you provide personal tutoring for one subject, the student often falls behind in the other subjects - you are taking on a debt that is paid somewhere if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product. In a role like advertising, this is fine. If you want to improve the world, I don't think it is. Likewise if you want to improve your application in terms of retention, lying to the customers about wait time will work for one order, but not multiple. It won't actually improve retention in an AB test after a year to lie unnecessarily.
AlbertCory 2y ago
He misunderstands Harry Truman’s quote, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” It's actually about politics (Truman's domain): If you insist on being the sole owner of some initiative, then no one else will want to work with you. If you allow other people to take some of the credit, then a lot of things become possible. It's not that it can't be tortured into applying to his BS/BS thesis, but it doesn't particularly help.
shreyansh_k 2y ago
Reading this article left me more and more annoyed with every paragraph. To quote from the article: > Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water. I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible. Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket. It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water. Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works. Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.
- adammarples 2y ago
  It's a silly example but he does give a constraint. The one constraint is that the heat has to come from the candles. The purpose is to illustrate that even if one variable is constrained, there are other variables that may not be constrained, that you had assumed were static (altitude, pressure). It's just an example which illustrates a point of the article: try and think of something you had assumed was fixed and change that instead of working with the parameters you thought you had. Not a bad idea overall.
  - gweinberg 2y ago
    He absolutely does not. He said "using only the candles and a box of matches". He never says "as a heat source". There's nothing in the problem as given that would indicate moving the water to someplace low pressure is within the rules but moving it to someplace hot is not.
- mharig 2y ago
supple-mints 2y ago
hail satan
rhelz 2y ago
// I’d add that BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—may be actually suboptimal. And we wonder why there's such a reproducibility crisis in behavioral science....

108 points by the-mitr 2y ago

Or, thinking out of the box (sic), you could have zero dish washers, a decent sink and a draining rack. Much more flexible. ie the way to fix the problems with dishwashers is not to get another one, but to get rid of the one you have :-)

the_real_cher 2y ago

[flagged]

canthonytucci 2y ago

BS in the case of this article stands for “behavioral science”

Cupprum 2y ago
I was so confused by the initial part of article. BS here, BS there…
hinkley 2y ago
Does it though?
- canthonytucci 2y ago
  I felt like I got click-baited and closed the article after the first sentence without reading it. Revisiting it…maybe the terms are interchangeable.
  - digging 2y ago
    Honestly the article is all over the place and appears to be mostly "bullshit" although I haven't afforded it a complete read yet (and probably won't).

DexesTTP 2y ago

Weird choice to talk about the placebo effect in this context. The placebo effect is definitely used in combination with chemical and biological effects when administering drugs (or, more accurately, it always automatically happens). It's just when trying to test the efficacy of drugs that you need to control for the placebo effect, otherwise the noise of the results would drown the signal of the biological/chemical impact.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
burning_hamster 2y ago
> it always automatically happens This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus deserves no consideration, when designing the treatment. However, the placebo effect is malleable, and can be improved [1], In scientific studies, this is typically done through suggestions and conditioning [2]. However, this is not standard clinical practice (AFAIK). Where the author is wrong, is that people that are designing drugs, aren't thinking about using the placebo effect more optimally. It is fairly well known, that the efficacy of drugs correlates with the severity of off-target side effects: say that you are taking an analgesic that acts by binding receptor A, but which also induces nausea by also binding an unrelated receptor B. During drug development, the structure of the drug is often tweaked to reduce or abolish binding to such off-target receptors, thus limiting side effects. However, these structural changes also often reduce efficacy, even if the affinity of the drug to the intended target isn't altered at all. My colleagues and I (working in pharmacology but in academia) have often wondered to what degree drug companies try to actively keep non-severe side effects as part of the response profile, given that they may be beneficial for the treatment outcome. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395902002051 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439590...

