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markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

m.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

TOK bias reason emotion science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers
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  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information.
  • Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."
Lawrence Hrubes

What If We Lost the Sky? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-if-we-lost-the-sky

science human sciences emotion beauty imagination global warming

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. Such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. If albedo modification were actually implemented, Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, told Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post: “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” And, he added, “astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”
  • Losing the night sky would have big consequences, said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent work looks at the health effects of the emotion of awe. In a study published in January in the journal Emotion, he and his team found that people who experienced a great deal of awe had lower levels of a marker of inflammation that has been linked to physical and mental ailments. One major source of awe is the natural world. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger,” said Dr. Keltner, “there’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that.” And, he added, looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Science Hour, The Medical Scandal Engulfing Top Swedish University - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p03jdr3y

science prediction economics human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Predicting the Next Financial CrisisWhy do financial crises occur – and when will the next one come? In the past, economic theory has failed to answer these questions. In this week’s Science Journal Perspectives, economists, physicists, epidemiologists, climate scientists and ecologists call to establish a new early warning system to avoid future global financial crises. They argue that the methods used by scientists to predict weather, traffic or disease epidemics should be used to simulate the financial systems, which could help to avoid the failures we have seen in the past. Professor Doyne tells Jack how the analysis of complex networks could and should be applied to the economy.
Lawrence Hrubes

When Philosophy Lost Its Way - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...when-philosophy-lost-its-way

philosophy ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it’s no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy’s all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very “scientific.”
markfrankel18

New smell discovered: 'white' | SciTech | GMA News Online | The Go-To Site for Filipino... - 1 views

www.gmanetwork.com/...new-smell-discovered-white

science smell biology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • esearchers have discovered what they described as the olfactory equivalent of white noise, a distinct smell made from a combination of several compounds.   The scientists, who reported the finding in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said it is best for one to go to a laboratory and personally experience it.   "The best way to appreciate the qualities of olfactory white is to smell it," the researchers wrote, according to LiveScience.com.   'Bland beyond description'   According to them, "olfactory white" is a mixture of different compounds, just as white noise is a mix of frequencies and white light is a mix of many wavelengths.  
markfrankel18

Book Review: The Half-Life of Facts - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4894104578113590368047244.html

science

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness—outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology.
  • ore commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the "Decline Effect"—the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published). If shaky claims enter the realm of science too quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes, scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel Kahneman has described as "theory-induced blindness." Had the Austrian medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed fever—and heeded his hand-washing recommendations—a devastating outbreak of the disease might have been averted.
Lawrence Hrubes

Scientists Unveil New 'Tree of Life' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html

science biology models DNA

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life on Monday, a diagram outlining the evolution of all living things. The researchers found that bacteria make up most of life’s branches.
  • In his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin envisioned evolution like a branching tree.
  • In the 1970s, Carl Woese of the University of Illinois and his colleagues published the first “universal tree of life” based on this approach. They presented the tree as three great trunks.
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  • Patrick Forterre, an evolutionary biologist at the Pasteur Institute in France, agreed that bacteria probably make up much of life’s diversity. But he had concerns about how Dr. Banfield and her colleague built their tree. He argued that genomes assembled from DNA fragments could actually be chimeras, made up of genes from different species. “It’s a real problem,” he said.
Lawrence Hrubes

Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-scientific-conferences.html

science bias gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.“It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said.
markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science - 2 views

www.motherjones.com/106166

TOK science pseudoscience psychology bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [1] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [2] in psychology. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.
  • In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [5]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [6] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brilliance of a Stradivari Violin Might Rest Within Its Wood - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...stradivari-violin-wood.html

arts science music technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Over the years, he said, many hypotheses about the secret properties of Stradivari and Guarneri instruments have come and gone. Advertisement Continue reading the main story For a while, people suggested that luthiers had simply used trees that have since gone extinct — but in fact those trees still exist. In 2003, Dr. Grissino-Mayer and a colleague said Stradivari’s secret had to do with the fact that he had lived during an extremely cold period, known as the little ice age, and that the trees around him were growing differently. How exactly that may have produced better instruments, however, remains unclear. Another popular theory — that Stradivari was using a varnish with magical sound properties — has not been substantiated by any chemical analyses.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 16
     
    scientists try to uncover the lost knowledge of how to make the best violins and cellos in history
Lawrence Hrubes

