Effective Social Justice Interventions: this is a great example of using EA as a technique to address areas the EA-as-philosophy sphere hasn’t touched.
The Last Day of Her Life: a psychology researcher’s decision to and process of ending her life as her Alzheimer’s progresses. Fun fact: state-sanctioned euthanasia requires you be mentally competent and have less than six months to live. Alzheimer’s patients are mentally incompetent years before they die of the disease.
The (crime-related) Broken Window Theory states that low level visible crime (graffiti, litter) leads to more crime, of all varieties. It is most famous for being Rudy Guilani’s method for reducing crime in New York City. My understanding was that that had been debunked, and NYC’s drop is crime was caused mostly by demographic trends. But some researchers did some fairly rigorous tests of it and it held up. Caveat: they tested visible crime’s evidence on other crimes of similar magnitude, not escalations like theft.
This week’s “beautiful theory killed by an ugly gang of facts” award goes to the meditation chapter of The Willpower Instinct, which promises fantastic benefits from the very beginning. In fact it says that meditating badly is in some ways better for you than meditating well, because it is the practice of refocusing yourself after you become distracted that is so beneficial. Unfortunately none of the studies cited show that exact things, and what they do show is a small effect on a noisy variable, in a small sample.
[I don’t want to be too hard on The Willpower Instinct. It encourages you to do your own experiments and stick with what works, I found some of it helpful, and it’s good for getting yourself into a willpower mindset. It’s just scientifically weaker than it would have you believe.]
Sine Rider: if xkcd was a video game.
Aceso Under Glass 