Slate Star Codex

It’s Christmas shopping season, and so time for the annual reminder that if you want to support this blog you can shop through my Amazon affiliate link (also on sidebar) and I’ll get ~5% of whatever you spend at no extra cost to you.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can also shop through this portal and give ~5% of whatever you spend to one of GiveWell’s top recommended charities.

In order to get you started, here are some recommendations for products I really liked over the past year. I’m not affiliated with any of these and don’t get anything from endorsing them besides the Amazon fee. I talk about some health care products, but they’re all out of my field and best thought of a the opinion of an informed consumer, not as official medical endorsements.

Traditional 18-Year Balsamic Vinegar

A big part of people’s enjoyment of food is placebo. For example, people in blind taste tests prefer Pepsi to Coke, but people in unblinded taste tests prefer Coke to Pepsi because of the Coke “mystique”. Likewise, people will rate wine as better-tasting if they are falsely told it is more expensive. I expect this effect is bigger in people who (like me) with relatively dull palates and overactive imaginations. We could capitalize on this by finding some food that sounds magical, amazing, and precious, and expecting it to have a taste that matches.

That food is balsamic vinegar. Not the fake stuff you get for $4.99 at the supermarket. The real version, which is usually called something like “traditional 18-year balsamic vinegar” and whose manufacture involves about the same number of complicated restrictions and obscure types of wood as building the Ark of the Covenant.

It’s not just that the grapes have to be from a particular species and grown in a particular Italian soil. It’s that they then have to be aged through a process in which the vinegar is constantly transferred, untransferred, and retransferred among series of successively smaller barrels of oak, chestnut, cherry, juniper, mulberry, and acacia a bunch of times for eighteen years, so that each wood can “add its flavor” to precisely the right degree. How long it must spend in each cask is so complicated that people need high-level mathematics just to figure out how old any specific sample of vinegar is. See for example Guidici & Rinaldi 2007, A Theoretical Model To Predict The Age Of Traditional Balsamic Vinegar. The paper finally concludes that “there is a finite limit for the age of balsamic vinegar” – which I guess is reassuring.

So how does it actually taste? Kind of like a mixture of grapes, oak, chestnut, cherry, juniper, mulberry, and acacia It tastes really interesting. Definitely not like normal vinegar. Not really like normal anything. Italians put it on ice cream (really!) or drink it straight from the bottle (really!) I can’t promise it’s not just the placebo effect, and honestly it probably is, but it’s certainly a more interesting the placebo effect than just buying an expensive wine or eating at a fancy French restaurant.

Buy traditional 18-year balsamic vinegar

Fake Nice Pants

I have some sensory issues which make me find normal pants annoying; I prefer to wear sweatpants whenever I can. But this isn’t always compatible with appearing as a normal productive member of society, so sometimes I am forced to wear uncomfortable blue jeans or dress pants or whatever.

Luckily now there are are now sweatpants that look like jeans, khakis, dress pants, etc. I won’t say they’ll fool a careful examination, but hopefully nobody is carefully examining your pants, plus even if people notice they might feel awkward calling you out on it.

Buy sweatpants that look like jeans, sweatpants that look like other types of jeans, sweatpants that look like dress pants, or sweatpants that look like khakis.

Xylitol Nasal Spray

Xylitol nasal spray is for nasal congestion and allergies. It’s not too different from saline sprays, but it’s a little gentler on the body and also has mild antibacterial properties. Also, I hadn’t even realized how well saline sprays worked until recently.

I’ve informally recommended this to a couple of patients with nasal and sinus issues and have received mostly good reports from them too.

Buy xylitol nasal spray

Hamilton CD

The new Broadway musical Hamilton is really good. If you don’t believe me, believe mainstream media sources like 538, Vox, Breitbart, Vox again, the New York Times, Vox a third time, the LA Times, and one more Vox. Also all of Tumblr.

It’s a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton set to rap, but you will like it even if you do not like rap or early American history. You can listen to the whole soundtrack for free on YouTube, follow along with the heavily annotated lyrics on genius.com, and finally you’ll want to have the CD so you can force your friends and family to listen.

If nothing else, this will help you understand the in-jokes on social media.

Buy the Hamilton CD

Dental Floss Scythes

Like everyone else in the world, my dentist told me to floss more but I never listened. Dealing with that weird little box of string was just too much of a trivial inconvenience.

