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Science Banana

@literalbanana189k followers

director of science programming for the Abstract Noun Abuse Prevention Task Force, a project of the Union of Concerned Anthropomorphic Fruit. Help Peer

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Oct 16
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Posts 91 posts
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1Oct 11, '24"Why is fraud so common in fields in which it is customary to publish images that can later be checked for obvious fakery?"52.3×696k1.8k128217
2Aug 9, '23the future is so beautiful49.2×654k2.8k686341
3Aug 22, '23I wrote a (for me) brief explanation of why I think the placebo effect, priming, nudge, ego depletion, social contagion, most "cognitive biases," and "behavioral" anything are fake29.2×388k919139816
4Oct 8, '21School gets a bad rap but it’s actually really impressive - juvenile human brains are constantly learning from any available context and the fact that school manages to halt this p19.9×04.9k1.1k201
5Jan 24, '24This is really good and I have thought about this a lot19×252k1.3k128437
6Dec 21, '24View post on X17.6×234k1.9k131111
7Mar 22, '23this study is absolute art I'm in awe14.3×190k831153288
8Sep 27, '24their conclusion is a two-sentence horror story lol12.1×160k2.3k94327
9Jan 5, '24I am just an ignorant internet banana and I could be wrong but based on my early research I think the Current Copy-Pasting Thing is worse than people are making it out to be9.3×124k64545164
10Jun 18, '18Refusing to know about things is a valid form of civil disobedience9.1×01.8k419231
11Jan 29, '20every seemingly innocent fragment of information is secretly plotting how to escape its context and cause trouble8.7×01.8k453201
12Jun 27, '25I'm reading Robert Sapolsky's Determined: Life Without Free Will as a mild form of self harm and here are two perfect pages - ego depletion, surgeon's birthdays, Francesca Gino/Dan8.2×109k83366530
13Nov 15, '24Is the placebo effect real? A brief (lol) thread of some of the points from my unfortunately novella-length post about why I think the placebo effect is fake:8.1×108k66966538
14Apr 19, '24some of these are wild7.4×98k1.8k87124
15Aug 2, '25Okay everyone is pointing and laughing going "this is an AI dumpster fire" but let's sort through the trash and recyclables and analyze the emission spectrum of the flame so to spe7.1×94k33412122
16Mar 24, '16sorry but if sincerely defending your beliefs is clearly and easily distinguishable from trolling then your beliefs are basic5.5×01k307115
17Jul 14, '25if you sat me down in an interrogation room and ordered me to brainstorm crazy ideas for dealing with excessive heat, even if you kept me awake for five days forcing me to invent n5.4×72k9372342
18Apr 20, '23I really respect the "staying hydrated" hobby like it takes a LOT of commitment to ignore your body's natural signals and throw off your salt balance for the sake of a quasi-religi5.2×69k8753742
19Mar 27, '24wondering if my crusade to make smart people realize how bad the evidence for things is might be doomed because smart people SUPER want there to be evidence for things, like way mo5.1×68k82174112
20Aug 30, '24hot take: massage, yoga, and exercise are good because they feel good, you don't need any evidence of efficacy beyond that and you probably won't find any lol4.8×64k8973269
21Sep 21, '24edward tufte can only dream of making a chart like this4.8×63k77838128
22Mar 18, '24One enduring mystery that I don't think I'll ever have a good answer to is what it was like from the inside to fake all that social science - was it purely cynical? pious fraud? so4.7×62k4461861
23Mar 31, '25I don't care if it's true I just love it4.4×58k1.3k72146
24Nov 6, '19I’m excited that I won even though it was an honor just to be nominated. Please buy my twitter strategy guide:4.3×0873172151
25Mar 25, '25A uniting characteristic of a great deal of junk science is that it paints a picture of human beings as plastic bags in a tornado - moved by inexorable forces, lacking agency and r4.3×57k791116233
26Dec 12, '24One Fact that I thought was relatively solid ground was that crime is a function of youth - that it was a human universal that it's mostly young males maybe 15-22 who do most crime4.2×55k52716108
27Mar 3, '25there's a widespread idea that as long as we fund "science" in the abstract, maybe there will be some fake or fraudulent stuff but at least some funding will trickle down to get re4.1×55k8345375
28Feb 16, '24I am skeptical of the "exercise cures depression" meta-analysis because these are often ways of laundering lots of bad studies that may or may not have ever happened into Serious S4.0×53k28224101
29Jul 24, '23conspiracy theory: the so-called "loneliness epidemic" is a judgy term invented by terrible people to throw shade on the fact that there were major breakthroughs in excluding terri4.0×53k3172151
