Fair points and well said.

None of what I'm about to say is not meant to be harsh or insulting... I'm simply sharing a probabilistic estimate of how I view the situation so far. How you react will further refine my perspective.

I've developed antibodies to the word "pedantic", particularly when one leads with it. It seems that when people use the word, it has a tendency to make discussion harder. How often have you seen someone use the word and the conversation develop further into something interesting? Versus the opposite?

Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a kind of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes this consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about this?". This goes along with a general attitude of conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount them.

I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear it, it gives me the impression the other person is not demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of communication that I find most valuable. I can relate: I'm hard for people to pin down: I've worked in too many industries and lived in too many places to be easily understood by any one frame of reference. The "me" of five years ago would have a hard time understanding the "me" of today. I'll give you an example: tell someone you think free will is an illusion and watch people's reactions. :)

I recognize what I'm saying, to some ears, could be construed as being anti-science or perhaps even pro-conspiracy theories. I can assure you that I don't hold such positions. I somewhat aspire to be a perfectly Bayesian agent but fall well short of course.

I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling confidence in psychology based studies in general, at least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone else I trust who has) the study. You might say this is my attempt to strike a balance between epistemic optimism and pessimism. My "alarm bells" ring louder for studies that have some kind of "appealing" aspect like; e.g. "oh, that's why I forgot something when I walk into a new room". We simply cannot discount how many people latch onto studies because the result is self-serving.

As I get older, I see _tremendous_ value in considering large amounts of information but giving new information a very high _tentativeness_ score. I have a huge aversion to the i.e "recent information being novel and interesting effect". Some might call me too cautious -- people in the Silicon Valley ecosystem often would. People in more traditional industries would say exactly the opposite; e.g. that I'm "too worried" about ethics and AI.

How does the above sound to you?

Now, some particulars. I'm no expert, but I want to show why I'm skeptical after having read some details from Wikipedia article. It mentions two studies, both from Notre Dame, consisting of (A) 41 people and (B) 51 people. Then, it has an entry for another Notre Dame study without detail.

Then:

> In a 2021 study, researchers at Bond University tried to replicate the doorway effect in four experiments: in both physical rooms and virtual rooms, and both with and without the participants doing a “distractor task” (counting backwards). In one experiment -- in virtual rooms, and with a distractor task -- doorways caused a statistically significant increase in false positives (i.e., false memories), but not false negatives (i.e., forgetting). In the other three experiments, doorways had no effect. The researchers suggested that this was consistent with real life, in which "we might occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually happens when we have other things on our mind . . . ."

This is the kind of replication problem that I'm talking about. The kind that makes credible and prolific psychologists be very careful to caveat their field. To quote Paul Bloom w.r.t. the field of psychology's state of understanding of the human mind, "A lot of our findings are not as robust as we thought they were" (from "What Do We Know About Our Minds?" with Sam Harris).