I recently learned about dental floss scythes (probably they have a less interesting official name). These are little plastic things that kind of pre-arrange the dental floss for you. Now I am actually flossing every day. Well, most days. Some days. The point is, I’m flossing. Yes, I’m a bad person contributing to disposable waste culture, but at least I’m healthy.

(Now some people say flossing might not prevent heart attacks as was previously believed, but it’s probably still a good idea)

Buy dental floss scythes

Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic

Not a product so much as a company. Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic are two online nootropics stores. They’re both owned by the same guy but have different branding: Nootropics Depot has nice gentle all-natural stuff, Ceretropic has new high-tech research chemicals.

There are lots of online nootropics stores, but these are far and away the best. I say this after lurking on r/nootropics for a long time, where users are very vocal about their experiences with different companies and mostly agree with my assessment. The guy who runs these stores also hangs out on r/nootropics, where he shares his encyclopaedic knowledge of everything and helps people who have gotten themselves in trouble. There are worse ways to spend a day than just reading through his entire posting history, but his commentary on my article Iron Curtain Of Psychopharmacology is a good specific example. He is legit and so are his sites.

Experimenting with nootropics is fundamentally a risky endeavor. You are using experimental psychoactive chemicals that haven’t been rigorously tested for safety or efficacy. Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic don’t change any of that. But they do ensure you are not doing anything stupider than the stupid thing you think you are doing. They are very careful about having purity-tested, un-degraded chemicals and making sure you are getting what is advertised on the bottle. They try to have the gold standard version of everything – for example, if they’re selling an herbal extract, it will be the same by composition, subspecies, etc as the version used in whichever studies have most clearly suggested safety and efficacy for the herb. They avoid at least some of the sketchiest diet-pill-stimulant-amphetamine-analogs you can find on some other sites. And they have excellent customer service and if for some reason your nootropics don’t arrive or get confiscated by customs they will work it out for you.

The other reason I like this company is that it does seem to have a long-term plan to build up a power base from which to try to ‘disrupt’ the pharmaceutical industry in the way we often talk about here. That’s obviously crazy ambitious, but they’ve already done some impressive things, like come up with a longer-lasting version of tianeptine. From a chemistry point of view that may not be super hard, but since tianeptine is a prescription drug in most of Europe it means they’ve improved pretty substantially upon a real pharmaceutical company’s project. They seem to be gradually getting labs and researchers, so I’m optimistic.

Oh, and if some of you crypto geniuses want to do a mitzvah, find an easy way for them to charge people non-Bitcoin money without credit card companies backstabbing them every few months because they get cold feet and decide nootropics are too weird.

Visit Nootropics Depot and Ceretropic.

Periscope Glasses

In case the nootropics don’t work well enough for you and you still have human experiences like “sleep” and “tiredness”, you may be interested in periscope glasses. They let you lie down supine in bed and still read without having to hold your book in an awkward position.

Buy periscope glasses.

[EDIT: If that wasn’t enough for you there’s also a 2014 Product Recommendations post.]

[Epistemic status: I predict everyone except me will respond to this with “Duuuuuuuuh”, but I found it changed some views of mine]

I.

I recently did couples therapy with two gay men who’d gotten married a year or so ago. Since then one of them, let’s call him Adam, decided he was bored with his sex life and went to a club where they did some things I will not describe here. His husband, let’s call him Steve, was upset by what he considered infidelity, and they had a big fight. Both of them wanted to stay together for the sake of the kids (did I mention they adopted some kids?) but this club thing was a pretty big deal, so they decided to seek professional help.

Adam made the following proposal: he knew Steve was not very kinky, so Adam would go do his kinky stuff at the club, with Steve’s knowledge and consent. That way everyone could get what they wanted. Sure, it would involve having sex with other people, but it didn’t mean anything, and it was selfish for a spouse to assert some kind of right to “control” the other spouse anyway.

Steve made the following counterproposal: no. He liked monogamy and fidelity and it would make him really jealous and angry to think of Adam going out and having sex with other people, even in a meaningless way. He argued that if Adam didn’t like monogamy, maybe he shouldn’t have proposed entering into a form of life that has been pretty much defined by its insistence on monogamy for the past several thousand years and then sworn adherence to that form of life in front of everyone they knew. If Adam hadn’t liked monogamy, he had ample opportunity to avoid it before he had bound his life together with Steve’s. Now he was stuck.

