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So apparently the fundamental attribution bias may not really exist: "The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: a (surprising) meta-analysis"_ActObs_meta.pdf), Malle 2006. Nor has Thinking, Fast and Slow held up too well under replication or evaluation (maybe half): https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/
I am really discouraged about how the heuristics & biases literature has held up since ~2008. I wasn't naive enough back then to think that all the results were true, I knew about things like publication bias and a bit about power and p-hacking, but what has happened since has far exceeded my worst expectations. (I think Carl Shulman or someone warned me that the H&B literature wouldn't, so props to whoever that was.) At this point, it seems like if it was written about in Cialdini's Influence, you can safely assume it's not real.
At this point, it seems like if it was written about in Cialdini's Influence, you can safely assume it's not real.
How well has the ideas presented in Cialdini's book held up? Scarcity heuristic, Physical attractiveness stereotype, and Reciprocity I thought were pretty solid and hasn't come under scrutiny, yet at least.
At this point, it seems like if it was written about in Cialdini's Influence, you can safely assume it's not real.
Are you sure "does not replicate" is the same as "not real"? If we can't trust the studies that found these effects, why are you so confident in the replications?
Time-reversal heuristic: if the failed replication had come first, why would you privilege the original over that? If the replications cannot be trusted, despite the benefit of clear hypotheses to test and almost always higher power & incorporation of heterogeneity, a fortiori, the original cannot be trusted either...
It would be surprising if the necessary level of power & incorporation of heterogeneity always happened to fall right in between that of the original study and the replication. I would expect that in many cases, the necessary level is above that of both studies, which means neither can be considered definitive.
I think there are some serious issues with the methodology and instruments used to measure heuristics & biases, which they didn't fully understand even ten years ago.
Some cognitive biases are robust and well established, like the endowment effect. Then there are the weirder ones, like ego depletion. I think a fundamental challenge with biases is clever researchers first notice them by observing other humans, as well as observing the way that they think, and then they need to try and measure it formally. The endowment effect, or priming, maps pretty well to a lab. On the other hand, ego depletion is hard to measure in a lab (in any sufficiently extendable way).
I think a lot of people experience, or think they experience, something like ego depletion. Maybe it's insufficiently described, or a broad classification, or too hard to pin down. So the original researcher noticed it in their experience, and formed a contrived experiment to 'prove' it. Everyone agreed with it, not because the statistics were compelling or it was a great research design, but because they all experience, or think they experience, ego depletion.
Then someone replicates it, and it doesn't replicate, because it's really hard to measure robustly. I think ego depletion doesn't work well in a lab, or without some sort of control or intervention, but those are hard things to set up for such a broad and expansive argument. And I guess you could build a survey, but that sucks too.
In the fundamental attribution error, I think that meta analysis is great, in that it shows that these studies suck statistically. They only work if you come to them with the strong prior evidence that "Hey, this seems like something I do to other people, and in the fake examples of attribution error I can think of lots of scenarios where I have done that." Of course, our memory sucks, so that is a questionable prior, but how questionable is it? In the end I don't know if it's real, or only real for some people, or too generalized to be meaningful, or true in some situations but not others, or how other people's brains work. Probably the original thesis was too nice and tidy: Here is a bias, here is the effect size. Maybe the reality is: Here is a name for a ton of strange correlated tiny biases, which together we classify as 'fundamental attribution', but which is incredibly challenging to measure statistically over a sample population in a contrived setting, as the best information to support it seems inextricably tangled up in the recesses of our brains.
(also most heuristics and biases probably do suck, and lack of replication shows the authors were charlatans)
Elo requested that I post this comment about spamming from (I take it) Landmark Forum participants in "the next Open Thread". (Perhaps in order to remind him to perform some sort of moderator-hammering on them.) So here we are. (Linking to it seemed like a better idea than copying its text.)
I don't know what to think about Ego Depletion. When I first read about it, it felt quite intuitive and the research on it was robust. It came up everywhere I read. Then the whole replication crisis thing happened and serious doubts were cast on it. I updated towards a weaker effect.
I haven't given it much thought since, until I was recently reminded of the study about mental fatigue on parole board judges and how chances of granting parole were greatest at the beginning of the work day and right after a food break(replenish mental resources).
If Ego Depletion is weak at best then what is going on with the parole study? My current epistemic status is that the effect is real and not debunked; but the effect may not be as universal (good for predicting parole and not so good for contrived cognitive experiments).
