alt Hacker News> and restricted it to only Mario/Yoshi players.
Do you not see the problem with drawing conclusions from a sample set that pre-selects for Mario/Yoshi players?
How do you think they’re determining that playing Mario/Yoshi prevents burnout if they only surveyed Mario/Yoshi players?
I really don’t understand all of the push to support this paper and disregard critiques as cynicism. The paper is not a serious study, or even a well written paper. Is it a contrarian reflex to deny any observations about a paper that don’t feel positive or agreeable enough?
I've critiqued it plenty in other comments, including that exact issue. However, that doesn't mean they "gave people surveys with a lot of questions" to p-hack, it seems like a study designed (albeit not well designed) to test one specific hypothesis. I see no reason to question that they did the methods as described in the paper, which were designed to test this very specific thing (they didn't even test "childlike wonder" in general, just self-reported Mario-induced childlike wonder), but their conclusions aren't supported by their data. If they were p-hacking as you accuse them of, why not have more questions? Why not survey non-Mario players too so there's a new variable to create significant results out of a null?