How is it not falsifiable? They found a correlation between susceptibility to bullshit and the result of a previously established cognitive tests.
> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
That's a terrible example of your point. As long as you can define a metric for "worse at their jobs" (it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to) then you have a really clear and testable hypothesis.
>it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to
This is the problem, you didn't you can find 100000000 ways for it to be correct. 'They didn't eat breakfast, and they spent 1 second on HN. Therefore breakfast would have been better.'
It looks to me like they designed a test to measure someone’s susceptibility to corporate bullshit, and then administered tests that were correlated with job performance in other studies. If the results were not different on the cognitive tests, then it would be false. If the people who scored higher with their bullshit scores did better on the cognitive tests, then it would be false. If you disagree with the methodology then criticize that, but saying it’s not falsifiable is simply false.
And they did use cognitive tests that were correlated with job performance. If the people did not perform differently on those tests, or performed better on those tests… well there you go. Is it the most rigorous study in the world? Obviously not. Does it indicate what it purports to indicate? It sure does.
That sort of method has proven problematic, as the thing that matters could be something correlated with breakfast, and the breakfast itself could be irrelevant.
You usually have to ask people to change their behavior. Pretty straight forward in this case though.
that's a bit of a meta discussion and it'd probably reveal some super interesting things about how tech culture have changed in the last ~15 years.
I've been on HN since 2010 (lost the password to my first account, alexc04) and I recall a time when it felt like every second article on the front-page was an bold directive pronouncement or something just aggressively certain of its own correctness.
Like "STOP USING BASH" or "JQUERY IS STUPID" - not in all caps of course but it created an unpleasant air and tone (IMO, again, this is like 16 years ago now so I may have memory degredation to some extent)
Things like donglegate got real traction here among the anti-woke crew. There have been times where the venn diagram of 4chan and hackernews felt like it had a lot more overlap. I've even bowed out of discussion for years at a time or developed an avoidance reaction to HN's toxic discussion culture.
IMO it has been a LOT better in more recent years, but I also don't dive as deep as I used to.
ANYWAYS - my point is I would be really interested to see a sentiment analysis of HN headlines over the years to try and map out cultural epochs of the community.
When has HN swayed more into the toxic and how has it swayed back and forth as a pendulum over time? (or even has it?)
I wonder what other people's perspective is of how the culture here has changed over time. I truly think it feels a lot more supportive than it used to.
