Apr 5
Links: The "Some people on the internet are wrong!" Edition
1. Naked Capitalism's april fools prank came 3 days late. Just to consider one of the most glaring errors of the letter, the author seems to have no idea that many academics earn money based on the value of their connections and knowledge from their governmental positions. Thus, their main patrons would be factions that might end up running the government. See Elizabeth Warren's use of weird metrics in order to make politically charged studies which led to her current position as a special advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.2. One of the bloggers at the Economist has no idea how hedge funds work. They are unable to tell the difference between a decrease in assets due to investors pulling money out of a fund and negative returns. To be fair, the blogger is apparently based out of Kansas City.
3. In one of the recent episodes of "To the Best of Our Knowledge", Lone Frank brought up understanding the "Coke/Pepsi" example as one of the main case studies of neuromarketing. The Coke/Pepsi example is derived from the Pepsi challenge, where the less popular Pepsi is preferred in blind taste tests, but Coke is preferred if the drinks are labelled. This leads neuromarketer proponents to believe that there is something special about the branding of Coke or memories associated with the brand that makes it more appealing than Pepsi and that this difference can be seen directly via brain scans. However, these neuromarketers are missing a key fact that was pointed out in Malcon Gladwell's book Blink. Coke tastes better in the long run because the sweetness of Pepsi gets more annoying over time. Given this data, the experimental subjects used by neuromarketing analysts are probably associating the brands with their memories of consuming the actual product. Advertising and other fond memories associated with a brand should also have a measurable impact on the brain that would be interesting to study in more depth, but it is kind of sad that the neuromarketing flagship study* is based on false premises.
*This label is based on how it was the one study that was brought up on the podcast and because it is the only study mentioned in detail on the wikipedia page for Neuromarketing.
