Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: The E on March 27, 2013, 08:04:22 am
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Right, so there's this company called Atheist Berlin, which sells shoes that somehow, inexplicably, are atheist. They ship them in boxes sealed with tape that has "Atheist" written on it. Some of their US-based customers noticed that shipping would work unreliably, so they made a little a/b study, where they sent out packages marked with the "Atheist" tape, and ones without it.
Here are the results (http://www.atheistberlin.com/study). Turns out, there seems to be a higher than average chance of the packages labelled "Atheist" to go missing or be delayed.
WTF is going on?
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Probably postal employee misconduct, intentlionally tossing out or delaying the packages marked "Atheist".
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Now this is crazy. We're still 6 days from April 1st, but this sounds like a hoax... On the other hand, the whole thing is so silly that I doubt anybody would be able to make it up. Anyway, I was like: :lol:
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I was raring up to scoff at this, but I see they did actually do a statistical analysis of their results.
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Indeed. Doesn't stop this from being hilarious. Also, I'm now sure it's not a hoax. Things like that can only happen IRL. Nobody would be crazy enough to make that up.
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Since it is from the actual shoe maker's site, as opposed to a independent third party, I'd question if it was just a marketing gimmick. If so it's in poor taste.
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It's obvious, isn't it? America is extremely bias against atheists.
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They should acquire more data by starting another company that sells Jesus shoes. :)
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People would assume they were for stomping on Jesus' name and lose them too. :p
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They should acquire more data by starting another company that sells Jesus sandals. :)
Fixxored that for you! :p
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Since it is from the actual shoe maker's site, as opposed to a independent third party, I'd question if it was just a marketing gimmick. If so it's in poor taste.
Of course it's a sleazy marketing gimmick, but most of their tests and claims are pretty valid nonetheless. Assuming of course they didn't just fabricate everything, which I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. There are a number of small issues, I guess, but hell, this isn't a formal study of bias in the USPS.
also on a more tangential note it is my opinion that their shoes look like ass
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Since it is from the actual shoe maker's site, as opposed to a independent third party, I'd question if it was just a marketing gimmick. If so it's in poor taste.
Of course it's a sleazy marketing gimmick, but most of their tests and claims are pretty valid nonetheless. Assuming of course they didn't just fabricate everything, which I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. There are a number of small issues, I guess, but hell, this isn't a formal study of bias in the USPS.
also on a more tangential note it is my opinion that their shoes look like ass
That its fabricated is what I'm implying. I'd prefer seeing some non biased test by a third party before buying into the USPS throwing out folks' packages because its has stupid packing tape. While USPS isn't exactly the greatest ever, US laws regarding the obstruction or tampering of packages is extremely severe.
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Wouldn't that just be a really stupid thing to do though if it was just a gimmick? Wouldn't you get slapped with a lawsuit, there'll be records on this stuff, packages being sent and received.
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More or less. The Postal Inspectors aren't very well known since they usually hand off to other people for arresting, but they're not slouches and federal law on this sort of thing is draconian as a result of the Unabomber and the War on Drugs.
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I am not sure about that part, though I'd probably agree with employee misconduct. Perhaps they should experiment with writing 'Athiest' instead, pun intended.
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Right, so there's this company called Atheist Berlin, which sells shoes that somehow, inexplicably, are atheist.
Obviously the company doesn't believe in soles. :D
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(http://www.hobbeslives.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/rimshot.jpeg)
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That its fabricated is what I'm implying. I'd prefer seeing some non biased test by a third party before buying into the USPS throwing out folks' packages because its has stupid packing tape. While USPS isn't exactly the greatest ever, US laws regarding the obstruction or tampering of packages is extremely severe.
More or less. The Postal Inspectors aren't very well known since they usually hand off to other people for arresting, but they're not slouches and federal law on this sort of thing is draconian as a result of the Unabomber and the War on Drugs.
Yeah, I'm aware that these laws are taken quite seriously but at the risk of being naive I still can't help but find it a little far fetched that they'd completely make stuff up. I'd find it much more likely that something was overlooked, or at worst left out, in the study.
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Marketing ploy? It's a legitimate airing of grievances. If I were running a business and I found out that postal workers were deliberately interfering with my deliveries I'd make a public stink about it too.
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I suppose you US residents could always test this out the next time you have a package to send... :D
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You nonbelievers are always so negative. This wasn't a case of discrimination; obviously what happened was that a disproportionate number of god-fearing shoes were saved from the incompetence of the federal government. It's a miracle!
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I was having some fun googling atheist images. Imagining them being printed off and slapped on boxes containing items to be shipped across America.
Slap this thing on the box, just to make sure you're going to offend just about anyone who's not an atheist, and how confident would you be of your package reaching it's destination?
EDIT: Had some problems getting it up.
(http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn201/Plunk_fr/antireligion.jpg)
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There's proclaiming yourself to be an atheist, and there's being a dick about it.
