Venkatesh Rao

I think some refined version of Amy Cuddy's power pose stuff will get vindicated at some point. My spidey sense tells me there's a there there. The stats police kinda won round 1 on procedural grounds rather than persuasive falsification of the intuition with an alt theory

You don't really need an "alt theory" when there's no data to explain do you?

That's a bad heuristic. General relativity was a example of a theory that showed where to look for data. Here there is suggestive evidence in the form of social dominance displays etc. It's natural behavior and must be good for something.

General relativity was one way to explain a lot of existing phenomena though. Then alternates were ruled out through the parameterized post-newtonian formalism. Power posing is a cause looking for an effect

Only the precession of mercury orbit iirc. The rest were predictions. I'd say power posing is a normative version of a natural behavior that needs a better account. And note, one effect (felt power) *was* replicated

So then the question is, what other things can or can't produce the same "effect"? Jumping jacks? Push ups? Swearing in a pillow? To me, the whole genesis of power posing is pretty lazy as scientific inquiry goes.