April 19, 2006

A Biological No-brainer!

Catching sight of a pretty woman really is enough to throw a man's decision-making skills into disarray, a study suggests.

I, for one, am not surprised.

Update: This beautiful verse by Scott Aaronson lends a poetic touch to the above phenomenon. I learned of this from Amit.

3 Comments:

At 2:37 AM, April 20, 2006, Blogger Navin said...

I may belive the results but to give it the name of a result due to scientific methods is bull shitt. These are results which are meant to con NSF into giving funding

 
At 12:48 PM, April 20, 2006, Blogger Krishna said...

Well, I don't know. (Just to be pedantic, "research" was done in Belgium, so it is quite unlikely that they wanted funds from NSF. But I am sure you used NSF figuratively. So we can replace it by Belgium's equivalent.)

Why is this not "scientific"? Do you mean the study itself is meaningless? I can't argue with that.

But you will be surprised how many scientific results are obtained using these methods. Mind you, these are not the absolute final word on this subject. I think the discovery in these subjects proceeds like this. Some researchers do some empirical study like this and deduce certain things. These deductions are only accepted provisionally till there is conclusive evidence for them.

Of course, these empirical studies by researchers are extremely scientific, in that if you and I pick 50 people and do this study, we won't necessarily have any basis to conclude anything. Many parameters have to be taken into consideration in selecting the sample, conducting the experiment, reaching conclusions etc.

 
At 10:51 PM, April 20, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think I agree with Krishna. Firstly, the article only said "a study suggests that ..."; it never said "we prove that ...". Secondly, do you believe that the force of gravity is inversely proportional to square of the distance? It's also a result verified by "scientific method". Is that bullshit to you?

 

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