every seemingly innocent fragment of information is secretly plotting how to escape its context and cause trouble

reading between the lines it seems like everyone in the neighborhood was getting sick of her shenanigans, especially the second time around, and only Cotton Mather believed she wasn't faking

part of this is that it makes more intuitive sense to classify plants based on our particular lifestyles and jobs rather than our genetics, like anyone can be a "tree" if they try hard enough honestly

you can just cite things

apparently she had a mole in his HOUSE?? (she was a servant girl, could be one of his servants)

Everyone deserves to safely share the road. Learn how Waymo is working to make our roads safer.

she is forced by the spirits to "fast" for up to 15 days but also people give her treats which she makes "disappear" and says the spirits are eating them, I like her the best especially since she didn't get anyone killed

one of the Afflicted Girls getting Youth Pastored by Cotton Mather (Mercy Short in Boston right after the Salem panic) casually picks his pocket, she's 17th century David Blaine lmao

It seems like a common pattern in public drama that giving inconsistent excuses/stories/lies ends up being worse for the embattled party than any other evidence against them

This is more than just four quarters. It’s every tailgate, every chant, every moment. It’s fuel that goes beyond the field. This is CELSIUS! LIVE. FIT. GO.

I don't really have a conclusion other than that exercise science is at its best when it's not pretending to be psychology, and honesty is the best policy in social media drama.

The author did eventually admit it was the real dissertation, and there has been some back and forth with very interesting material for cope connoisseurs https://t.co/bvmljZobMR

But instead of saying it's normal, apparently the embattled author opted to claim that the dissertation reviewed was just a rough draft, and also made the dissertation private, which is why I have to rely on hearsay and youtube screenshots, alas

It seems obvious that nobody moderately literate reads most papers in full, but apparently nobody moderately literate even read the TITLE of this poor paper (which isn't even terrible IMO, it has a potentially useful finding)

Buckley update! Beethoven recording! On November 24, 2025, WFB would have turned 100. On that day, I will release my recording of his favorite Diabelli Variations by Beethoven made on WFB's beloved Bösendorfer piano several months after he passed away in 2008. Here's a short

I think a possible response to the drama would have been to say that almost ALL exercise science is like this. As for the sloppy errors, I was looking at papers citing the papers that cited the PhD thesis, and this one jumped out at me

An interpretation of this from the linked video got a lot of traction - that if it were a normal distribution, it implies that many of the subjects weigh <5 kilos and have negative ages. Even if not normal, it implies ridiculous and implausible things about the distribution.

As you may notice, the standard deviations look extraordinarily large for the "Lowest Performers" - and were apparently accidentally copy-pasted from the means of the "Highest Performers."

The other main issue is that the dissertation is riddled with errors, including spelling errors and a particularly cursed set of tables (youtube screenshots for reasons I'll explain in a bit)

I don't think it's exaggerating too much to say that his thesis was "people with more muscles are stronger," which is, to put it mildly, well-established in the literature.

As for the fitness influencer's scandalous PhD thesis, the issue taken with it wasn't even that it wouldn't replicate - it was that it was too obvious and well-established.

So what can we say about sports science? It seems fair to conclude that the field has serious problems, although at least some researchers are doing good work, and even working to improve the field.

Not saying the results all follow this pattern - here's all the study titles and the results to check your intuition

Examples of studies that DIDN'T replicate: one about the effects of "preferred music," two about something that sounds like ego depletion to me, and a sort of placebo effect study in golf, RIP the placebo effect for the millionth time