Adam gave the following counterargument: yeah, marriage usually implies remaining monogamous, but that was all legal boilerplate. He had wanted to get married to symbolize his committment to Steve – committment that he still had! – and he hadn’t realized he was interested in fetish stuff at the time or else he would have brought it up.

Steve gave the following countercounterargument: okay, this is all very sad, but now we are stuck in this position, and clearly only one of the two people could get their preference satisfied, and given the whole marriage-implies-monogamy thing, it seemed pretty clear that that person should be him.

So then of course they both turned to me for advice.

The rules for psychotherapy are a lot like the rules for Aaron Burr: talk less, smile more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for. This last principle is generally known as “therapeutic neutrality”, and it demands that we not take sides in our patients’ disputes or dilemmas. Instead, we try to remain an impartial discussion facilitator, teasing out our patients’ true values and concerns until they are able to come to a conclusion on their own.

On the other hand, their friends probably don’t have the same scruples and are going to be offering them advice. And I wondered what advice I would give, if I were their friends and not stuck in metaphorical Switzerland.

II.

Assume Steve’s analysis is right; this is a zero-sum game and there’s no way for them both to come out of it happy. Which side do we choose?

A quick retreat to a simpler situation: suppose Adam really wants to keep all the windows in the house open all winter with no heat on, so that the inside temperature is 10F and the house is full of snow. Steve does not want to do this. Both of them want to stay together for the sake of the kids, but this do-we-freeze-our-house thing is really getting in the way.

This problem is easy. Adam, you’re crazy and your preferences are stupid and don’t count. Suck it up and keep living with Steve at normal-person temperatures.

Another retreat in the other direction: suppose Adam wants to sometimes take a shower, but for some reason the thought of Adam being in a shower pisses Steve off and he refuses to allow it. Once again, both of them want to stay together for the sake of the kids, but this can-Adam-take-a-shower thing is really getting in the way.

This problem is also easy. Steve, this time your preferences are stupid and don’t count. Suck it up and let Adam take a shower.

A third new situation. The one Unit of Caring recently discussed on her blog. A transwoman wants to have Christmas with her family, but her family doesn’t believe in transgender and insists on calling her by her original male name and male pronouns. Both her and her family don’t want to “ruin Christmas” by refusing to get together as a family or making a big deal of this. Who is in the right? Unit of Caring writes:

Anyone who does not respect their siblings enough to call them by the name of their choosing does not then get to go “oh! you not wanting to let me repeatedly hurt you is breaking apart our family, how unreasonable of you!” If you want people to spend time around you, call them by the names they chose. If you wouldn’t repeatedly slap your siblings in the face, don’t deliberately misgender them either. (And if you would repeatedly slap your siblings in the face, then you shouldn’t have to look too far to figure out whose behavior ruined Christmas.)

If it doesn’t bother you that you’re hurting someone, then you don’t get to act wronged when they decide you’re not worth spending time with.

I agree with this assessment, but only because I agree with Unit about the object-level issue of transgender. It seems like if you wrote in the same question to your local priest, they’d say the trans woman was being unreasonable. I don’t think there’s any good way for Unit and the priest (or the woman and her family) to resolve their differences except by one convincing the other of their position on the object-level issue of transgender.

(well, if you really really really understood utilitarianism, you might be able to say you should take the highest-utility solution, but no one understands utilitarianism that well)

This seems to be true of my patients’ problem too. Unless we can decide whether wanting to go to a fetish club and have sex with people besides your husband is a reasonable request, we can’t solve Adam and Steve’s disagreement. I mean, Steve’s argument about the contract isn’t bad, but if it were something we disagreed with – let’s say some old-timey marriage contract where the woman vowed to always serve and obey her husband, and now she’s a feminist and wants out – we would probably be pretty sympathetic despite the precise wording of what she’d “agreed” on.

III.

I come to the table with personal baggage. I come from a very permissive subculture. I’ve had some very happy open relationships and wanting to be open seems like a reasonable request. I’ve had some friends who are very kinky, and wanting to be kinky seems like a reasonable request too. I’m not personally very good at feeling jealous, so wanting your husband to never go to a club, even if he doesn’t tell you about it, or make you think about it, or even agrees only to do it when you’re away on a business trip in another city – seems a bit odd. Honestly I would be tempted to take Steve aside and ask him whether he’s sure that he couldn’t deal with Adam going to this club, and whether maybe he wants to give it a chance, and whether maybe he just wants what’s best for Adam even if that makes him a little uncomfortable.

