We probably are the study..."we presented the Michigan Fish Study to online communities to see which part of the click bait they fixated on the most..."
Not just the scientific replication crisis, but also the scientific media replication crisis.
For all of the p-hacking and file drawer effects that modern research (noting this is an older piece) tries to avoid, the incentives for popular scientific media including blog posts all run in the other direction. Even if limited to just good, replicable studies in journals, anything we hear about via popularization is likely to be attached to a stronger-than-real effect size.
Me too -- I reacted this way when I read it, and posted it here to see if others would agree or if there was some nuance I was missing. In particular I bristle at this frequent juxtaposition of the US and Japan (or "East" vs "West" more broadly) in terms of individualism and collectivism -- those terms aren't well defined enough to not be misleading, and might convey truth in some cases but better specificity would help us avoid wrongheaded generalizations based on old tropes and stereotypes
It makes sense to me that there would be differences in how people with various cultural backgrounds interpret art, since we largely know that the way people experience and think about color is different, though
It's also funny to see US vs Japan as a stand-in for East vs West, because eg Japan and China have very different cultures; and eg Germany and the US also have their differences. (Or Chile and the US, if you want to stay far in the West.)
I may be depressed. I looked at the picture as soon as it loaded and then read the summary below it. Following the 5-second idea, my eyes were caught by the little frog like figure at the bottom of the image. My initial reaction was like "what is that little frog doing in this fish bow? It's going to be eaten soon."
I noticed all the fish. Not because I'm holistic though. I first noticed the big ones. Then though "hmm what's the trick" and carefully scanned the rest of the image because of that. But I guess the experiment was done in a more controlled way. Without "fish test" in the title!
Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
> Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.
I wonder if the discrepancy in analysis comes from the way the participants are asked to view the picture. English and Japanese are vastly different languages and even a simple question can be translated in subtly different ways.
Huh. I'm a U.S. (and Canadian) citizen. I've travelled a fair but (10-11 countries) but never the "East".
I looked at all the elements and was trying to understand the relationships and why the frog was the way it is and why the foreground fish had more colour.
2 reasons for that, I think. One, that I was aware it was a "test", and two, I'm an analyst.
And this is how the US left and right view things. Each honestly viewing the world about them, yet each seeing different things as important.
Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person, is key to resolving differences between you. And disrupting that ability is a way to destroy a country from within.
Adversaries such as China, Iran, Russia, and others know they cannot physically destroy the US or the collective West. Yet they can, if done right, cause self destruction. They can spread lies, misrepresent, spew distrust, and entice youth's natural dissatisfaction to grow and flourish.
Destroy the US from within, and they succeed without a shot fired.
It matters not what actor is currently on the stage. Whether left or right, this president or next or prior, the hostility exists. And it exists in large part, thanks to our enemies seeking our doom.
When you hate your political opponent without knowing them? When you blindly follow political dogma without questioning? When you take a stance because a party does?
You become a useful idiot.
And sadly?
In this day and age, we all are idiots.
Seek that part of the picture you are missing. Work to get your opponent to do the same.
You may still disagree, but even the tinest expansion of view is a victory for you both. Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
> You may still disagree, but even the tinest expansion of view is a victory for you both. Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
But this view is also a win for "them". A society that cannot look to itself, see its failings and divisions and address them and move past them is doomed to stagnation and failure.
The thing about divide and conqour strategies, is they don't create the divisions out of nothing. They exploit what is already there. Suppressing the divisions without resolving them is like surpressing an emotion. Eventually the pressure builds until there is an explosion. It is as much a losing strategy as letting differences spiral into animosisty and hatred.
Sucessful strategies (such as stoking division) usually don't have an easy answer of what you can just do to defeat the strategy. If they did, people wouldn't have been using such strategies for thousands of years; People use them because they are hard to counter.
I love the irony in the pitting of the US vs China, Iran & Russia, whilst talking about stoking division.
Don't corollaries to your comments also apply at a higher level globally, or is there something special about considering countries as a grouping vs political parties?
Surely they're all just games we play in our minds and people kind of arbitrarily just agree that countries most definitely exist and this is my in-group, whereas others are enemies.
Some political opponents are literally trying to harm you. Trying to pretend otherwise is not just naive, but actively damaging. They are literally passing or trying to pass the laws that are literally harming "me or my close ones" and then celebrate the harm.
> Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person
J.D. Vance, Donad Trump and Putin are bad people. They are all my political opponents.
