I’d like to tell you about one of the biggest and most effortful studies on behavior change ever conducted and its strange findings (that may not even be obvious if you read the paper – I only realized its implications on my 2nd reading!)
Let’s begin: The study had 61,000 participants, all with gym memberships. 30 scientists worked in small teams to develop interventions, each aiming to increase gym attendance over 4-weeks. This resulted in 53 interventions to test. A promising setup to figu...
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causal inference
When Fallacies Aren’t Fallacies
Something rarely discussed that's important to recognize about "logical fallacies": in real-world situations, most of them are only SOMETIMES fallacies.
Here are a bunch of examples:
(1) Appeal to authority: some authorities ARE reliable. For example, ask a physicist about a well-established idea in physics, and you'll likely get the right answer.
(2) Bandwagon effect: lots of people believing something often is evidence for it being true. For example, lots of people saying they heard ...
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