Modified3019 2y ago

[flagged]

n4r9 2y ago

> here’s the weird thing: if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space. They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work for a lot of people. Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level whereas crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and heavy pans cupboard. Secondly, plates and utensils are way more spread out in a dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky. So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher. And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and salespeople.

hinkley 2y ago
In my kitchen I don’t have space to hang the pots and pans. If I could move a wall or a cupboard then that problem would free up a drawer and one of those fiddly corner cupboards.
gweinberg 2y ago
Yes. The claim "you don't lose any storage space" may not be barking insane, but it is drooling idiot stupid. Also, you have to spring for a second dishwasher.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  A second dishwasher is like a thousand bucks. Well worth the convenience over years of use.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Assuming that the system works exactly as the author describes, which it would not. And assuming that you have more money than time, which isn't true for everyone.

ijxjdffnkkpp 2y ago

This article is an example of the Shirkey principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution. Of course behavioralscientist.org wants you to think that everything is behavioral science. If it was, then we would need to keep the behavioral scientists employed.

Waterluvian 2y ago
I think that's definitely very common. Though it's possibly tricky to distinguish from "<domain expert> will see the world through their lens," which is a bit more innocent, I think. I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Bagged2347 2y ago
I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
- pessimizer 2y ago
  You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed. > Is there no value in observing human behavior? The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
- petsfed 2y ago

javier123454321 2y ago

This can be extrapolated to say something a little more like, every field of study can be used to analyze the world. It means that partially, everything is connected to anything else like the Holographic Theory of Learning[1] states. Creating a field of study is creating a framework for tackling problems. Architecture for spatial and material problems, software for logical and procedural problems, history for causal problems, chemistry for material, etc. Any one of those fields gives you a tool for addressing any problem, and some of those tools are extremely useful in some narrow definition of a problem. Everything has a historical, material and spatial dimension, and everything is processed through our logic and behavior. The goal is to know which hammer to use when, I suppose. [1]. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765

risenshinetech 2y ago

If the title were "Is Everything Behavioral Science?" I certainly would have answered the question myself with a "no" and then moved on with my day. Instead, I was fooled into clicking on the article with the false hope that this would be an interesting take on the rise of bullshit. Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?

dang 2y ago
I've taken a crack at it but I'm not sure it's much better. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. accurate and neutral, and preferably using language from the article itself), we can change it again.

Tao3300 2y ago

> if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space. I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.

cnity 2y ago
For all the logical arguments both for and against di-dishwashing, I think the main problem is actually aesthetic (at least for me). There's something quaint and appealing to me to know that my dishes are neatly stacked in a cupboard compared to sweating it out on the innards of a dormant appliance.
- Tao3300 2y ago
  > Di-dishwashing Love it. Let's just call it didishwashing

pavel_lishin 2y ago

Can someone explain the aside about solar panels to me? The article makes it sound like nobody is buying them despite the advances made, but half the houses in my neighborhood are covered in solar panels, and the only reason we don't have any on our house is because no company will sell to us because our roof is shaped weird! The engineering solutions absolutely made people willing and interested in installing solar panels.

Suppafly 2y ago
This. Almost half of my neighborhood has panels, and we're in the midwest, I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%. I'd probably have them, but all of the companies that are in my neighborhood use annoying door to door sales and I hate to reward companies that do that.
- digging 2y ago
  > I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100% Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've never convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an apartment and I don't think I know of a single apartment building in my city that has panels.) Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar installation.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    I do know that some companies lease them, which is a bad financial decision for a homeowner - not only do you not own them, which is bad, but the contract stays with the house, which may make it harder to sell. After all, why would I buy a house that's somehow weirdly indebted to some fly-by-might solar installation company I've never heard of ?
    - digging 2y ago
      Wow, yeah. I suppose I can sort of see the motivation, insofar as solar panels have a finite lifespan, the homeowner might think it's better to not be on the hook for handling end-of-life. But in reality, as you say, I would not want to lease them. I would prefer to purchase them outright and trust that either the original installation company or another company could remove the old ones correctly.

morsch 2y ago

I can't really say why, but every paragraph of this article left me annoyed. It's full of under-examined half-truths, told in the smug manner of someone who doesn't have to care if they're right or wrong.

