Archive for December 31st, 2021

Obit watch: December 31, 2021 (supplemental)

Friday, December 31st, 2021

Want to get this in now, since I don’t know what tomorrow is going to be like: Betty White. THR.

Tiffini Hale. She was a member of the “Mickey Mouse Club” cast from 1989 to 1995, and was only 46.

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What we know that isn’t necessarily so…

Friday, December 31st, 2021

Tweet:

Working link.

A lot of this probably isn’t news to people who are as geeky as I am. Some high points:

No good evidence of anything from the Stanford prison ‘experiment’. It was not an experiment; ‘demand characteristics’ and scripting of the abuse; constant experimenter intervention; faked reactions from participants; as Zimbardo concedes, they began with a complete “absence of specific hypotheses”.

No good evidence from the famous Milgram experiments that 65% of people will inflict pain if ordered to. Experiment was riddled with researcher degrees of freedom, going off-script, implausible agreement between very different treatments, and “only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.”

Evidence for a small marshmallow effect, that ability to delay gratification as a 4 year old predicts educational outcomes at 15 or beyond (Mischel).
After controlling for the socioeconomic status of the child’s family, the Marshmallow effect is r=0.05 or d=0.1 one-tenth of a standard deviation for an additional minute delay, with nonsignificant p-values. And since it’s usually easier to get SES data…

“Expertise attained after 10,000 hours practice” (Gladwell). Disowned by the supposed proponents.

At most extremely weak evidence that psychiatric hospitals (of the 1970s) could not detect sane patients in the absence of deception.

(Previously.)

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Obit watch: December 31, 2021.

Friday, December 31st, 2021

I’ve written before about the NYT‘s ability to do touching obits for people who aren’t famous (outside of, perhaps, a limited cultural circle) but still led interesting lives.

Ben McFall, “the longest-tenured bookseller in the history of the Strand”.

Mr. McFall enjoyed duties and perks not given to any other Strand employee. For much of his tenure, he was the only person in charge of an entire section. Not only that, the fief he governed — the fiction shelves — provides the Strand with the core of its business in used books.
He determined the price of each used hardcover novel and book of stories and then affixed a Strand sticker to the dust jacket. On occasion, he’d assess a book newly purchased by the store and find inside his own handwriting with a price from the 1980s.
Pricing was one of many fields in which Mr. McFall’s experience enabled him to make quick, intuitive pronouncements. Without checking a computer, he would say he knew how many years it had been since he had last seen an obscure old novel, the number of days it had remained in stock, and its current value online.

…

Yet he did not trade this adroitness for a position in management. Instead, he remained among shoppers and Strand underlings on the ground floor, where he became the only employee to have a desk designated specifically for his use. It was at the back of the main aisle, the sort of placement a restaurateur might choose for the corner table he would occupy in his own establishment. Behind Mr. McFall lay a sign reading “Classics” and a shelf of leather-bound volumes.

…

Mr. McFall could gossip or banter without looking up from the books he was working through. He sometimes surprised people by halting a conversation, departing wordlessly and returning with a book that he would say his interlocutor had to read. He was known to stash books under his desk if he thought they were perfectly suited to any of his regular customers.

…

Back then, the Strand hardly sold new books. Now, in addition to the latest best-sellers, it gives space to socks, tote bags and mugs. Bibliophilic employees have complained about that evolution while also accusing management of mistreating workers, particularly during the pandemic, which led to mass layoffs and a warning from Ms. Wyden that “our business is unsustainable.”
Mr. McFall gave his blessing to commercialization — “I’m perfectly willing to sell low-end dresses here if it means keeping the Strand in business,” he told The Times — and throughout his tenure he commanded respect both from management and across factions of the rank and file.

…

When Mr. McFall was interviewed for his Times profile, he gestured toward a group of young Strand staffers and said, “I don’t have to have children because these are my children.”

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