But go back two hundred years and ask the people of that culture, and this choice is a no-brainer. Fetish clubs (or the closest 19th century equivalent) are weird, vile, sinful things, and Adam’s desire to go to one is totally beyond the pale. He should never even have made the request. But since he did, we can strongly and clearly tell him that this is morally wrong, that he should apologize to Steve for the trouble he put him in, that he should realize there’s more to life than kinky sex, and that he should want what’s best for Steve even if that means he can’t satisfy his libido quite so much.

If Adam and Steve were in the traditional culture of the 1800s there would be no debate. If they were in some ultra-permissive sexually-open subculture of the 2100s, there would also be no debate. The culture would tell one of them that they were wrong, just like someone who wants to make the other live in a 10 degree frozen house is wrong, that person would grudgingly agree, they would stay together, and that would be that. The problem only comes when they’re in a culture with a lot of different subcultures that haven’t made up their minds yet. Like ours.

We all hear the stories of the economists who start by assuming perfect rationality, and then add in deviations from that assumption when they come to them. I kind of like to start from a liberal assumption of perfect atomic individualism and add in deviations when I encounter them. And, well, this is the latest one I encountered.

Adam and Steve’s individual personalities and situations will help resolve their conflict, but the tiebreaker vote is always going to be cast by the culture around them. Realizing this has made me more open to activists who are trying to change the culture – and, symmetrically, to conservatives who are trying to prevent the culture from being changed. People with unusual sex lives like to say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom doesn’t hurt anyone else – neither breaks their nose nor picks their pocket – but the fact is that the partial social acceptance of fetish clubs and of open relationships is what gives Adam a leg to stand on. And some religious conservatives like to talk about how they only want to defend their own right to practice and express their beliefs instead of being forced into the broader cultural revolution all around them, but the fact is that their beliefs are what’s supporting Steve. My sympathies will always be with the atomic individualists who want to come up with some clever Adam-Steve contract that solves their problem on the meta-level as long as all actors are rational, but I am starting to worry the culture warriors have a point here.

UR said that “the sovereign is the one who sets the null hypothesis”. Once you’ve let the culture set a default – going to fetish clubs is a reasonable request, going to fetish clubs is an unreasonable request – then given sufficiently good liberal norms people who want to deviate from the default can absolutely do so, but as soon as a conflict springs up the identity of the default option still matters a lot.

I’m not suggesting a total war of all against all, and there’s always the Archipelago option, but I guess sometimes culture wars do need to be fought beyond the point where you just leave people alone, if only to shift the default in your direction.

Speaking of culture wars, an apology to gay people. I always obfuscate details about my patients to disguise their identities, but I feel particularly bad about making this couple gay because it reinforces the stereotype of gay people as hypersexual and bad at committment. I made them gay anyway, because when I tried to write them hetero, their gender seemed to skew the problem too much to one side or another – for example, when Steve was a woman, he was the poor innocent wife wronged by a horny husband who insisted on thinking with his crotch. I worried that if I made the couple hetero, my readers for one reason or another would bring their own baggage and wouldn’t be able to see it as the difficult and evenly-balanced problem it seemed like when I was in the office with them.

Which itself says something about how our culture sets default hypotheses.

I.

A sample of Thursday’s talk at Yale:

These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015). The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even though it’s kind of cherry-picked. The Washington Post just sort of reads between the lines and figures that if it’s not quantity of time that helps kids, it must be quality. And FOX also reads between the lines and figures that if moms spending time with their kids has no effect, the argument from opportunity costs suggests mothers are spending too much time with their kids.

None of them are completely outright lying. And indeed, most of the articles eventually explain what I just said, halfway down the article, in one or two short sentences that most readers will skim over. But the rest of the article uses the study to support whatever the news source involved wants it to support, and so people will come up with four diametrically opposed conclusions from this one study depending on which source they read.

II.

Here’s a study that I wasn’t able to include in the presentation because it just came out recently. As per the Rice University press release: Overweight Men Just As Likely As Overweight Women To Face Discrimination.

The paper included two studies. In the first, men went into stores either with or without fat suits and try to do some things – ask if there were job openings, ask for a job application, ask an employee for help, try to buy some things, et cetera. Then they measured the men’s success across both conditions to see if they had more trouble when they appeared overweight.

