The magic soup debacle is finally over
And other links and updates for Spring 2024
(This is the quarterly Links ‘n’ Updates Post, a roundup of news from the blog and things I’ve been reading.)
(1/16) THE MAGIC SOUP DEBACLE
Back in 2005, a researcher at Cornell named Brian Wansink published a study where people were randomly assigned to eat soup out of regular bowls, or out of bowls that (secretly) refilled themselves with unlimited soup. People ate 73% more soup out of the magic infinite soup bowls, even though they didn’t notice themselves doing this and didn’t report feeling any more full than the people who ate out of the regular bowls.
In 2016, Wansink published a blog post where he (proudly!) described how he directs his students to keep fishing in their data sets until they find significant results. This is a very naughty thing to do and renders your statistics completely untrustworthy, as many people pointed out in the comments. Cornell investigated and found Wansink guilty of research misconduct. He “retired” in 2019, and 18 of his papers have been retracted.
But we all want to know—what about the magic soup bowls?? Does that result hold up?
Recently, another team tried to replicate the soup study and found the same effect, although it was smaller: people given self-refilling bowls ate 33% more soup. Weirdly, participants with regular bowls estimated that they ate more soup in terms of ounces, but both groups estimated they consumed the same amount of calories.
This study also provides vindication for my people, who have been long-maligned as ravenous soup-eaters:
We also tested to see if participants who reported being from the Midwest showed different results compared to individuals from elsewhere; we found no significant interaction.
(2/16) KIDNAPPING KIDS FOR, UH, SCIENCE
Institutional Review Boards, which provide ethical oversight for research in the US, are notoriously slow and dumb. I once had to wait four months and undergo several rounds of review before I was allowed to ask MBA students questions like, “How much do you like having fun?” Meanwhile, in China:
We investigated whether 3- to 6-year-old children (total N = 240) could be lured to a new location within their school grounds by an unfamiliar adult
[…]
In the next phase of the procedure, the confederate asked the child to leave with him or her by saying the following: (a) “You are so adorable. I really like you. I have a gift that I want to give to you!” and (b) “Let’s go together and get it, and I will bring you back here after a while.”
About 75% of kids agreed to go with a female stranger, and about 50% agreed to go with a male stranger. Regardless of gender, when the stranger showed up and said the wrong name of the child’s teacher, mom, and class, 40% of the kids still decided to go with them.
(3/16) GORBACHEV SHILLS FOR PIZZA HUT
(4/16) The Bermuda Shorts scandal of 1955
(5/16) Harvard invited the Unabomber to his 50th college reunion
(6/16) Pliny the Elder, a Roman soldier and scholar from the first century AD, on menstruation:
It would indeed be a difficult matter to find anything which is productive of more marvellous effects than the menstrual discharge. On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately; brass and iron will instantly become rusty, and emit an offensive odour; while dogs which may have tasted of the matter so discharged are seized with madness, and their bite is venomous and incurable.
(7/16) The apocalypse had good branding
William Miller convinced thousands of people that the world was ending in 1843, which sounds crazy until you see how good his posters were:
(8/16) “Why Are There So Many Illegal Weed Stores in New York City?”
that explores an ouroboros of messed-up social policy:Selling weed is illegal and we’ll put you in jail for it.
Okay selling weed is legal now and we’d like to offer weed-selling licenses to people who were previously arrested for selling weed.
Oh no most of the people selling weed didn’t obtain a license!
Selling weed without a license is illegal and we’ll put you in jail for it??
(9/16) Highlights from the :
Riding a bicycle weakens your heart and make you ineligible for military service
The Forgotten War on Beepers, which includes this heartbreaking scene:
(10/16) In 2009, a majority of Americans thought cellphones and email were a “change for the better.”
Tragically, only 29% thought the same about blogs:
(11/16) Eighteen soldiers agreed not to fart and then entered a simulated flight chamber to see if flying makes you gassier
Seems like it does?
(12/16) Colin Lysford on the largest known bacterium, which was discovered in 2022:
The moral of the story: you can still find an order-of-magnitude extreme value across an entire domain of life by just picking up the wet thing and checking whether it’s fungus or not. The age of anecdote is not remotely at an end.
(13/16) This peer-reviewed paper was retracted after online commenters noticed this image of a surprisingly well-endowed mouse:
(14/16) “I talk a lot and also I rarely talk”
Speaking of problems in research, Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online recruitment platform that lots of psychologists use for their studies, now appears to be completely infected with bots and scammers. Basically, if you ask people how much they agree with statements like “I talk a lot” and “I rarely talk,” their answers should correlate negatively. (That is, people who agree with “I talk a lot” should also disagree with “I rarely talk.”) But on MTurk, people’s answers to opposite questions correlate positively. CloudResearch, a similar site, fares much better:
(15/16) Why you’ve never been in a plane crash.
(16/16) How much heat does water lose in midair?
pours boiling water from various heights to see how much it cools during flight. “I measured the peak temperature with a digital thermometer, being careful to allow the scalding-hot water to splatter onto my unprotected hand.”UPDATES FOR LIZARD SCIENTISTS
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency in the UK is funding projects on “scaling compute”. Applications due May 7.
Lizards in the wild:
A reader pointed me toward a lot of cool stuff happening at iNaturalist, which is a hub for people doing distributed science all over the world.
UPDATES FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ
(1/5) I was back on EconTalk with Russ Roberts talking about furnaces and air conditioners.
(2/5) Substack interviewed me as part of a piece about including voiceovers in posts, which is a good opportunity to mention that I include voiceovers in posts. You can also get them on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
(3/5) One reader took issue with my “conveniently incomplete” quote from the behaviorist John Watson in Startling differences between humans and jukeboxes. He was right—I had never seen the quote in context before. Here’s the full quote (addition in bold):
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select: doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
(You can read the whole book here.) I remain impressed with Watson’s gumption!
(4/5) Brandon Rosiar, who composed the intro music I use in the voiceovers, is open for business if you’re looking for a composer/mixer/sound engineer/producer. I recommend him very highly—he took my extremely vague instructions “you know, something that goes like bing bong bonk da BONK” and made something I love.
(5/5) Reader Devon Balwit did some art based on one of my recent posts:
A cornucopia of fascinating leads! Among other things, I wondered how Wansink's apparatus would have worked if Tantalus had been one of his experimental subjects. But then I realized that one of the underlying assumptions of all science, not just soup-science, is that divine meddling is excluded.
dead link to dynomight, correct link is https://dynomight.substack.com/p/fahren-height