30Mar 6, '25people complain about the "loneliness crisis" but if you tweet something confusing enough you get to chat with more people than your ancestors would meet in their entire lives3.8×50k1k8260
31Apr 26, '19protip: if you are wrong on 6 or more levels simultaneously, your opponents’ morale will plummet and they won’t be able to correct you3.7×092118323
32Nov 4, '19View post on X3.4×077619950
33Jan 13, '24I estimate that the kind of scientific misconduct I care about most - pretending to measure abstractions when you're not really measuring those abstractions, pretending tiny effect3.4×45k5744975
34Aug 29, '23if you lack the creativity and intelligence to make your point in the form of a joke (thereby both difficult and cringe to refute) you can always write a sincere 5000-word essay wi3.2×43k5685352
35Jul 7, '25idk much about 1776 but I've been spending a lot of time in 1690s new england and I'm so happy there's firewood discourse because there's a subtle way that firewood issues were a p3.1×42k3391596
36Nov 6, '19imagine how hard social science would be if people had complex, ambiguous inner lives that weren’t capable of being captured by simple survey instruments3.1×075217317
37Sep 23, '23hi this is the irony police do you know why I pulled you over today2.8×37k405419
39Nov 4, '24A detailed review of the "nutrients in crops are declining" issue that's pretty interesting and not just a sketchy chart2.6×35k29232162
40Jul 11, '20I’m volunteer hostile fact checking Nudge because I hate myself and I thought it would be a bunch of n=30 fMRI studies and priming stuff but the first reference is just a blog post2.6×046580103
41Oct 6, '21Why, in general, are old things beautiful and new things ugly? This is my descriptive answer, but how it got that way is more complicated2.5×038874186
42Oct 31, '22BREAKING: Twitter to announce "PVP-tier" check marks, vulnerable to being lost to any non-verified user with less than half your follower count who ratios you2.5×0774694
43May 3, '19Right now someone is learning a tidy but wrong theory about your personal area of expertise.2.5×056811611
44Sep 22, '23View post on X2.4×33k4115821
45Jul 28, '23it's an ethical mistake to carefully edit your tweets so they don't make anyone mad because many people desire to be mad the way a dog desires your burrito and you're basically den2.4×32k5018122
46Mar 30, '25the witch trials are like science fraud in that the consequences for the worst villains are like -nothing -nothing -??? -had to change churches -didn't get to be president of harva2.3×31k3592918
47Apr 15, '19Public art is mostly imposed on communities that can’t defend themselves from it. Rarely do you see public art spoiling rich neighborhoods.2.3×05778737
48Apr 13, '19Oh you're a feminist? Name three women2.2×05501205
49Apr 23, '25I highly recommend taking a side in a centuries-spanning beef as a way to build a mental framework for history - it's all random dates and meaningless names until you're in a fight2.2×29k8445674
50Apr 1, '25Congratulations, you just became the world's greatest expert on Thing! In recognition of your achievement, your prize is that you are forever triggered whenever an innocent normal 2.1×28k4573828
51Apr 2, '25Why didn't anyone speak out during the Salem witch trials, given how incredibly fake they were? The first two "witches" accused by the roleplaying girls were the obvious suspects: 2.1×28k3942856
52Feb 17, '24the self-selected online survey showing cyclists are perceived as less human if they wear helmets, vests, or lycra has the funniest measure that I'm sure is very real and valid2.1×28k4674056
53Jun 18, '24View post on X2.1×27k3144417
54Apr 24, '19Imagine if compulsory education was just an elaborate escape room that almost all of us failed1.9×04649715
55Jun 28, '25I guess my biggest concern is that if a graybeard professor in a quantitative field can't or won't exclude the behavioral science trash on the basis of taste after over a decade of1.9×25k3642578
56Jan 11, '25reading old texts iceberg1.9×25k49169104
57Feb 2, '24would be a shame if the cobra farms became so ubiquitous that every elite institution became a subsidiary of Big Cobra1.9×25k3233428
58Jun 13, '21grant me the wisdom to avoid pretending to measure the things I cannot measure, the fancy rulers to measure the things I can, and the serenity to chill when people are doing it wro1.8×042810217
59Mar 8, '21protect weird and dumb things because you never know which weird and dumb things are going to weirdly, stupidly hill-climb out of local maxima1.7×04565530
61Jun 8, '25possibly ice cold take: agricultural science is extremely real and you would make very few mistakes by letting it keep all of its funding and in fact funding it harder1.7×22k4702814
62Feb 9, '24"cargo cult science" is the wrong metaphor because building cool straw airplanes doesn't actively hinder anyone's efforts to deliver cargo1.6×21k3413318
63Aug 27, '18There’s a debate about whether fish feel pain and the best moment is “actually plants might feel pain”1.5×03098915
