Tangled Bank

The Tangled Bank blog carnival for science blogging is up.

One of my favorites was this explanation for why we need science, which starts:

In a recent experiment, subjects played a computer `game' where points were scored completely randomly, having nothing to do with what the players did. One group randomly got points 33% of the time, the other group 66% of the time. After 50 or 100 trials, the players were asked, amongst other things, for helpful tips for incoming players to score more points. Most of the players -- including even those who only got points 33% of the time! -- had helpful tips for incoming players, stuff that had `worked for them'.

(Snip)

How could the subjects in the above experiment have gotten it so wrong?  Their actions had no impact on the results, yet they had crafted theories about how the point-scoring worked in the game, and believed that they had tested those theories.

It goes on to explain why the easiest person to fool is yourself, and why we need the scientific method to control for our innate biases.

Comments

[BronzeDog]

This is one experiment I can relate to: I'm currently addicted to a freeware game called rRootage. It's a classic "shmup" game with some apparently complex scoring schemes. The Engrish readme file that came with it wasn't terribly informative, but I've been able to come up with some robust hypotheses.

Still need to figure out why I sometimes miss out on end-of-level bonus points in Ika(ruga) mode, though.