Hacker News with Generative AI: Behavioral Science

Fashionable Nonsense. Behaviorial Science Is Bullshit (thebaffler.com)
You’ve heard the rumors. People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. If you do a little ritual before you go on stage, you’ll perform better. If you give your employees chocolate chip cookies, they will become, as if by magic, more motivated. What you think, and the judgments you make, are conditioned by “bias” that you need to overcome with data. With statistics. With science.
The WW2 experiment to make pigeon-guided missiles [video] (bbc.com)
During World War Two, psychologist B F Skinner tried to use pigeons to guide missiles towards enemy ships.
Not everything is behavioral science (behavioralscientist.org)
An Anatomy of Algorithm Aversion (ssrn.com)