Ugh. Then he follows his straw man with an over-generalization and appeal to ridicule:
"anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys"
and an appeal to personal belief (which also happens to be biased, and begs the original question):
"I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless."
Finally, he closes by quoting a section of the original article out of context, and misinterpreting the meaning:
"there are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice....Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data."
(the original Times article explains that the theory of glucose-induced willpower was tested in specific experiments, and found to have some merit.)
For a guy who wants to take a science reporter to task for sloppy reporting, he sure does play fast-and-loose with the logical fallacies....
You're committing to the same fallacy. I don't care what "studies in general" do -- I care what this study did.
Same goes for your use of the words "always" and "never" -- given that sample bias is a well-known scientific phenomenon, you're going to have to provide extraordinary evidence to convince me that studies "always" make the mistake...that's a rather extraordinary claim.
C'mon. If I say, "Okay, here's my random sample", and it's a self-selected group, you know immediately it's not a random sample. Whether or not this matters has much to do with whether we are testing physiological or pyschological criteria.
A) I don't know if the study authors claimed that they used a "random sample" (not all experiments require it).
B) Even if it wasn't a "random sample", unless the selection bias was correlated with the trait under study, it's highly unlikely to matter.
C) All of this is window dressing. The point is, Berkun's argument was overly general ("Anyone with..."), and based on ridicule of the experiment, without actually knowing anything about the experiment (by his own admission!)
If Berkun knew the details of the experiment, and was pointing out a methodological flaw, he'd be making an argument. Instead, he's speaking from the comfort of ignorance, attacking a study based on second-hand information and his own personal biases.
"anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys"
and an appeal to personal belief (which also happens to be biased, and begs the original question):
"I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless."
Finally, he closes by quoting a section of the original article out of context, and misinterpreting the meaning:
"there are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice....Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data."
(the original Times article explains that the theory of glucose-induced willpower was tested in specific experiments, and found to have some merit.)
For a guy who wants to take a science reporter to task for sloppy reporting, he sure does play fast-and-loose with the logical fallacies....