Is Everything BS?

> 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 :-)

> 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.

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.

>> 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?

// 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....

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

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

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.

hail satan

Behavioural Science is contradiction in terms much like Military Intelligence.