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markfrankel18

Climate buffoons' real motives: 5 reasons they still spout debunked garbage - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...hey_still_refuse_to_see_reason

TOK science bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The most simplistic of climate deniers are those who looked out their windows this winter, saw that it was snowing, and reasoned that global warming therefore can’t be real. This speaks to a basic confusion of the difference between weather and climate. (If you’d like a much more thorough debunking of weather-based climate change denial, read this.)It’s also a classic example of confirmation bias: Deniers get giddy when it snows because it appears to confirm their belief that Earth isn’t really getting warmer. To understand why that doesn’t make sense, one need only look at the average global temperatures. Yes, it was very cold in parts of the U.S., but zoom out and it becomes clear that last month, overall, was the fourth-warmest January in recorded history.In some cases, it could be a fear of science that is driving this type of thinking.
  • A misunderstanding of what scientists take as “proof” may also be responsible for this confusion.
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ilingual-advantage-aging-brain

TOK language human sciences social studies bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
  • For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language.
  • Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published. That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. “Our overview,” de Bruin concluded, “shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Six Most Interesting Psychology Papers of 2015 - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ting-psychology-papers-of-2015

human sciences SocialScience psychology replicability bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” from Science This paper isn’t really a study; it’s the outcome of an important movement in the field of psychology. In an effort called the Reproducibility Project, researchers at dozens of universities collaborated to replicate a hundred psychology studies that were initially conducted in 2008. They ended up replicating between a third and half of the studies. Is that result bad or good? It’s inevitable that studies won’t always be replicable—if every study could be replicated, then every researcher would be right the first time; even legitimate findings can prove fragile when you try to repeat them. All the same, the paper concludes that there is “room for improvement” in psychology, especially when it comes to “cultural practices in scientific communication.” Specifically, the authors propose that “low-power research designs combined with publication bias favoring positive results together produce a literature with upwardly biased effect sizes.” In other words, the desire for novelty drives researchers to overestimate the conclusiveness of their own work. It’s a fascinating and valuable effort to make sure that psychology moves forward in the best way possible.
markfrankel18

Fighting Whitewashed History With MIT's Diversity Hackers | Atlas Obscura - 0 views

www.atlasobscura.com/...ry-with-mits-diversity-hackers

TOK history bias technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse. “It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.
  • As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about.
markfrankel18

Workplace Wellness Programs Don't Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise. - The New... - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...rograms-randomized-trials.html

TOK science bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Perhaps the greatest strength of the randomized controlled trial is in combating what’s known as selection bias. That occurs when groups being studied (intervention and control) are already significantly different after they are “selected” to be in the intervention or not. One of the most elegant examples of why we need such trials came recently in an examination of employer-sponsored wellness programs.
Lawrence Hrubes

S Korea leader Moon scraps state-issued history books - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-39895168

history bias culture nationalism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 May 17 - No Cached
  • South Korea's new president says he is scrapping government-authored history textbooks ordered by his predecessor. They symbolised "outdated and one-sided" history education, an aide said. The conservative government of Park Geun-hye said the books were needed to correct left-wing bias. The move caused anger and most schools refused them.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hy-facts-dont-change-our-minds

reason bias confirmation bias psychology science rationalism emotion human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
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.
markfrankel18

Moral Puzzles That Tots Struggle With | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3855804578511241565478434.html

ToK ethics moral

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Here's a question. There are two groups, Zazes and Flurps. A Zaz hits somebody. Who do you think it was, another Zaz or a Flurp? It's depressing, but you have to admit that it's more likely that the Zaz hit the Flurp. That's an understandable reaction for an experienced, world-weary reader of The Wall Street Journal. But here's something even more depressing—4-year-olds give the same answer.
  • In my last column, I talked about some disturbing new research showing that preschoolers are already unconsciously biased against other racial groups. Where does this bias come from? Marjorie Rhodes at New York University argues that
markfrankel18

Why We Need Answers: The Theory of Cognitive closure : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-we-need-answers.html

TOK psychology terrorism closure

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • The human mind is incredibly averse to uncertainty and ambiguity; from an early age, we respond to uncertainty or lack of clarity by spontaneously generating plausible explanations. What’s more, we hold on to these invented explanations as having intrinsic value of their own. Once we have them, we don’t like to let them go.
  • Heightened need for cognitive closure can bias our choices, change our preferences, and influence our mood. In our rush for definition, we tend to produce fewer hypotheses and search less thoroughly for information. We become more likely to form judgments based on early cues (something known as impressional primacy), and as a result become more prone to anchoring and correspondence biases (using first impressions as anchors for our decisions and not accounting enough for situational variables). And, perversely, we may not even realize how much we are biasing our own judgments.
  • In 2010, Kruglanski and colleagues looked specifically at the need for cognitive closure as part of the response to terrorism.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s a self-reinforcing loop: we search energetically, but once we’ve seized onto an idea we remain crystallized at that point. And if we’ve externally committed ourselves to our position by tweeting or posting or speaking? We crystallize our judgment all the more, so as not to appear inconsistent. It’s why false rumors start—and why they die such hard deaths. It’s a dynamic that can have consequences far nastier than a minor media snafu.
markfrankel18

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-mysterious-hot-hand.html

TOK bias science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
  • A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
  • Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.
markfrankel18

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
  • Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
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.
markfrankel18

When Big Ideas Go Bad - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

www.chronicle.com/...238544

TOK science bias psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • So how did arguably the most popular idea on the internet end up on the scientific ash heap? For that matter, how could such questionable research migrate from a journal to a viral video to a best seller, circulating for years, retweeted and forwarded and praised by millions, with almost no pushback? The answer tells us something about the practice and promotion of science, and also how both may be changing for the better.
markfrankel18

Poland vs. History by Timothy Snyder | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...oland-vs-history-museum-gdansk

TOK history bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • Most seriously of all, the effects of suppressing national memory could be of critical importance to Poles in coming decades, and to a global audience that has yet to fully absorb the complicated lessons of World War II. In some measure at least, how rising generations of Poles see themselves, democracy, and Europe will depend on whether they can have ready access to their country’s complicated experience in World War II. The collapse of democracy, the museum’s first theme, could hardly be more salient than it is right now. And the presentation of the conflict as a global tragedy could hardly be more instructive. The preemptive liquidation of the museum is nothing less than a violent blow to the world’s cultural heritage.
Lawrence Hrubes

Stalin, Russia's New Hero - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-vladimir-putins-russia.html

history memory politics nationalism bias ethics propaganda

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
  • School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader.
  • Why is Stalin now gaining popularity? For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”
markfrankel18

Police Body Cameras: What Do You See? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...police-bodycam-video.html

TOK perception bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Public frustration with policing has led to calls nationwide for more cameras worn by officers. But what do those cameras actually reveal?
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