I don’t have the research handy, but in one study looking at helmeted bicycle riders, drivers gave less room to bicyclists with helmets than without, potentially suggesting that having a helmet made one more likely to get hit by a car, yet more likely to survive if hit.
Wait. Shavers using standard DE blades are also more likely to do proper pre-shave preparation (hot towel, good lathering shave cream, etc) as well, right?
The Hawthorne Effect has many skeptics, but whether it’s true or not probably doesn’t apply here.
The environments - the total sum of the conditions of driving - were vastly different in the 1940s from the 2000s. It may make perfect sense to reverse procedures when the environment changes that much. The Hawthorne Effect by definition applies only to making changes in the same environment.
As it stands neither of the OPs examples are universally true. All he’s saying is that in a large enough universe of cases, some will be different from others. I don’t think we need a separate name for that.
But that’s just an opinion. I can say my five blade razor is far better than any single blade razor. And what’s that link to? It just goes to a website, without not a cite or am I missing it?
I don’t think you read the second article you link to very carefully. It is not the removal of the markings that made roads safer. What the article says, in summary form is “Road engineers used to use lots of signs to compensate for bad road design. Today, some engineers are focusing on good road designs that do not need road markings.”
All this suggests is that road markings are not as important to traffic safety as starting with a good design. Which I would call “common sense,” but it’s not what you were thinking of.
I don’t like the examples, but there is a general term for the mathematical situation in which B is greater than A, C greater than B, and A greater than C. It is called “intransitivity”. It doesn’t work for the normal definition of “greater than”, but there are many mathematical relations for which it is possible.
A common example is in elections. It is quite possible to imagine a situation in which, in a two person election, candidate B will beat A, C will beat B, but A will beat C.
There’s a great example of an nontransitive dice bar bet:
The hustler lays out four dice, each labeled with numbers on each side. (Sample dice sets can be found on Wikipedia.) He proposes a simple game with the mark, whoever rolls the higher number wins, (or whoever rolls lower pays for the round, whatever,) and offers the mark the first choice of his die. If the mark presumes that one die has to be ‘best’, he’ll probably take the bet, but whatever die he picks, the hustler can pick a die that has a 2 out of 3 chance to beat it. (That’s with Bradley Efron’s dice set.)
1/3 of the voters have preference order ABC, 1/3 have CAB, and 1/3 BCA. 2/3 prefer A to B (so A beats B), 2/3 prefer B to C (B beats C), yet 2/3 prefer C to A (C beat A).
It doesn’t exist. If the second version really is an “improvement” on the first in some respect, then by definition the first version isn’t “the best” in that respect any more. The examples you’ve given to demonstrate the ‘phenomenon’ will be fallacious. I don’t even know what the razor example is, because the second cite you gave to prove that single-blade razors are the most effective looks like it’s just a forum landing page?
Well, the OP’s two cites are apparently poor examples too (the first one the second link is wonky, and the second link seems to describes traffic calming, which may improve pedestrial safety in some cases, but does NOT either improve traffic flow or reduce congestion - instead, it slows traffic down by increasing confusion and adding road obstacles)
However, can we perhaps use, say, automobile models - e.g. the 1968 Chevy Camaro was the best model year Camaro ever (this is a fact, BTW), but the 1977 Chevy Camaro was also great (this may not be a factual statement, BTW, just an example). Lots of examples of this in various car (and motorcycle) model lines, plenty of debate too. Of course, this may be somewhat of a cheat, since the designs years apart may differ greatly, but I am trying to think of a model that was legendary when introduced (I keep thinking some sort of Jaguar), but later improvements in power, handling, convenience etc made later model years even better- is that example also too forced?
I don’t know about elections, but how about competitive sports, where player A usually beats B, B usually beats C, and C usually beats A. Can you imagine that happening?
That is based on individual opinions. If you look at more concrete data it can’t work: for instance if Car A’s top speed is slower than Car B, and Car B’s top speed is slower than Car C, then Car A cannot have the highest top speed of the three. Same goes for torque, acceleration, trunk size, whatever. In fact it even works for individual opinions as well: if you think the 1968 Camaro was the “best model” ever, you can’t also think that the 1977 model was an “improvement” on it. It would be a contradiction.