Yea, like... One side wants us to be a little kinder to each other (while selling us out to corporate interests) and the other side wants to create a quasi-fascist religious state and detain, enslave and execute some of us (while selling us out to corporate and Russian interests).
What a difficult challenge to determine which one to support.
The real answer is of course "neither", but unfortunately the US's politics are broken into two parties, and nobody will be truly satisfied with their choice.
While that's true, you also can't opt out of politics/government/society (unless you have the means to expatriate yourself), so the lesser of two evils is still less evil. IE, votes still matter. Yes, even if your district is gerrymandered to hell and back.
not to open a can of worms that I'll immediately run away from because I have work to do, but that is exactly what privilege is, no? Women, LGBT people, visible minorities, disabled people, etc. can't just treat politics like a sport.
What does it mean about me if I looked at the image and the article headline and thought "scientific replication crisis"?
I'd honestly be shocked if this was repeatable. A brief search didn't turn up any attempts.
We probably are the study..."we presented the Michigan Fish Study to online communities to see which part of the click bait they fixated on the most..."
Not just the scientific replication crisis, but also the scientific media replication crisis.
For all of the p-hacking and file drawer effects that modern research (noting this is an older piece) tries to avoid, the incentives for popular scientific media including blog posts all run in the other direction. Even if limited to just good, replicable studies in journals, anything we hear about via popularization is likely to be attached to a stronger-than-real effect size.
Im pleasantly surprised hackernews largely seems in agreement this is speculative bullshit.
Me too -- I reacted this way when I read it, and posted it here to see if others would agree or if there was some nuance I was missing. In particular I bristle at this frequent juxtaposition of the US and Japan (or "East" vs "West" more broadly) in terms of individualism and collectivism -- those terms aren't well defined enough to not be misleading, and might convey truth in some cases but better specificity would help us avoid wrongheaded generalizations based on old tropes and stereotypes
It makes sense to me that there would be differences in how people with various cultural backgrounds interpret art, since we largely know that the way people experience and think about color is different, though
It's also funny to see US vs Japan as a stand-in for East vs West, because eg Japan and China have very different cultures; and eg Germany and the US also have their differences. (Or Chile and the US, if you want to stay far in the West.)
I may be depressed. I looked at the picture as soon as it loaded and then read the summary below it. Following the 5-second idea, my eyes were caught by the little frog like figure at the bottom of the image. My initial reaction was like "what is that little frog doing in this fish bow? It's going to be eaten soon."
Maybe it's less about depression and more about heightened sensitivity to imbalance or danger in a system
I also was mostly fixated on the frog, as was apparently another commenter here.
It's a pity the researchers didn't explain what that says about our culture, or which Disney princess we are.
BuzzFeed apparently leading Springer and Elsevier in social science publishing.
I noticed all the fish. Not because I'm holistic though. I first noticed the big ones. Then though "hmm what's the trick" and carefully scanned the rest of the image because of that. But I guess the experiment was done in a more controlled way. Without "fish test" in the title!
If someone tells me it's a "test," my brain goes into "look for the twist" mode too
Japanese culture even has a word Ma meaning 'negative space' or 'the space between'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
The world means "inbetween" and gets extrapolated to a lot of deeper meanings and be more specific or specialized depending on the context.
It's like bokeh, the world in itself has a base meaning, which can point to a specific thing when used in the right context, like in photography.
part of the fetishization of Japanese culture
It reminds me of Prince, who was talking to a fellow musician and told them that the space between the notes is just as funky as the notes you play.
Debussy said it first lol
English culture can also express 'negative space' or 'the space between'. You just did.
Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
The main difference regards the emphasis/value placed on it. In Japanese culture the space between:
> often (holds) as much importance as the rest of an artwork
This is a great read, with examples (namely gardens and theaters):
https://web.archive.org/web/20241127041031/https://deeperjap...
> Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.
I wonder if the discrepancy in analysis comes from the way the participants are asked to view the picture. English and Japanese are vastly different languages and even a simple question can be translated in subtly different ways.
It was on students of the faculty, so I guess all in English: https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb06/connection
The link to the CNN article gives me a 502 Bad Gateway.
In any case, this kind of convenient and interesting finding smells like replication crisis fodder to me.
Huh. I'm a U.S. (and Canadian) citizen. I've travelled a fair but (10-11 countries) but never the "East".