Another math problem. Enjoy it!
https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/yet-another-math-problem/
Zvavzvmvat |fva(a)| vf rdhvinyrag gb zvavzvmvat |a-s(a)| jurer s(a) vf gur arnerfg zhygvcyr bs cv gb a; rdhvinyragyl, gb zvavzvmvat |a-z.cv| jurer a,z ner vagrtref naq 1<=a<=10^100; rdhvinyragyl, gb zvavzvmvat z|a/z-cv| jvgu gur fnzr pbafgenvag ba a. (Juvpu vf boivbhfyl zber be yrff rdhvinyrag gb fbzrguvat yvxr z<=10^100/cv+1.)
Gurer'f n fgnaqneq nytbevguz sbe guvf, juvpu lbh pna svaq qrfpevorq r.t. urer. V guvax gur erfhyg unf gur sbyybjvat qvtvgf:
bar fvk frira mreb svir gjb frira svir avar fvk guerr svir bar svir fvk svir bar svir fvk frira svir sbhe svir avar rvtug svir avar fvk bar bar mreb frira sbhe svir fvk fvk sbhe avar svir svir svir mreb frira guerr fvk gjb guerr bar guerr avar guerr rvtug bar rvtug rvtug rvtug svir avar mreb gjb frira bar mreb fvk gjb avar guerr frira rvtug sbhe svir gjb mreb avar svir gjb gjb avar svir mreb frira gjb sbhe mreb mreb rvtug gjb frira fvk bar frira svir fvk avar sbhe sbhe sbhe mreb fvk guerr
I have the same question as this OP. I didn't think any of the answers were helpful enough. Basically everything I could find regarding Assange's asylum with Ecuador stems from the threat of Sweden extraditing him to the U.S., however the threat of politically motivated deportation remains regardless of what happens in Sweden; the U.K. can just as well do it.
I think it might be good to have a universal language, but I think it's vanishingly unlikely that Esperanto or any other deliberately manufactured language will become one. The way languages get (anything like) universal is by being widely used, and the way languages get widely used is by being widely useful. I don't see any plausible way for something like Esperanto to achieve that. English might become a universal language. Maybe, depending on how the world goes over the next few decades, Chinese or Russian or something. But it won't be Esperanto. Pretty much everyone whose knowledge of Esperanto would make learning Esperanto valuable already speaks English.
child mode for language acquisition
Child mode for language acquisition is a myth. It only helps with pronunciation. For every other aspect of language acquisition that has ever been studied, adults learn faster.
Edit: I mean adults learn faster per hour of effort, which is the relevant axis. In practice, children often learn faster per calendar year because they have nothing better to do.
English has the advantage that England is no longer a very powerful country and I don't think many important countries hate us that much. Therefore it feels more politically neutral to speak English.
I think Mandarin is the only realistic competition, but it will be hard for people outside of the far east to learn. And much of the far east currently feels like China is trying to dominate them, so they would rather use English.
I speak Esperanto fluently, and I really wish it could replace English as a standard communication language. But I see it as a coordination problem that is almost impossible to solve.
Learning English as an international language seems like an insane waste of resources. Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster? But the trick is that the costs are not same for everyone. Specifically, for native English speakers, Esperanto would be more costly than simply using the language they already speak fluently. And because the international language is chosen by people who have most economical power, of course their preferences are going to have greater impact. (And the same thing would happen if e.g. 20 years later English is replaced by Chinese. Then again, everyone except for Chinese would have a reason to prefer Esperanto, but the Chinese wouldn't care, so the rest of the world would have to learn Chinese.)
Even a hypothetical situation where e.g. four languages with most economical power would be perfectly balanced, wouldn't necessarily mean that people would adopt Esperanto (or any other neutral language). Most speakers of these four languages would have little to gain by learning another language, so they wouldn't bother. And for the speakers of smaller languages it would be more profitable to learn one of the four languages (the specific choice depending on their geographical and political situation).
Essentially, most people don't even want to communicate internationally. They mostly learn a foreign language if they believe it will help their careers. Which usually means they learn a language of an economically more powerful group. But that means that the other side doesn't have an incentive to learn a foreign language. The few hobbyists don't have enough purchasing power to matter on the large scale.
It would have to be a completely fragmented world, where almost every city would speak a different language, that would create a strong need for a neutral language. But after the invention of mass media, such situation is not going to happen.