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markfrankel18

Are Scientists on "Cusp of Knowing" How Weird We Are? | Cross-Check, Scientific America... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...of-knowing-how-probable-we-are

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “The Copernicus Complex addresses some of the deepest questions humans have ever asked. How weird are we? Was our existence highly probable, or improbable? Even miraculous? You can break this question down into more specific questions: How probable was our universe? Our galaxy? Solar system? Planet? How probable was life? And how probable were creatures like us, who can ponder their probability?
  • Scientists still don’t have a clue why our universe has the form we observe, or how life began on the Earth some 3.6 billion years ago, or whether life exists elsewhere. During his talk at Stevens, Scharf acknowledged that we may never observe exoplanets in sufficient detail to know, with certainty, that they harbor life.
  • “Unfortunately, you cannot determine the probability of the universe or of life on Earth when you have only one universe and one history of life to contemplate. Statistics require more than one data point.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We may be on the cusp of knowing, and yet still infinitely far away.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The blind breast cancer detectors - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31552562

science health medicine statistics probability tests math

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gerd Gigerenzer's test In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question: A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer? nine in 10 eight in 10 one in 10 one in 100 Gigerenzer then supplied the doctors with data about Western women of this age. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - recent stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different.) The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence") If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity") If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate") In one session, almost half the gynaecologists said the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer.
markfrankel18

Chasing Coincidences - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 0 views

nautil.us/...chasing-coincidences

ToK math psychology probability coincidences

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The simple question might be “why do such unlikely coincidences occur in our lives?” But the real question is how to define the unlikely. You know that a situation is uncommon just from experience. But even the concept of “uncommon” assumes that like events in the category are common. How do we identify the other events to which we can compare this coincidence? If you can identify other events as likely, then you can calculate the mathematical probability of this particular event as exceptional.
  • We are exposed to possible events all the time: some of them probable, but many of them highly improbable. Each rare event—by itself—is unlikely. But by the mere act of living, we constantly draw cards out of decks. Because something must happen when a card is drawn, so to speak, the highly improbable does appear from time to time.
markfrankel18

Let's do some math on Ebola before we start quarantining people - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...e-we-start-quarantining-people

TOK math science

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.
  • The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.
markfrankel18

Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 1 views

nautil.us/...hy-we-keep-playing-the-lottery

ToK Lottery math psychology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
  • “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.
  • It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, the probabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didn’t evolve to calculate complex odds. In our evolutionary past, the ability to distinguish between a region with a 1 percent or 10 percent chance of being attacked by a predator wouldn’t have offered much of an advantage. An intuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as “doesn’t happen,” “happen sometimes,” “happens most of time,” “always happens,” would have sufficed, explains Jane L. Risen, an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, who studies decision-making. Despite our advances in reason and mathematics, she says, we still often rely on crude calculations to make decisions, especially quick decisions like buying a lottery ticket.
  • In the conceptual vacuum created by incomprehensible odds, people are likely to experience magical thinking or superstition, play a hunch, or simply throw reason out the window all together, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. “Most of the weird stuff that you see with decision-making and risk happens with small probabilities,” he says.
  • But even fantasy will drop its hold on us if we always lose—a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge’s Williams. Lotteries that allow players to choose combinations of four or five numbers from a total of 60 numbers are popular, he says, because many players experience “the near miss,” which creates the illusion that they came close to winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. Most players don’t realize, however, that “near-miss” is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match.
markfrankel18

The Aftershocks - Matter - Medium - 2 views

medium.com/...the-aftershocks-7966d0cdec66

TOK science language probability

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Seven of Italy’s top scientists were convicted of manslaughter following a catastrophic quake. Has the country criminalized science?
  • “I am willing to go to jail for this point,” he thunders. “A scientist can write whatever opinions he wants in a scientific paper and it is off limits to a judge.”Even in the land of Berlusconi and the judicial circus of cases like Amanda Knox’s, convicting a bunch of geoscientists in the wake of a natural disaster marks a new low. What would Galileo say? But what happened in L’Aquila is a window onto how we think about, communicate, and live with risk, and about impediments to clear thinking that afflict us all.
  • Years later, Kent published an article in Studies in Intelligence that used the Yugoslavia report to illustrate the problem of ambiguity, particularly when talking about uncertainty.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers. But as Kent realized back in the 1950s, we are even worse with words. In one study that Fischhoff co-authored, people had trouble understanding a 30-percent chance of rain. It wasn’t the probability that tripped them up, but the word: rain. Are we talking drizzle or downpour? All day or just part of the day? And over what area, exactly?
markfrankel18

The Physicist's View Of Reality : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...the-physicists-view-of-reality

TOK science Physics

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 14 Sep 13
     
    "Science is more like the United Nations than it is like a village. Different communities of scientists carry out their work using their own methods, languages and styles. Scientists in different fields need interpreters if they are to communicate with each other. There is no scientific lingua franca, not even mathematics. So, while there is no incompatibility between what physics teaches us about the world and what we learn from biology, no one today would seriously propose eliminating biology by reducing it to physics. You can't carry out the work of biology - you can't identify its problems and investigate their solutions - in the language of physics. And yet, despite this state of affairs, I suspect that many of us, and most scientists, whether they ever take the time to think about this or not, are probably committed to what I'll call the physicist's view of reality."
markfrankel18

All the explanations you've heard so far about Laurel vs. Yanny are probably wrong. - 0 views

slate.com/...-yanny-are-probably-wrong.html

TOK perception science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 21 May 18
     
    "major celebrities chiming in"
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
markfrankel18

The case against big data: "It's like you're being put into a cult, but you don't actua... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ou-dont-actually-believe-in-it

