Serious fun

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-26 08:30:04

It's easy to think of being serious and having fun as opposite sides of a spectrum. The problem is that 'being serious' has many unrelated meanings, for example:

The second meaning is on a totally orthogonal axis. Something like superficial/purfunctory/haphazard <-> substantive/engaged/purposeful.

I wanted to get up and yell: "EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT."

If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get - does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius?

Or - much more likely - the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud.