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DavidLS comments on Fixing Moral Hazards In Business Science - Less Wrong Discussion

33 Post author: DavidLS 18 October 2014 09:10PM

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Comment author: DavidLS 20 October 2014 12:23:12PM 3 points [-]

I did a poor job at the introduction. I'm assuming the studies exist, because if they don't that's full on false advertising.

Not to pick on anyone in particular here are some I recently encountered:

  • mtailor.com ("Scientifically proven to measure you 20% more accurately than a professional tailor." - no details are provided on how this was measured, hard to believe claim, YC company)
  • Nightwave Sleep Assistant - list of effects, no source.
  • Basically anything in whole foods :p

The probiotics section at wholefoods (and my interactions with customers who believed those claims or were skeptical of my claims given the state of the supplement market) was what finally caused me to post this thread.

As a perplexing counterbalance to wholefoods are companies which don't advertise any effects whatsoever, even though you'd expect they would.

List of companies where a lack of studies/objective claims caught my imagination:

  • unbounce.com & optimizely.com - these are huge companies doing science stuff. Why don't they have "opptimizely users make X% more revenue after 9 months" rather than testimonials?
  • The five companies I did customer development with (Beeminder, HabitRPG, Mealsquares, Complice, Apptimize)