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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Several of the studies cited in Cressey share the same common mistake. While purporting to examine recreational use, what they are really looking at is equal to getting drunk every day. That is not recreational use, it’s abuse. Recreational drinking means a glass of whine with a meal with friends or even, as in the case of the late nonagenarian radio journalist Alistair Cooke, a single measure of malt whisky every evening at sundown. The very fact of illegality discourages those kinds of moderate consumption. That legal access severs the role as a gateway substance is unsurprising. Obviously the thing opening the gateway is not the substance as such but habitual contact to professional and probably persuasive drug traffickers.
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I’m unsure why the non-result in Habyarimana & Jack is reported at all. The main driver for the reduction of accidents seems to be inclusion in the study with no significant difference between placebo and treatment outcomes. This strongly reminds of all those highly promising advances in education, that fail miserably and turn out actually deleterious when introduced on a large scale in practice.
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All the results in Smeets et al. are just as I’d have expected. People tend to be generous but object to being milked or to their giving being taken for granted. That said the authors again just assume that behaviour in an artificial laboratory setting with play money mirrors actual behaviour with their own assets. It may, but this step needs to be demonstrated not just assumed. I still tend to consider all studies of this kind to be essentially meaningless.
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For Weisel & Shalvi see Smeets above. I for one would have no moral reservation whatever against playing the game to milk the experimenter. This is emphatically not how I act when entrusted with other people’s money, be it as a local councillor or member of another group.
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Atir, Rosenzweig & Dunning have come up with a sequel to the Dunning-Kruger-effect. This time it’s those perceiving themselves as the most knowledgeable who are fooled into believing they know and have heard of more than actually is the case.
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And again it is none other than Elsevier no longer surprising us with an outstanding example of editorial oversight. In the first line of Ally et al.’s abstract a power rating is off by three orders of magnitude. The number of authors, none of whom noticed this major blunder, is four. At least this time the error is so glaringly obvious that no reader will have been fooled.
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Hejazi et al.’s title is misleading. Usually mitigation means accepting change as given and taking steps to live with it. Here they are talking of measures taken trying to stop or lower climate warming. Not only is the efficacy of all those unproven and probably pure wishful thinking, what they demonstrate is the measures themselves directly causing the very problems they are indirectly meant to avoid. The thing they fail to address is the utter nonsense of bioenergy as such. Food production already is in a crisis with every calory produced requiring more than one calory of fossil energy input; diverting land for fuel production can only make matters worse.
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It’s a nice coincidence to find Bibi & Kiessling and Cooper et al. juxtaposed in the same week’s list. Let them fight it out, I’m not qualified to make a judgement here.
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