The ego depletion saga demonstrates the importance of effect sizes
pigee.wordpress.com
pigee.wordpress.com
This will bring about the ego singularity as the positive feedback loop quickly spirals out of control.
But on the whole, I felt that the article was rather trying to state that effect sizes matter, using the ego depletion theory as an example for that. The implications at the end of the article are particularly interesting, or at least, if I were to be more brazen, don't really deny commonly held prejudices on soft sciences...
This isn’t physics, where the existence of a tiny effect such as time dilation might nonetheless have significance beyond the observable regime. If a psychological effect is barely measurable then it’s of no use to anybody. In particular you don’t need to go around taking it into effect in your everyday life.
Compare to the original analogy of a muscle. An actual muscle, if you work it close to its limit, will be weaker one minute later... but if you work it to its limit three times a week for a month it will get stronger. These effect sizes are large, they’re consistently observed in ~100% of healthy adults, and you can actually apply them in your life.
I'd consider "it is like a muscle" a red flag when reading news/science.
Compare this to for example ego depletion, and I would say that the analogy is not apt.
† - for instance, by denying himself bad, tempting things
‡ - gives in to temptation
It's not flimsy at all, it just appears to be wrong.
I kind of think Brent could have gone further with some of the implications of the ED effect size being so small. To me, it's interesting that it is basically zero (I don't think it's even .08, based on Bayesian prior choice effects, which is another interesting angle on this story). Why? Because I think it's a fairly intuitive idea that gets applied by people in everyday life over and over again, and has broader implications.
For example, you are in a situation where you're tempted by something, have to resist temptation, and experience it as exhausting. You go home from work and are tired and need to relax, ostensibly because you're tired by being on your best behavior all day. There's recent very cogently argued public health literature arguing that diets don't work largely because it's too hard (read: too fatiguing, too effortful) to resist our favorite foods, either in the short term or over the long term.
In short, I think there are a lot of people who would be surprised that the ego depletion effect is so close to zero. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people. It also raises the question of why it's difficult to resist temptations over a sustained period, and how to model that process more accurately (my reading of the ego depletion literature is that a lot of the effect can be explained by sustained negative emotional state or heightened attention, rather than resource depletion, but that's a different issue; another explanation is with reward prediction models, but I think those are predicting a different aspect of behavior).
I guess I'm agreeing with you, but I think the magnitude of the effect size being zero or close to it is important for a lot of reasons aside from meta-scientific issues pertaining to replicability and trustworthiness of results.
Any HNers have tips for working in low-data regimes (N=low hundreds)? Is there some magic Bayesian angle I don't know about?
We haven't systemically looked at effect sizes and this article is a good push for me to dig into that.
If you have a million users you can get few data per user but lots of data in total.
If you have 100 users you can get a lot of data on each one by direct contact
Locking yourself into 100 early adopters may or may not be prudent.
Main thing to answer is how representative your sample of target users is. The deeper the questions asked, less likely it is.
Alas, some of the social sciences didn't use to be so honest. See this infamous piece about 'methodological terrorism': http://datacolada.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Fiske-presi... (or https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/inside-psychologys-methodolog... for an overview).
Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion.
After looking up this concept of Ego Depletion, which seemed like a new idea I haven't heard of before, when I clicked this discussion today... I can see it's basically the same idea. But what I hadn't considered is that the same ideas are able to be used by, eg. advertisers!
While my goal of study in this field is making the most of my own efforts, there is someone out there looking at the same charts, trying to figure out exactly where is the right place to put their advertisement to maximize the effect it has on me, even going as far as to get me to buy something that I wouldn't have bought otherwise.
That's just fascinating. (Alternatively, that's a horrifying idea...)
1) Go to Ivy school, get your phd, make all the key connections
2) Find something that makes intuitive sense to a highly educated person, and create a test that you claim measures it. Even better if it’s really fuzzy, like “ego depletion”. For example, call it “mood enhancement”. This is if your mood is elevated. The test would ask 20 questions about your current mood, like “Do I feel happy” and “I feel above-normal positive emotions”. These 20 questions will use 1 to 5 scale and provide a 100 point outcome.
3) Use your connections to get people in the academic industry to start promoting it and using it. Publish a paper showing what baseline is.
4) Now is your time to strike. Start making experiments that you anticipate would modify someone’s mood, like giving them a glass of wine before the test, or having them call their mother. Do control and experimental and see the boost to “mood enhancement”.
5) Publish paper after paper on your amazing discoveries of how to boost “mood enhancement”. Get others to cite your publications and make a cottage industry of “mood enhancement” research experts. More people, more papers, more funding - and you started it all with the key genesis “mood enhancement” paper!
6) Write books, go on NPR as a guest speaker, give speeches. You have quantified mood and determined how to boost it. “My research shows that a 7.2 percent increase in mood occurs when you call your mother before a big company presentation. It’s science!” You are now a public figure and can get tenure and big corporate speech bucks. The world has been forever changed by your mood enhancing research!
Elongating an extra cynical rant does not count as teaching us something, so please don't post like this to HN. If what you're writing is based on knowledge or experience, please share your knowledge or experience directly. If it isn't, please post elsewhere.
Your failure to be cynical in the face of ever-mounting evidence is a clear sign that you are failing to show the skepticism demanded of sincere scientists. From [0] linked upthread:
> This means, presumably after about Jan 1st 2025 utilizing willpower will increase the available resources to utilize in willpower tasks. This in turn will require us to hold back from utilizing our willpower in order to prevent exponential amplification in a loop… However, holding back from utilizing willpower itself requires willpower, leading to actually super-exponential ego growth. Shortly after midnight Jan 1 2025 all humans will vanish in a blinding flash of pure ego.
Clearly something is wrong here; clearly ego depletion, as described by the literature of psychology, does not exist. (Or I am about to write a lot of code in the next few years!)
The thread-starter you are criticizing was obliquely referring to several well-known failures of the psychologist community: power poses [1], priming [2], and more beliefs about food than you knew you ever held [3].
As somebody elsewhere says, the point is indeed that perhaps it's all rubbish. Do you have a coherent reason to believe, or is it something taken on faith?
[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/19/break-out-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing
[2] https://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psycho...
It's disappointing when a site is supposed to promote curiosity and yet its moderators are not only uninformed but actively incurious. You have a pattern of policing folks' tones under the auspices of poor content, but it doesn't hold up well when you post two-sentence dismissals to hundreds of words worth of original, sincere, considered thought. It makes you come across as lacking in empathy and insight.
This ain't the first time you've shown this attitude, for what it's worth. I am picking up on a pattern.
Only in the same sense that the fad diet industry has "some value". It makes people careers and money. Actual value in the field would be to discover truths about people's psychology.