"Some people find some other people more likable when those people speak more in a conversation, but drawing any other conclusions than that would be fantastically stupid on its own merits, and doubly so given the recent crises in this field."
My correction was neither snarky nor a shallow dismissal, but rather a genuine and 100% serious correction of the conclusions that can be responsibly drawn from the research.
Ex: We have decades of research on ASD and ADHD that have utterly failed to serve the very large number of people who don’t fit the profile of “young white American boy” to whom that research actually applied because the conclusions were wrongly assumed to generalize to the wider population.
It’s not a new problem, and there is no justification whatsoever for being oblivious to that problem in this field anymore.
I'm sure you have a substantive point, but the way you communicated it pattern-matched so closely to the snark and shallow-dismissal categories that its substantiveness was more or less lost.
I understand how frustrating it is when there's a point which is well-known (to you) and people ought to be more aware of it. The problem is, when you let that frustration slip into your comment, or indeed dominate it, you end up sending mixed messages to any user who doesn't know the point or why it ought to be well known by now.
It's common in HN comments for people to post something that assumes the state in their own head, and makes sense in that context, but makes little sense to the reader who doesn't have that state in their head. To such a reader, your GP comment comes across as snark and shallow dismissal. The thing to realize is that only a slight minority of the audience—basically, nobody but you—has that same state in their head. Therefore, if you want to be understood, you can't assume it—you have to assume statelessness instead, and bootstrap the context by including the relevant bits explicitly.
It's also common on HN for people to respond to a moderation scolding with a version of what they actually meant and could have posted in the first place. I call this the rebound effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Your reply here is interesting from that angle because it's a partial rebound: it tells us part of the state you have in your head (knowledge of decades of research on ASD and ADHD), but still not enough to really grok your point, and the rest of it is still venting frustration.
It's of course perfectly natural to want to vent frustration when one feels it; the trouble is that this doesn't communicate the information that other people need to understand you, and the frustration itself adds noise to the signal. It also is likely to activate adjacent frustrations that other people feel, and therefore to evoke an unhelpful argument, rather than the curious conversation we want here.
There's a huge problem in many branches of science where, using normal methodology, it's possible to come up with an endless stream of results that are unlikely to have any predictive validity outside of the extremely specific circumstances of the experiment -- and often not even there. This gives the illusion of knowledge, but everything you "know" falls apart if you actually try to apply it to the world around you.
An attempt by DARPA to evaluate the various fields of social science found that only about half of the papers they tried to replicate actually gave the same results when tried a second time. People in those fields could give pretty good predictions of which papers would replicate, but the publishing apparatus doesn't seem to have much in the way of quality control to filter out the papers everyone knows are junk -- nor do people cite the junk studies less often. Here's a very readable writeup with details:
What's more, correlational studies have another problem: even a consistent-but-small correlation between two variables usually is non-causal when you're looking at sufficiently complicated webs of cause and effect, e.g. the ones found in the social sciences like psychology. The math here has some profound, dire implications, and I found this article to be a huge eye-opener:
If 80% or more of your published and "peer reviewed" predictions were non-reproducible crap (as is the case with said soft sciences), then you'd indeed better not say anything about the subject at all.
Just because you're "doing science" and getting some results back, doesn't mean you're doing something accurate or worth over not doing.
It’s more that performing this experiments with rats would only be slightly less representative of the general population than the college undergraduates they almost certainly used.
I'm going to take the charitable view and assume that what they found was true and reproducible within the artificial scenario they created, but I'm with you — conversation is a dance. It's less about "how much to talk" and more about meeting the other conversationalist(s) energy and vibe, vibrant interaction vs. monologuing, "yes, and"-ing at the right opportunities, not needlessly interrupting just to hear the sound of your voice, etc.
I certainly wouldn't assume a linear relationship between talking time and likeability. There has to be a drop-off at some point, since few people like being ambushed by someone who won't let them say a single word. Familiarity also plays a role. It might be somewhat relieving for a new acquaintance to carry a conversation, but wearying for a familiar person to subject you to endless verbal barrages.
There, I fixed it for you.