Status Updates From The Skeptics' Guide to the ...

“I find arrogance to be common in pseudoscience in general. If you think you’re the one genius who has broken the laws of physics, [...] then you should be really certain.”

“[B]enign and reasonable interventions, even if they have no specific effect, may be a sensible way to make people feel like you are paying attention, that you care, that their voice is being heard, and may therefore improve the culture of the workplace.”

“The bottom line of all this is that any intervention in almost any context will subjectively seem to work. [...] This often leads to the false conclusion that the specific intervention (a treatment, a diet, a self-help strategy, whatever) has a specific efficacy and therefore the underlying philosophy must be valid.”

“The name ‘Hawthorne effect,’ [...] derives from experiments conducted between 1924 and 1933 in Western Electric’s factory at Hawthorne [...] The experimenters made various changes to the working environment, like adjusting light levels, and noticed that regardless of the change, performance improved.”