In the second, subjects were asked to rate videos of an employee giving a marketing spiel for a new product; once again, the employee was either wearing or not wearing a fat suit. They measured the subjects’ ratings across conditions to see if they ranked the overweight employees lower.

The first study only included men, and so could not possibly have determined whether men were more or less likely than overweight women to face discrimination. The second study actually did have both male and female employees involved, and although it really wasn’t their main interest, the researchers did a post hoc evaluation to find the effect in each sex. In all three of the outcomes where discrimination was found, women faced more discrimination than men. They didn’t significance-test the comparison, but just from eyeballing it, it was probably significant.

So a paper in which one study does not compare men to women, and the other study finds women facing more discrimination than men, the press release somehow gets phrased as “Overweight men just as likely as overweight women to face discrimination in retail settings”. Huh.

You might wonder, “Does it really matter what a press release says? Does anyone read the exact wording?” Yes. Many other news sources copied the phrasing, for example Medical Daily’s Fat Discrimination Is The Same Regardless Of Gender. One such copycat, PsyPost.com copied the press release nearly word for word, including the title. Then it got posted on Reddit and now has 5189 upvotes and 1572 comments. So there’s that.

III.

“But at least it correctly raised awareness of how weight discrimination is a big problem in the retail setting, right?”

The paper measured a ton of different outcomes. Let’s focus on Study 1. The actor in the fat suit was supposed to ask if there were job openings (there were) and see if the company told him. Then he was supposed to ask for an application form and see if they gave it to him. Then he was supposed to walk in as a customer and see if employees greeted him. Then he was supposed to ask the employees to recommend him an item and see if they did. Then he was supposed to ask them to recommend him a second item and see if they did.

No difference was found between overweight and normal-weight actors in any of those five experiments. Two of them had ceiling effects that probably made the attempt futile, but the other three didn’t, and there wasn’t even a trend toward discriminating against the overweight guy.

So what did they find discrimination on? They say that detected “interpersonal discrimination”, ie discrimination based not on any quantifiable outcome but based on how friendly/warm the person interacting with the actor seemed toward him. They determined this by self-rating and other-rating; that is, the actor wrote down how friendly he thought the store clerks were toward him, and a spy surreptitious observer who had placed herself near the interaction also rated this for corroboration. Their rating scales included twelve items including “how many times did the clerk nod”, “how friendly did the clerk seem?”, “how much eye contact was the clerk making?” and “how much comfort level did the clerk seem to have?”. The experiment found a statistically significant difference between the fat-suit-wearing and non-fat-suit-wearing trials and concluded that there was interpersonal discrimination.

But hold on a second! The study says nothing about anyone being blinded. In fact, it’s really hard to blind an actor to the fact that he is going into some stores while wearing a fat suit and other stores while not wearing a fat suit. As far as I can tell, everybody involved was in on the study from the beginning. If your boss tells you “I want you to rate how much comfort level clerks have with you for this study on fat discrimination”, it seems really possible to me that there might be a slight tendency to overrate the clerks who interacted with thin-you, and to underrate the clerks who interacted with fat-you.

How slight a tendency? Clerks dealing with fat people got an average rating of 2.3 (seven point scale, lower is better), and those dealing with thin people of 2.0.

So after finding no discrimination on five objectively measurable outcomes, they find very subtle discrimination on an unblinded subjective outcome practically designed to produce placebo effects.

We move on to the second study, where participants (as usual, psychology students) are rating video presentations given by fat vs. thin people. This is supposedly tying into the “retail industry” theme of the paper, but honestly it seems kind of forced to me.

Anyway, the participants are asked to rate their presenters on seven measures: overall quality of presentation, overall attitude toward product being presented, overall attitude toward the store that would employ a person such as this, intention to support the store, employee’s appearance, employee’s carelessness, and employee’s professionalism. The results:

There was no difference between how participants rated overweight vs. normal-weight presentations overall.

There was no difference between how participants rated products presented by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how participants rated stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how likely participants were to support stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was a difference in how participants ranked the appearance, carelessness, and professionalism of overweight vs. normal-weight people.

The first four results are encouraging. What about the last three?

Well, I feel like if you ask people to rank someone based on “their appearance”, and your subjects answer based on how they look, you kind of walked into that one. Oh no, people rank conventionally attractive people as having better appearances than less conventionally attractive people! Someone call John Ioannidis to double-check this astonishing result!