freestyle24147 2y ago
Absolutely true. The article is a BS spewing BS.
deleted 2y ago
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gweinberg 2y ago

If I had to go by this article, I would have to conclude that behavioral science is indeed pure bullshit. Example: "Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water." Or, with much less effort, you could put it on top of a burning stove. Claiming that bringing the water to the edge of space still counts as using only the candles isn't being clever, it's bullshit.

petsfed 2y ago
And also, it takes forever to boil water at high altitude, for a variety of reasons. The air is usually colder (which means the candle consumes more of its fuel just warming itself up), the oxygen content of the air makes the candles less efficient, and also less oxygen means the candle burns slow enough that radiative cooling of the water becomes a factor, not to mention that while air is generally a poor thermal conductor, low density air is an even worse conductor. I can boil a quart of water in about 5 minutes on my jetboil at sea level, but it takes about 15 minutes at 10,000 feet. I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly wrong this guy is.

throwanem 2y ago

Behavioral science has lately shown itself susceptible to a great deal of BS! The defensive crouch is reasonable, and entirely earned in my view given the question of how much of the field's basis may well fail to replicate. The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of perspective.

csours 2y ago

Since finishing Blindsight, I've been thinking about juggling (real physical juggling, not a metaphor). Specifically, I can teach someone to learn to juggle, but I can't teach a person to juggle directly. My thinking brain cannot juggle, but my body can juggle. I can't make decisions fast enough to juggle. --- This is kind of a silly example, but I think the same is true for reading (what happens when you see an unfamiliar word), speaking, etc, etc. So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.

throwanem 2y ago
You can, though, reflect on the juggling you observe yourself doing with sufficient precision and accuracy to both distill the essentials for others and further improve your own practice. This also generalizes.
mistermann 2y ago
> So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of. Like for example, forming accurate beliefs about the quality of ideas our minds lack familiarity with! Perhaps like juggling (and unlike walking, etc), it is a skill that is not innate, so must be learned? And perhaps unlike juggling, it isn't easy to know when you lack the skill (because of the nature of it).
- csours 2y ago
  Are these two limitations of rational thought described in the literature: 1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history. 2. Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole. In each step 'down', we exclude details not relevant to that scope, but we neglect to add those details back when we consider the system. AI will certainly not save us from #1 because it will have it's own history. #2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.

uththtjf 2y ago

[flagged]

nonameiguess 2y ago

I'm pretty sure the two dishwashers thing has occurred to plenty of people. But dishwashers cost more money than a cabinet and they require a dedicated water line. This means you can't simply install a second dishwasher in a pre-existing house without first tearing up the walls to add new pipes from your water main to wherever you're going to put the dishwasher, and if you wanted to do this in a brand new house, you'd be asking whoever you're trying to sell it to to pay for an extra dishwasher. And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it a good predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it does no better than placebo, that isn't to say that placebo is useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated, expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.

ssl-3 2y ago
Plumbing isn't always challenging. If having two dishwashers instead of one is the goal, then it can be trivially easy to put a second dishwasher next to the first one. (It is possible to think in terms that aren't exclusively flippant and extreme.)
- analog31 2y ago
  Sure. Get rid of the fridge or the sink.

richrichie 2y ago

Behavioural Science is contradiction in terms much like Military Intelligence.

more_corn 2y ago

I really wanted this to be an essay about “is everything Bullshit?”

biomcgary 2y ago

This article is perfectly meta and should be read as performative art capping a lifetime of work. i.e., "I am so rich and successful that I can write transparent absurdities that are labeled as such and get lots of nodding agreement." Even the HN response of dissecting the absurdities fits nicely into the author's oeuvre.

mwkaufma 2y ago

>> If you look at medicine, one of the slightly strange things about it is that they subtract the placebo effect. Now, given that the placebo effect can contribute to a cure, or to the efficacy of a treatment, you’d think people would be trying to actually maximize the placebo effect. Is this a joke?