Fighting ISIS With an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ts-try-to-predict-attacks.html

science math human sciences SocialScience prediction terrorism social networks

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.
  • The tracking of terrorists on social media should take a cue from nature, Dr. Johnson said, where “the way transitions happen is like a flock of birds, a school of fish.”
  • The researchers also said there might be a spike in the formation of small online groups just before an attack takes place.
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  • Both Mr. Berger and Ms. Patel noted a tricky question raised by the research: When is it best to try to suppress small groups so they do not mushroom into bigger groups, and when should they be left to percolate? Letting them exist for a while might be a way to gather intelligence, Ms. Patel said.
markfrankel18

Scientific Pride and Prejudice - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tific-pride-and-prejudice.html

TOK psychology bias science arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions
  • Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.
  • In his 1960 book “Truth and Method,” the influential German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an interpreter of a text must first question “the validity — of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” However, “this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self.” Rather, “the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias.” To deal with the problem of selective use of data, the scientific community must become self-aware and realize that it has a problem. In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades.
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  • Perhaps because of its self-awareness about what Austen would call the “whims and caprices” of human reasoning, the field of psychology has been most aggressive in dealing with doubts about the validity of its research.
markfrankel18

Welcome to the Age of Denial - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...come-to-the-age-of-denial.html

ToK Science

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all lifelong students of science must learn now.
markfrankel18

In Defense of Psychology : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-conceptually-messy-psychology

ToK psychology Human Sciences

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13
     
    "There's a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science. In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It's early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness."
markfrankel18

Time-shifting man predicts the future › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (A... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...3834436.htm

ToK psychology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "Time" is something that both philosophers and physicists have been wondering for about, well, a long time. And now, the neuroscientists have joined in. They have found a man who, when he looks at you, hears what you are saying to him before your lips move.
  • Now you might not realise this, but in terms of vision you are always living 0.3 second (or 300 milliseconds) behind reality. That's how long it takes between when the incoming light lands on the cells in your retina, and you get that full magnificent wraparound 3D colour sensation that we call vision.
  • We don't notice this delay in reality because we have evolved to be able to deal with this. We can anticipate actions or patterns through experience.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So how come we normally see the lips moving at the same time as we hear the voice? Almost certainly, it's because our brain deliberately inserts a delay of about 200 milliseconds on the audio circuit. Now sure, there would be an advantage in being able to hear dangerous things, such as the killer kangaroo bearing down upon you that extra 200 milliseconds earlier. But all of us are a product of an evolutionary pathway that decided it was more important for us to be able to easily communicate with our fellow humans, than to hear the killer kangaroo that 200 milliseconds sooner. After all, we humans are quite pathetic as a hunting animal. We can't run very quickly, our eyes are not very sharp, and neither is our sense of smell. Our claws are silly little fingernails, and our teeth are not very good at ripping and tearing. But thanks to our amazing brain, we can organise ourselves into groups and so we have become masters of the planet. So, getting back to Mr PH, if the sound of the outside world was deliberately electronically delayed by 200 milliseconds, suddenly audio and vision were in sync for him again. And when the neuroscientists did an MRI scan on his brain, they found damage in areas that were well-placed to disrupt audition and/or timing.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Why science needs imagination and beauty - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...cret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

TOK science physics imagination beauty

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13
     
    "Albert Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." They're both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature's mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 3 views

www.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion
    • Lawrence Hrubes
      Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Oct 13
       
      2 Ways of Knowing here, acting in combo
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Sleep's memory role discovered - 0 views

www.bbc.com/health-27695144

memory sleep learning science brain neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists. The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep. Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory. It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.
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