Now starting to read Tenth of a Second by
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Fascinating. This book talks a lot about why 1/10th s was such a big deal. There was a whole mildly crackpot kinda-pseudo-science movement to study the “personal equation” of individuals from 1790s to WW1. Kinda like “cognitive bias” research today.
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Apparently started with attempts to account for observer bias in precise astronomical instruments, turned into a general metrology crisis, ended in Taylorism, Jungian psychology, etc.
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Apparently when Gauss invented least-squares, it was in part to solve this problem, and there was lot of debate about its validity. Karl Pearson developed his chi-square test etc to address that. Never knew this context.
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Reaction time studies on the order of 1/10th s was the foundation of all pre-modern psychology looks like. The whole thing strikes me as similar to phrenology or handwriting analysis for personality, etc. Empirical bullshit science is the best kind of bullshit science.
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And yeah, I think cognitive bias stuff will be considered the weird bullshit science of our era imho.
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Hm, why? It does appear to be fairly practical stuff, at least if you don't take it too seriously and DoS yourself.
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