Listen to Paul sing this song:
A real study done by real PhD researchers, published in the journal Psychological Science, "proved" that listening to "When I’m 64" literally made you younger by nearly 17 months:
Not “made you feel younger”, or “made your brain younger”: the study demonstrated that listening to certain songs made you younger. And these surprising findings met the standard of “statistical significance” which most scientific journals demand.
In fact, the three authors of the study had set out to deliberately make a point. They wanted to show that, by using routine statistical methods, you could find apparently solid results that were not merely unlikely but patently absurd.
Science isn’t broken. But it is profoundly flawed. And the wrong results can have serious implications.
(From the sobering Freakonomics podcast, Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?)
This doesn't even get to when people simply make things up ("The Twitter Papers PROVED researchers LIED about covid coming from a lab leak!!!!!")
So we should have at least some pity to people immersed in a world of conspiracies, or hatred, or dogma. And for people who don't believe anything.*
And that is before considering that we don't have free will. We are all just broken computers. OTOH:
When Anne’s pals Shelley and Katherine met me during 1992’s Time the First, I was, as mentioned, totally blissed out. (That is: not my normal self.) They asked Anne, “Does Matt ever get upset about anything?” Anne replied: “Well, he does yell at his computer.”
Guilty!
*
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