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There's proclaiming yourself to be an atheist, and there's being a dick about it.
Yeah.
It's a genuinely amusing and intriguing thought though. Would the package get through, and what condition would it be in if it did?
The fairest test is of course just the word atheist like the shoe makers did. You'd almost be asking for your package to be destroyed if you put that thing on it.
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Marketing ploy? It's a legitimate airing of grievances. If I were running a business and I found out that postal workers were deliberately interfering with my deliveries I'd make a public stink about it too.
How do you know its legitimate? Its not independently verified and is presented like some silly hipster ad. I'm not saying its wrong, its possible there is issues in the USPS in regards to the sending of packages in which case it should be investigated and those responsible prosecuted. But I don't think its fair to rake USPS over the coals based of something that could merely be a stupid gimmick to sell more ugly shoes.
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Ditch the hole atheist thing, come to the agnostic side!.
You can switch sides faster when the time requires, like at the end of the world or a heated religion discussion :P
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Ditch the hole atheist thing, come to the agnostic side!.
You can switch sides faster when the time requires, like at the end of the world or a heated religion discussion :P
:lol: :)
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Had some problems getting it up.
It happens, man.
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hmm... nope not the onion.
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****ing hell lorric, were you just living in a box before you found hlp
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Would the package get through, and what condition would it be in if it did?
If your box had that on it and I saw it then I would keep it, so no.
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****ing hell lorric, were you just living in a box before you found hlp
If you're talking about the "getting it up" thing, my mind just doesn't think that way. The "It happens man" post actually took a few seconds for me to process it's true meaning, so this kind of thing happens to me from time to time, and I'll probably use the same exact sentence again sometime.
Now on to why I came back here. I looked at the article again. Atheist shoes have closed the comments section, but have left plenty of comments in there. I read the one on the top, so there might be something in the future with this, I'll paste it in:
"EPILOGUE 2: It’s 3 days now since we published this page and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response. Thank you to everyone who commented, emailed, or shared. And thank you for bearing with us on Wednesday, as our website slowed to snail-mail pace, due to so many visitors. For those wondering what USPS have made of this, we still await a response, though we have asked them if they would like to assist us in replicating / extending the research. It would be really cool of them if they did help us with that, as they only stand to benefit from a more expansive study. Many of you have asked sound questions about our experimental design and the background to the experiment, and we have tried to answer as many questions as we can in the comments below. However, there is a good deal of thinking and data that could not be squeezed into the infographic above (thankfully science does not operate by a process of peer-reviewed infographics!) and we are hoping to include much greater detail on the study in a paper to be submitted to a peer reviewed social psychological journal. A Professor from a leading US University has offered to assist us in the write up of this research, along with the implementation and funding of further research, for which we are very grateful. This first research was conducted on a tiny budget, without the expectation that we would find such significant results and also without the expectation that it would attract so much attention. Hindsight is 20-20 and we regret now that we didn’t invest a little more money to incorporate tracking, ideally GPS given the recent ineffectiveness of USPS tracking, and also one or two more conditions, to control for the factor of writing-on-tape vs no-writing-on-tape. We will implement these enhancements in the next replication, should the experiment still be viable post all the coverage. As for challenges that the absence of tracking or an additional worded tape condition might undermine the validity of our results, or our conclusion, we refer you to our responses in the comments below. To summarise, we don’t believe that USPS tracking would have enhanced the study as it has in our experience proven to be unreliable and time-insensitive in recent months. The one question it might help resolve, is whether the perceived bias occurred in US Customs or in USPS centers. At the same time, we are confident this question has been adequately addresses by pre-experimental controls showing an insignificant incidence of US Customs selecting our packages for inspection in a previous 600 shipments to the US. The factor of worded tape is more difficult to eliminate as a potential explanatory variable for the delays, the hypothesis being that the more noticeable nature of worded packing tape creates a perceptual bias that leads to greater selection of these packages for additional checks. However, if that was the case (and we’d imagine USPS would be wiser to employ a randomized process of selection for additional checks) the additional scrutiny of worded packages resulting from a perceptual bias, is unlikely to explain the absolute disappearance of these packages, such as we have seen in or findings. Specially scrutinized packages should ordinarily return to the postal system, and eventually be delivered. But for packages to disappear completely, we see no likely explanation other than there existing an attitudinal bias and discriminatory motivation on the part of some people handling these packages. Nonetheless, thank you to everyone who pointed out the benefit of an additional worded-tape control and we look forward to having that next time round. For the time being we’re going to close the facility to leave comments on this page as we’re finding it hard to keep up with answering everyone, when there’s already a lot of repetition of questions and answers in the below. But we will be posting updates here, including our plans for further research, which we would like to keep as open source as possible. In the mean time, we can be contacted about the study at [email protected]. Thanks once again! ATHEIST Shoes"