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EXPERIMENT_FAIL

                                                  November 10, 2013

                                                  FAST_SLOW_AND_SLOWER
   One thing that comes to mind,
   reading Kahneman's "Thinking,
   Fast and Slow" is that the
   psych experiments he uses as
   illustrations sound incredibly
   tedious to me.

   Myself, I avoid placing myself
   in situations where I need to do       I once mentioned to a group of
   tasks like that, and the temptation    psych graduate students that in
   is strong to just fake it and blow     psych experiments I sometimes
   it off.                                just fake it, particularly if I
                                          think they're really boring.
     But some of Kahneman's early
     work would have spotted                  They were all shocked, except
     someone like me by observing             for one who understood: "That's
     my pupil diameter.  Arguably,            something that you have to take
     that's a clever experiment               into account."
     design: we'll tell them we're
     working on X but really we               I was exaggerating a bit though:
     want to see how fast they                I was thinking of classroom
     tune-out when confronted with            situations where the teacher
     Y under varying conditions Z.            decides to make us participate.

                                              If I'd volunteered to do an
                                              experiment, I'd no doubt treat
                                              it more responsibly.

                                              But I don't volunteer: psych
                                              experiments are invariably
                                              tedious and/or tricky and
                                              embarassing.

                                              You could convince me to
                                              participate by impressing me
                                              with the importance of the
                                              result you're after-- but
                                              the importance is often not
                                              at all obvious (there's no
                                              reason it should be), and
                                              if I *know* what you're
                                              after that could bias the
                                              results.

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