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markfrankel18

The Dangers of Pseudoscience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-pseudoscience

TOK science pseudoscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 13 - Cached
  • The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The surprising downsides of being clever - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...-the-downsides-of-being-clever

reason intelligence IQ wisdom bias psychology human sciences SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.
  • The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
  • A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
Andrea Barlien

The Two Faces of Science - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-two-faces-of-science

science

shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    "Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as it may seem, both these contradictory statements have held true throughout the 450-year history of "modern" science. In fact, they are what have given science the stability and creativity that root its cultural power."
markfrankel18

Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved? - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-moral-disputes-be-resolved

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. Can religion help? It might seem that if morality is a matter of obeying divine commands, we could make short work of moral disagreement, if only we knew which was the true faith. Of course, we don’t. But 2,300 years ago Plato showed that appeals to God’s wisdom, no matter which faith, is irrelevant to what makes for moral rightness.
  • What about reason? Many philosophers have argued that rational beings can reason their way to the right answers in morality. Kant and Mill both tried to do this, but ended up building incompatible moral theories by reasoning from two quite different starting points.
  • In recent years some thinkers have argued that the foundations of morality are given by what science, especially evolutionary biology, shows us about the conditions of human flourishing. These philosophers, social psychologists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that there was strong selection for a core set of moral norms that are so widespread they are absent only in psychopaths.
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.
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  • 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?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - A Point of View: The upside of losing one's memory - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-31849855

memory memory loss wisdom cognition neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Reading the scientific research, I learn that the brain starts deteriorating from the mid-20s onwards. By our 40s and 50s, it's well under way. The changes include a drop in brain volume, loss of myelin integrity, cortical thinning, impaired receptor binding and signalling, and altered concentrations of various brain metabolites. The accumulation of neuro-fibrillary tangles, something we associate with Alzheimer's, also happens in normal ageing.
  • You may be asking what I am worrying about. I'm not yet 50, after all. I don't have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or any reason to be worried about those diseases. My favourite novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald, was nearly 80 when her last and best book, The Blue Flower, was published. The philosopher Mary Midgley is still sharp as a razor, and she'll be 96 next birthday. She didn't even write a book till she was past 50. The psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar was still seeing patients at the age of 102.
  • Last week, my colleague listened to his father, behind a drawn hospital curtain, doing an Alzheimer's diagnostic test. He said that the trickiest part was when they read out a list of words but instead of asking you to repeat them they moved on to some numerical questions before asking you to list the words a moment later. He was petrified to find that he couldn't do it himself.
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  • If I was looking for advice about anything other than which smart phone to buy, I'd generally ask someone aged 80- rather than an 18-year-old. It's like when you take a photograph - there's the shutter speed to consider, but there's also the depth of field. Perspective matters.
Lawrence Hrubes

Teaching Doubt - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...teaching-doubt

science religious knowledge systems skepticism doubt education

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “Non-overlapping magisteria” has a nice ring to it. The problem is that there are many religious claims that not only “overlap” with empirical data but are incompatible with it. As a scientist who also spends a fair amount of time in the public arena, if I am asked if our understanding of the Big Bang conflicts with the idea of a six-thousand-year-old universe, I face a choice: I can betray my scientific values, or encourage that person to doubt his or her own beliefs. More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.
  • Doubt about one’s most cherished beliefs is, of course, central to science: the physicist Richard Feynman stressed that the easiest person to fool is oneself. But doubt is also important to non-scientists. It’s good to be skeptical, especially about ideas you learn from perceived authority figures. Recent studies even suggest that being taught to doubt at a young age could make people better lifelong learners. That, in turn, means that doubters—people who base their views on evidence, rather than faith—are likely to be better citizens.
  • Science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign world view, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe. But science is a place where such confrontation is explicit and accessible. It didn’t take more than a simple experiment for Galileo to overturn the wisdom of Aristotle. Informed doubt is the very essence of science.
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  • Some teachers shy away from confronting religious beliefs because they worry that planting the seeds of doubt will cause some students to question or abandon their own faith or the faith of their parents. But is that really such a bad thing? It offers some young people the chance to escape the guilt imposed upon them simply for questioning what they’re told. Last year, I received an e-mail from a twenty-seven-year-old man who is now studying in the United States after growing up in Saudi Arabia. His father was executed by family members after converting to Christianity. He says that it’s learning about science that has finally liberated him from the spectre of religious fundamentalism.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Group Thinking - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p039zq41

psychology fallacy groupthink human sciences SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Anyone who has ever been in a meeting has seen the phenomenon of "Groupthink" first hand. The will of the crowd over shadows the wisdom of individuals and it can lead to dangerous consequences. Mike Williams asks why humans succumb to "Groupthink" and how we fight the tendency to follow the herd even if it leads to very perilous outcomes.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

human sciences psychology communication

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
Lawrence Hrubes

"Books Smell Like Old People": Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...le-the-decline-of-teen-reading

literature education proof technology teens arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why 'Natural' Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...snt-mean-anything-anymore.html

language ethics science nature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • It seems that getting end-of-life patients and their families to endorse “do not resuscitate” orders has been challenging. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a little too much like throwing Grandpa under the bus. But according to a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patients and family members and even medical professionals are much more likely to give their consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
  • So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
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