“Carelessness” and “professionalism” are perhaps less excusable, but c’mon, you had them watch a two-minute video. When you give someone zero information on a thing, and you force them to make a judgment on the thing, then yes, stereotypes are their best source of information. If you showed me a picture of an average-looking man and an average-looking woman and say “Quick! Which of these people is more likely to like baking cupcakes?!” I’ll pick the woman, not because I think all women are obsessed with cupcakes or because I go around looking at every woman I see as a cupcake factory, but because you asked me a stupid question and ensured stereotypes were the only thing I had to go on.

Then the authors find that this was mediated by explicitly-expressed stereotypes against fat people, which is kind of interesting, but doesn’t make the nonsignificant things any more significant.

So to sum up: there was no discrimination against the overweight on any objective measure of the actual retail experience, including positions advertised, applications given, greetings offered, or customers served. There was also no discrimination against the overweight on presentation evaluations in terms of overall evaluation, evaluation of employee, evaluation of product, or evaluation of company.

There was a tiny amount of discrimination on a subjective measure rated by unblinded observers aware of the purpose of the study. There was also some evidence on three subtler ratings of the presentation that seemed designed to ask participants impossible questions in order to force them to stereotype. However, these meaningless scales did not effect the raters’ overall impressions as measured any of four different ways.

IV.

Here is the reporting from the news outlets that passed their first test and didn’t frame it as men and women facing equal amounts of weight discrimination.

Business Insider: Researchers Had Men Pretend To Be Obese – And The Results Are Disturbing, which says that “this research highlights the importance of including men in discussions about weight stigmatization,” and “the authors also advocate organizational efforts to combat negativity against heavy customers and potential employees…the first step may be for individuals to become aware of how strong weight biases are.”

AskMen: Young Men Who Appear Overweight Suffer Interpersonal Discrimination. “Researchers disguised six thin young men as obese customers or job applications and found that they were victims of microaggressions. Basically people were a little bit more jerky towards them.”

Oximity: Overweight Men Often Snubbed At The Mall. “Shopping malls can be hostile places for overweight men, regardless of whether they’re customers or simply looking for a job.”

The Health Site: Men, Here’s One More Reason For You To Lose Weight. “Ruggs said that these findings were another reminder that there was still more work to be done in terms of creating equitable workplaces for all employees, potential employees and consumers. She concluded that this was something organisations could take an active role in, and said that companies could do better job training on customer relations as part of the employees’ new-hire process. ”

Now I’m almost missing the kind of random scattershot media bias we found on the time-spent-with-children study. Here every media outlet reports the results the same way that the study’s author and the press release reports the results.

This is not a totally wrong interpretation, any more than “six hours a week will tame your teen” is a totally wrong interpretation of the childhood study. But if I myself were writing an article on this study, it would be SURPRISINGLY LITTLE DISCRIMINATION FOUND AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN, and mention somewhere in the middle that some discrimination was found on a few sketchy variables. Instead, we get DAILY DISCRIMINATION AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN and WE NEED TO INSTITUTE SENSITIVITY TRAINING PROGRAMS IN RETAIL ENVIRONMENT, and they mention somewhere in the middle that a lot of important variables came out negative.

A lot of studies work like this. You test ten or twenty complicated variables, you get positive results on some, negative results on others, some of those results seem plausible, other results seem like maybe you made a mistake somewhere or didn’t have enough power or whatever, and then you make an interpretation based on your personal bias. Then it goes from the researcher’s personal bias to the abstract to the press release to the headlines to the mind of the average reader, dropping subtlety at each step, until “No discrimination against overweight men, except where the study was practically designed to ensure false positives” becomes “Rampant discrimination against overweight men everywhere” becomes “Overweight men are discriminated against just as much as overweight women.”

Don’t get me wrong. I expect there probably is lots of discrimination against overweight men. And I think this study’s project of trying to find it and convince people of its existence was worthwhile. But I don’t think you should get to convince everyone that science has proven X, unless science has actually proven X. The process that produced these headlines is strong enough to produce any headline you want, with the part where you actually do the study becoming more and more of a ritual or a formality. There are just too many degrees of freedom between the study and the reporting.

Stalin once said that “those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.” It’s starting to look like those who do the studies decide nothing and those who report the studies decide everything. The only solution is to actually read the study and not just the headlines. Sometimes we might even have to – God help us – read beyond the abstract.