TOK ethics math

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • in the very worst manifestation it was actually kind of a weaponized mathematical algorithm. I was working in online advertising. Most of the people working online advertising represented it as a way of giving people opportunities. That’s true for most technologists, most educated people, most white people. On the other side of the spectrum you have poor people, who are being preyed upon, by the same kinds algorithms.
  • people need to stop trusting mathematics and they need to stop trusting black box algorithms. They need to start thinking to themselves. You know: Who owns this algorithm? What is their goal and is it aligned with mine? If they’re trying to profit off of me, probably the answer is no.
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.”
Lawrence Hrubes

How a mathematician dissects a coincidence - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

math luck coincidence probability

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Can you unknot a twist of fate with logic? Vox's Phil Edwards asked mathematician Joseph Mazur about his book, Fluke, and one of its most incredible stories.
markfrankel18

Camels Had No Business in Genesis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ad-no-business-in-genesis.html

religious knowledge systems TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • There are too many camels in the Bible, out of time and out of place.Camels probably had little or no role in the lives of such early Jewish patriarchs as Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, who lived in the first half of the second millennium B.C., and yet stories about them mention these domesticated pack animals more than 20 times. Genesis 24, for example, tells of Abraham’s servant going by camel on a mission to find a wife for Isaac.These anachronisms are telling evidence that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it narrates and is not always reliable as verifiable history. These camel stories “do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,” said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, “but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Martha, My Dear: What De-Extinction Can't Bring Back : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...xtinction-cant-bring-back.html

science TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • There are a lots of potential problems with de-extinction, starting with the fact that, in any rigorous way, it’s probably impossible. Recent advances in paleogenetics have made it feasible to reassemble the genomes of recently extinct animals, like the passenger pigeon and even the mammoth. But the results are inexact—there will always be uncertainties. And even then things get really tricky.
  • The nearest living relative of the passenger pigeon is a bird called the band-tailed pigeon, which lives in the western United States and in Canada. The theory behind Revive & Restore’s resurrection effort—which, it should be noted, has a staff of one—is that, with some very sophisticated genetic slicing and dicing, a band-tailed pigeon embryo could be converted into a passenger pigeon embryo. This embryo could then be transferred to a band-tailed pigeon egg and raised by band-tailed pigeon parents.
markfrankel18

The prisoner's dilemma, in real life - 0 views

kottke.org/...prisoners-dilemma-in-real-life

ToK Science prisoner dilemma psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The prisoner's dilemma, in real life  SARAH PAVIS  ·  AUG 08 2013 You might have hear of the prisoner's dilemma, a classic example in game theory showing why individuals might not cooperate. But what you probably don't know is the name comes from a thought experiment. No one had ever actually tested it on real prisoners. Until now
markfrankel18

Rational Disagreement: Arguing Your Way to the Right Decision | Big Think Edge | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...your-way-to-the-right-decision

ToK reason disagreement

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When you find yourself in a disagreement with someone - whether you are discussing politics or football - you probably tend to view the experience as a waste of time. Humans are stubborn creatures because we need to validate our own egos. That means no one wants to "give in." We all want to "win" the argument. However, as Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality, demonstrates in today's lesson, if you are simply out to "win" an argument and validate your ego, you really aren't winning much of anything. You are actually missing out on an opportunity for learning and personal growth.  In the video below, derived from a lesson on Big Think Edge, the only forum on YouTube designed to help you get the skills you need to be successful in a rapidly changing world, Galef shows how one can disagree productively:
markfrankel18

Correlation is not causation | OUPblog - 0 views

blog.oup.com/...correlation-is-not-causation

ToK correlation science reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A famous slogan in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation. We know that there is a statistical correlation between eating ice cream and drowning incidents, for instance, but ice cream consumption does not cause drowning. Where any two factors –  A and B – are correlated, there are four possibilities: 1. A is a cause of B, 2. B is a cause of A, 3. the correlation is pure coincidence and 4., as in the ice cream case, A and B are connected by a common cause. Increased ice cream consumption and drowning rates both have a common cause in warm summer weather.
  • We know that smoking causes cancer. But we also know that many people who smoke don’t get cancer. Causal claims are not falsified by counterexamples, not even by a whole bunch of them. Contraceptive pills have been shown to cause thrombosis, but only in 1 of 1000 women. Following Popper, we could say that for every case where the cause is followed by the effect there are 999 counterexamples. Instead of falsifying the hypothesis that the pill causes thrombosis, however, we list thrombosis as a known side-effect. Causation is still very much assumed even though it occurs only in rare cases.
  • One could understand a cause, for instance, as a tendency towards its effect. Smoking has a tendency towards cancer, but it doesn’t guarantee it.. Contraception pills have a tendency towards thrombosis but a relatively small one. However, being hit by a train strongly tends towards death. We see that tendencies come in degrees, as do causes, some strongly tending towards their effect and some only weakly.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Correlation does not imply causation. At best it might be taken as indicative or symptomatic of it. And perfect correlation, if this is understood along the lines of Hume’s constant conjunction, does not indicate causation at all but probably something quite different.
markfrankel18

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281601

TOK language because

shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Linguists are recognizing the delightful evolution of the word "because." 
  • he word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun." You probably know it better, however, as explanation by way of Internet—explanation that maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure. I'm late because YouTube. You're reading this because procrastination. As the language writer Stan Carey delightfully sums it up: "'Because' has become a preposition, because grammar." 
markfrankel18

No, dogs aren't people! - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...no_dogs_arent_people

TOK dogs psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Rather than selectively allowing certain critters into the club of species that are like us, we should probably simply remember that humans aren’t as special as we think we are. Instead of advocating for the protection of animals by leaning on their apparent similarity to our own species, perhaps we can just work to avoid needless suffering in all animals — human-like or not.
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