[pizza]

Before re-reading the comments after approaching this thread again, a few hours after the first time I did, I basically just wanted to comment "this is very very unlikely to be true, and at best we can only say 'reasons that make people self-control make people self-control'"

Suppose I made the argument "car crashes rely upon momentum":

- car crashes is a terse signifier; a high-level recognition of something that no doubt relies upon low-level phenomena

- momentum is a physical, and therefore, low-level, phenomenon

No one would say I said anything useful. They would say "well duh but why were they driving towards where they drove? were they reading a text? were they drunk? were they even to blame when they crashed? was the car fully-functional? what were the weather conditions like? how much experience driving had they had? how old were they? how good was their vision?" etc..

More or less this is what is going on with, at least, the headline implies:

- self control: high level subjective phenomenon (who is to say that every person has self-control via non-dissimilar mechanisms??)

relies upon

- glucose: a correlate. Correlates are mostly useless and used to fool people, even if r > 0, and even if r=~1. Correlation more often indicates that there is a combination of excitement and merely-coincidental yet spurious non-causality in >99.99% of measurements.

I don't blame people for wanting there to be a simple, chemiological explanation for things that are very important to their existence. But I do blame the people who are responsible for preemptively jumping the gun and broadcasting the suggestion that these questions have been answered, especially because they are reporting that it was solved via something as vulgarly facile as in vivo molar concentration of near-universal molecule

Even if it is unlikely that the claim is true in a fundamental and meaningful and not-merely-correlative sense, after so many decades of prior investigators having approached this obvious hypothesis..

[haakoflo]

> But I do blame the people who are responsible for preemptively jumping the gun and broadcasting the suggestion that these questions have been answered

Usually when such claims are broadcast, it happens in two steps:

1) Some researcher (often a PhD student) finds some correlation (with our without conscious P-hacking) that has p<0.0.5. Their thesis may depend on it. 2) Some news broadcaster makes a story from the article. Their job/income may depend on it.

Now who, exactly, would you blame.

[pizza]

The broadcaster for broadcasting misinformation. The PhD student isn't producing misinformation (unless, they are, which is bad af).

I'm sure that every professional reporter, whether science popularizer or something else, understands and takes seriously the need for obey the Hippocratic Oath in their own profession, too ("first, do no harm").

But.. it's not like the reporter isn't aware that the constraints they are subject to (much higher time pressure + less familiarity with the topic vs the researcher's low time pressure + intimacy with the topic) don't automatically absolve them of their responsibility to own any mistakes they make once the genie's out of the bottle. It mostly hurts their readership if they start employing non-facts once they add them to their repertoire of decision heuristics.

Sure science reporting is definitely a good force in the world for helping people make decisions over important stuff, but.. like.. the researcher's reputation is ruined for causing potential damage to academia, but a reporter doesn't have skin in the game and has little to lose if others trusted them.