64Dec 25, '19The essence of “cringe” is horror at the display of natural, universal human motivations minus the typical human ability to obfuscate motivations1.5×03565423
65Jun 28, '21This poor figure lost its caption!1.4×03523245
66Mar 14, '20One thing that might still make a difference is if people in the 20-40 age range who got coronavirus and required critical care started publicly explaining how painful and awful it1.4×0377608
67Jan 23, '20Are people silly for not having coherent, non-contradictory beliefs, or is it silly to expect intelligent people to have global, universal, coherent beliefs about messy reality?1.4×02925518
69Mar 23, '25(explaining my gardening problems to a young person) my dahlias are crashing out. they are cooked. they unalived themselves1.4×18k4944315
70Jun 25, '20be the hard-to-describe genre you want to see in the world1.3×02956521
71Jul 3, '21Increasingly common experience: looking up all the citations for a claim in a review paper expecting them to be based on bullshit methodology, but it turns out the cited papers don1.3×0392289
72Mar 31, '25thoughts on literacy 1. it's impossible to force a high level of literacy on people 2. it's morally bad to try to force a high level of literacy on people 3. high levels of literac1.3×17k3063068
73Jul 23, '25>researching >stuck >ask a clippy >he has ideas >real sources or hallucinated? they're good sources banana >they're hallucinated >search anyway >leads to EX1.3×17k3932220
75Dec 26, '21TWITTER CAPITALIZATION RULES 1. if it's obviously a proper noun you don't have to capitalize it (queen elizabeth) 2. if it's not clear that it's a proper noun you can help out your1.3×03613312
76Aug 17, '21maybe this is overly optimistic but I think the answer to “how to fund science fraud investigations” is just to have a tiny % of the credentialed people who can’t get jobs in acade1.2×0340429
77Nov 1, '21your great-grandparents had parasocial relationships with newspaper columnists and radio announcers1.2×03523310
78Nov 15, '20if you see a sketchy claim be a pedant 👏👏 if you see a sketchy claim be a pedant 👏👏 if it’s based on survey data be an angry buzzkill hater if you see a sketchy claim be a peda1.2×0319524
79Jul 19, '21Universal ways to make things fun if they have become boring: 1. give yourself arbitrary obstructions 2. pay attention to small details/sensations1.2×02922645
80Jun 16, '19normie is a spectrum, but a normie is someone whose basic demographic profile is an accurate predictor of his tastes.1.2×03113916
81May 24, '21Noise (the new book) cites the hungry judges study like the replication crisis never even happened1.2×02803928
82Sep 7, '21the domains in which logic applies are like the flowers on the highest mountain peaks: rare, precarious, tiny as pearls, dwarfed by the ever-crumbling, ever-rising rock pile of cet1.2×02864424
83Jan 31, '21If you discover that some kind of evidence is bad, the logical thing to do is to downgrade all your beliefs that were based on that kind of evidence, but in practice that’s a LONG 1.2×03052811
84Aug 19, '21one tragedy of life is when there’s a fake phenomenon that people take seriously and then people do science on it to prove it’s fake but it turns out the science is also fake but c1.1×03262616
86Aug 7, '21Smokey Bear sucked on a vape pen. “The words have sold out,” he sighed, tossing a book into the creek. “Every noun or verb has a bestselling autobiography. Back then you’d ask ten 1.1×02843732
87Jan 21, '20language philosophy is wild it’s like trying to dislodge yourself from a spiderweb but all your tools are spiderwebs and you might be spiderwebs too1.1×02784812
88Nov 30, '24That is hilarious - "comparing different diets" study has the "high protein high fat" group eating spaghetti, bagels, raisins, potatoes, BANANAS...1.1×15k2841516
89Dec 3, '22maybe laws that mandated miserly trickling shower heads and treacherous smart thermostats were good in retrospect because they taught people that it's normal to have to jailbreak t1.1×0335245
90May 7, '25It's fine that robots write essays for college kids. In fact all meaningless work should be done by robot1.1×14k3624113
92May 6, '25you may not like it but this is what peak literary criticism looks like1.1×14k2962435
93Aug 1, '20the german word for the pain of remembering that survey data are fake and worthless even when you like the story they tell1.0×0273349
94Jun 29, '24large sample sizes are good but you should always check if it's a large sample of desperate mechanical turkers paid fifty cents to hurriedly give the researchers the answers most l1.0×13k5062816
96Oct 2, '21BUT IT TURNED OUT THAT THEIR ORIGINAL METHODOLOGY DIDN’T PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT RESULTS, THEY HAD TO DO A POST HOC PAIRWISE COMPARISON AND ONLY ENDED UP WITH P=.0498 AND GET THIS, IT 1.0×0291229
98Nov 17, '24that's a really interesting idea0.8×11k277920
100Dec 25, '23merry christmas0.7×9.7k27930

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