science

First caveat, this research was all done before the dawn of the reproducibility movement, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Some day hopefully all discussion of science requires considering this. Anyway, onto the show.

There seems to be this common finding in psychology literature: people make accurate snap judgments about certain social qualities of others.

The term thin slice comes from a frequently cited article by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, in which subjects evaluated thirty-second silent video clips of instructors teaching a class.’ Subsequent analysis found that these brief evaluations predicted the instructors’ end-of-semester student ratings. Their work built on earlier research that found a similar predictive power in job interviews,’ where the first impressions were critical for the eventual hiring decision.

You know, trust your gut and all that. Here’s some more of the same theme:

Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression.

Great. So here’s my question: why the hell is it so hard to figure out whether a job candidate will be any good? Consider the findings of employment-related thin-slice research: it can predict whether the person is hired or not. It cannot predict if the person will be any good on the job. Here’s a quote from this paper:

DeGroot and Motowidlo (1999) found that actual performance ratings of managers in a news-publishing company were associated with naive raters’ judgments. Ratings of 10-second clips of interviews of 22 managers on liking, trust, competence, dominance, persuasiveness, influence and willingness to help the manager, when combined into a composite, were significantly positively correlated with job performance ratings by their supervisors.

In contrast, a study on the vocal characteristics of direct salespeople found a relation between certain microtraits and actual sales performance, but no relation between thin-slice trait judgments and actual sales performance (Peterson, Cannito & Brown, 1995). Twenty-one direct salespeople gave audiotaped, scripted sales-pitch introductions, which were five sentences and 64 words long. Speaking rate, average pause duration, loudness, variability and fundamental frequency (the vibration rate of the vocal folds in the throat) were measured and a sample of housewives who were representative of the target audience, rated the salespeople on questions related to the salespeople’s personality characteristics and rated their own receptivity toward the salespeople. The housewives were able to detect difference in speaking rates, but this was not related to differences in their perceptions of the salespeople. In addition, the housewives judgments of attitude and receptivity were not correlated with sales performance.

What can we learn from all this? Why don’t we have a basic intuition for business ability? It seems that business skills are simply not something that mattered in the evolutionary crucible. Idle speculation here but maybe things like social status and dominance are good things to snap judge because they help avoid costly conflict.

Business, though? Cro-Mangon man says: “Meh”.

I like the idea of psychology because it lets me anchor intuition about others in something more concrete. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a field so deeply susceptible to BS, psychology research is currently at the forefront of the reproducibility movement. Consider Ed Yong’s reporting work:

“Some people are concerned that this will damage psychology as a whole and the public will perceive an epidemic of fraud,” says Simonsohn. “I think that’s unfounded.” He notes that retractions are common in many fields, and cites the case of anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, who was recently found to have fabricated data in at least 172 papers.

“We in psychology are actually trying to fix things,” he says. “It would be ironic if that led to the perception that we are less credible than other sciences are. My hope is that five years from now, other sciences will look to psychology as an example of proper reporting of scientific research.”

It’s important to realize that much of scientific research is BS. At least psychology, unlike economics, has real experiments to reproduce!

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
– Ellen McManis
Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.:

The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.

That’s xkcd‘s new blog. And there’s this incredible illustration:

And much much more.

The most exciting blog idea I’ve come across in years? Yep.

…when the sign in front of my local pharmacy started advertising “Green coffee beans – as seen on Dr. Oz” [as a weight loss wonder drug -DW], I tracked down the clip in question.

That’s Scott Gavura of Science-Based Medicine (SBM), who then goes on to drilling into a (the?) piece of evidence that could possibly support this supplement manufacturer’s claims. I have to admit I love reading the occasional holy smackdown of crackpot science. And today I got my fill:

…Green coffee extract (the brand “GCA”) was used in the study. The authors note that GCA has a standardized content of 45.9% chlorogenic acid, which is purported to be the active ingredient. Now contrary to what was said on the Dr. Oz show, chlorogenic acid is also in roasted coffee in significant amounts, so you don’t need to take green coffee extract to get a good dose.

…The study is entitled Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, linear dose, crossover study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a green coffee bean extract in overweight subjects. The lead author, Joe A Vinson, is a chemist at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. None of the three authors appear to be clinicians or medical professionals, and none appear to have published obesity-related research before, according to PubMed. The study was funded by a supplement manufacturer, Applied Food Sciences.

To start — this is a very tiny trial — just 16 patients (8 males, 8 females) with an average age of 33 years. The research location was a hospital in Bangalore, India. How these patients were recruited was not disclosed. Normally a trial would list detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria, and then describe how many patients were considered and the reasons for exclusion. This paper just reports the final number, and there is no information provided on why 16 was felt to be the desireable number. The average weight was 76.6kg (168 lbs) and the average body mass index (BMI) was 28.22. While the BMI on an individual basis may not be informative, when looking at a population, a score between 25 and 30 is usually accepted to mean overweight, but not obese. The details on how these measurements were taken were not well described — which is surprising, given this is a this is a pretty important part of the study.

And on and on it goes. Science lovers and crackpot-haters, do feast your eyes on the whole article.

Today CERN announced that they have probably found the Higgs Boson. I read this last night so I was expecting it:

They’re very likely going to announce that the 5-σ threshold, the “gold standard” for discovery, has been reached, and that we’ve discovered the Higgs boson.

Assuming things go as we expect, the speculation will turn to the question of what does it mean, and I’ve got some early analysis for you.

For a Higgs right around 125 GeV, which is where all preliminary analysis points, we expect that the Higgs will be produced at a certain rate, and that it will decay into various other particles at particular rates. What are those rates? There’s an excellent analysis in this paper, that shows what the standard model rate is for various possibilities, and what the preliminary data is for each detector, thus far.

If this is, in fact, where the Higgs appears to be, and the rates observed are consistent with the standard model predictions, and there are no other “new particle” announcements that come out on the 4th, then this is an amazing victory for the standard model.

And a nightmare scenario for everything else, including supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory.

Here’s a bit more:

The great nightmare of people interested in particle physics is that the standard model works toowell. That the Higgs exists somewhere between 120 and 140 GeV, that there’s no supersymmetry or extra dimensions or composite Higgs or technicolor or anything surprising.

And this would mean that we’d never understand why the Higgs couples the way it does, or whythe particles in the Universe have the masses that they do; the best we’d be able to say is, “They just do.”

So I’m hopeful that they don’t find only the Higgs, because if they do, we could be living through the last hurrah of particle physics, and there’s too much that we still need to know! Here’s hoping…

I haven’t seen anything in any of the press releases commenting on whether this nightmare scenario is true or not.