I looked at all the elements and was trying to understand the relationships and why the frog was the way it is and why the foreground fish had more colour.
2 reasons for that, I think. One, that I was aware it was a "test", and two, I'm an analyst.
A more detailed linked in the experiment and surrounding research: https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb06/connection
For some reason I assumed different cultures saw different fish. I thought "These are bass and all the other cultures are wrong."
Turns out I was right. Not sure what these pop-psychologists would say about it though.
Why is that one fish breathing air bubbles?
Its coming from the fish.
My first thought was "why is the water green". What culture does that imply I'm from?
One that doesn’t spend time around bass ponds?
I like the test, will start using it on interviews instead of leet code questions
Lots of fish? Send to microservices teams. Few fish? Monolith team.
How many golf balls can you fit into these 5 fish?
this is a project manager I need!
The only thing worse than leet coding in interviews is pop-psycholoy conducted by untrained people.
Seriously, what information are you hoping to get out of this and why do you think it has any relavence to the job?
I don't know, learn something about a big fish :D
Presumably it's a proxy for whether or not a candidate is Japanese
And this is how the US left and right view things. Each honestly viewing the world about them, yet each seeing different things as important.
Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person, is key to resolving differences between you. And disrupting that ability is a way to destroy a country from within.
Adversaries such as China, Iran, Russia, and others know they cannot physically destroy the US or the collective West. Yet they can, if done right, cause self destruction. They can spread lies, misrepresent, spew distrust, and entice youth's natural dissatisfaction to grow and flourish.
Destroy the US from within, and they succeed without a shot fired.
It matters not what actor is currently on the stage. Whether left or right, this president or next or prior, the hostility exists. And it exists in large part, thanks to our enemies seeking our doom.
When you hate your political opponent without knowing them? When you blindly follow political dogma without questioning? When you take a stance because a party does?
You become a useful idiot.
And sadly?
In this day and age, we all are idiots.
Seek that part of the picture you are missing. Work to get your opponent to do the same.
You may still disagree, but even the tinest expansion of view is a victory for you both. Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
it's very funny how the experiment is about how us people overestimate their importance globally and this is the first comment
> You may still disagree, but even the tinest expansion of view is a victory for you both. Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
But this view is also a win for "them". A society that cannot look to itself, see its failings and divisions and address them and move past them is doomed to stagnation and failure.
The thing about divide and conqour strategies, is they don't create the divisions out of nothing. They exploit what is already there. Suppressing the divisions without resolving them is like surpressing an emotion. Eventually the pressure builds until there is an explosion. It is as much a losing strategy as letting differences spiral into animosisty and hatred.
Sucessful strategies (such as stoking division) usually don't have an easy answer of what you can just do to defeat the strategy. If they did, people wouldn't have been using such strategies for thousands of years; People use them because they are hard to counter.
I love the irony in the pitting of the US vs China, Iran & Russia, whilst talking about stoking division.
Don't corollaries to your comments also apply at a higher level globally, or is there something special about considering countries as a grouping vs political parties?
Surely they're all just games we play in our minds and people kind of arbitrarily just agree that countries most definitely exist and this is my in-group, whereas others are enemies.
Some political opponents are literally trying to harm you. Trying to pretend otherwise is not just naive, but actively damaging. They are literally passing or trying to pass the laws that are literally harming "me or my close ones" and then celebrate the harm.
> Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person
J.D. Vance, Donad Trump and Putin are bad people. They are all my political opponents.
Yea, like... One side wants us to be a little kinder to each other (while selling us out to corporate interests) and the other side wants to create a quasi-fascist religious state and detain, enslave and execute some of us (while selling us out to corporate and Russian interests).
What a difficult challenge to determine which one to support.
The real answer is of course "neither", but unfortunately the US's politics are broken into two parties, and nobody will be truly satisfied with their choice.
While that's true, you also can't opt out of politics/government/society (unless you have the means to expatriate yourself), so the lesser of two evils is still less evil. IE, votes still matter. Yes, even if your district is gerrymandered to hell and back.
> Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
ah yes, understanding the people who want to kill people like me is a great win.
They cannot imagine that my political opponent is actually my enemy and it's not my choice that made it so and no choice I make can change it.
not to open a can of worms that I'll immediately run away from because I have work to do, but that is exactly what privilege is, no? Women, LGBT people, visible minorities, disabled people, etc. can't just treat politics like a sport.
[dead]