HWR_14 2y ago
It's only a joke because doctors will prescribe placebos. He's unable to distinguish between testing medicine and treating diseases.

EduardLev 2y ago

What's it called when someone asks you a question with certain parameters, then makes fun of you for trying to keep your answer within certain parameters because you didn't think outside the box?

tgv 2y ago
Being a prick.
mharig 2y ago
Being a father?

xanderlewis 2y ago

Reading the commentary on here reminds me how much Rory rubs techie people (and I count myself as one) the wrong way. You have to realise: he’s not presenting an alternative to rationality/science/economics/whatever; he’s just pointing out where it’s easy to miss out on seemingly silly, but ultimately far wiser, solutions to problems that are usually — ultimately naively — positioned as technical or numerical. Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour into things is almost never a bad idea. Don’t take it so seriously.

Baeocystin 2y ago
He reads like smug sandpaper.
mistermann 2y ago
I'd say, certain ideas (his are some of them) seem to be intolerable even as a supplement. It'd be hilarious if they were actually useful ideas.
authorfly 2y ago
Yes he does rub technie people the wrong way, but I think it's more widely a growing didain of Nudge theory and these guys in other places like UX conferences after a lot of wasted time from these ideas - they just don't pan out in practice in the long term. I don't have a solely tech background and once believed quite staunchly and with excitement in Rorys ideas. As commented elsewhere, they did not work out for me, it turned out the mimetic nature of humans is useful - to avoid loss, and lost experience (which accumulates greater costs over time). Things like nudges, these ideas, these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot. The problem is, if you trick someone into paying twice as much for their shampoo, they have less money to spend on other things. How is it satisfying to do this? It's dark patterns with a new face. I think this applies in the positive case too. Great, something like estimating a 10 day waiting time and hitting it in 7 days makes people report on paper they are happier. When most places do this, the effect will disappear. In fact, if I have one place in my life (e.g. the dentist) where they overestimate, and one where they underestimate (doctors), I will get more annoyed at the doctors than I would have been if they both were bad at estimating. It's shifting my discontent but I'm still discontented by the fact it takes 7 days, not the difference with the estimate. This is obvious and evidence in this example from the data in England with the NHS vs the health services and their satisfaction rates in Denmark and Germany etc. It's true individual cases can have individual effects, but it's a bit like how if you provide personal tutoring for one subject, the student often falls behind in the other subjects - you are taking on a debt that is paid somewhere if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product. In a role like advertising, this is fine. If you want to improve the world, I don't think it is. Likewise if you want to improve your application in terms of retention, lying to the customers about wait time will work for one order, but not multiple. It won't actually improve retention in an AB test after a year to lie unnecessarily.

AlbertCory 2y ago

He misunderstands Harry Truman’s quote, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” It's actually about politics (Truman's domain): If you insist on being the sole owner of some initiative, then no one else will want to work with you. If you allow other people to take some of the credit, then a lot of things become possible. It's not that it can't be tortured into applying to his BS/BS thesis, but it doesn't particularly help.

shreyansh_k 2y ago

Reading this article left me more and more annoyed with every paragraph. To quote from the article: > Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water. I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible. Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket. It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water. Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works. Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.

adammarples 2y ago
It's a silly example but he does give a constraint. The one constraint is that the heat has to come from the candles. The purpose is to illustrate that even if one variable is constrained, there are other variables that may not be constrained, that you had assumed were static (altitude, pressure). It's just an example which illustrates a point of the article: try and think of something you had assumed was fixed and change that instead of working with the parameters you thought you had. Not a bad idea overall.
- gweinberg 2y ago
  He absolutely does not. He said "using only the candles and a box of matches". He never says "as a heat source". There's nothing in the problem as given that would indicate moving the water to someplace low pressure is within the rules but moving it to someplace hot is not.
mharig 2y ago

supple-mints 2y ago

hail satan

rhelz 2y ago

// I’d add that BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—may be actually suboptimal. And we wonder why there's such a reproducibility crisis in behavioral science....