BBC - Future - What Sherlock Holmes taught us about the mind - 0 views
-
The century-old detective stories are being studied by today’s neurologists – but why? As it turns out, not even modern technology can replace their lessons in rational thinking.
-
Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician himself, and there is evidence that he modelled the character of Holmes on one of the leading doctors of the day, Joseph Bell of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. “I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated disease,”
-
Conan Doyle may have also drawn some inspiration from other doctors, such as William Gowers, who wrote the Bible of Neurology
- ...11 more annotations...
The stimulus bill includes a tax break for the 1% (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
-
We face a frightening pandemic. More than 100,000 American have been infected with Covid-19, while tens of millions more continue to shelter at home. Meanwhile, the markets are crashing.
-
While health care workers and local governments frantically race against the clock to keep up with the escalating medical caseloads while trying to keep themselves and their families safe, Congress was still able to find the time to give money away to rich people.
-
Now here is what changed in the historic $2 trillion stimulus bill. Previously, if a married couple had depreciation deductions that exceeded their real estate business income, the couple could claim that "loss" to write off taxes on a maximum of $500,000 in income from other sources, like wages from a day job.
- ...1 more annotation...
deductive reasoning - 0 views
Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | Wired Science | Wired... - 1 views
-
I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.
-
He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.
-
Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.
- ...5 more annotations...
Philosophy Is Not a Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
what objective knowledge can philosophy bring that is not already determinable by science?
-
numerous philosophers have come to believe, in concert with the prejudices of our age, that only science holds the potential to solve persistent philosophical mysteries as the nature of truth, life, mind, meaning, justice, the good and the beautiful.
-
myriad contemporary philosophers are perfectly willing to offer themselves up as intellectual servants or ushers of scientific progress. Their research largely functions as a spearhead for scientific exploration and as a balm for making those pursuits more palpable and palatable to the wider population.
- ...13 more annotations...
Republicans Attack Obama on Birth Control Rule - NYTimes.com - 1 views
-
The policy requires health plans to cover birth control without a deductible or co-pay, upsetting social conservatives who think religiously affiliated institutions deserve an exemption. What might “compromise” mean? In many Democratic dictionaries, it’s a synonym for “surrender.”
-
Rick Santorum described the health care policy as “a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings.” (Mr. Santorum also accused Mr. Obama of having argued that the Catholic Church should be forced to ordain women, which of course is not true.)
Thomas Kuhn: Revolution Against Scientific Realism* - 1 views
-
as such a complex system that nobody believed that it corresponded to the physical reality of the universe. Although the Ptolemaic system accounted for observations-"saved the appearances"-its epicycles and deferents were never intended be anything more than a mathematical model to use in predicting the position of heavenly bodies. [3]
-
lileo that he was free to continue his work with Copernican theory if he agreed that the theory did not describe physical reality but was merely one of the many potential mathematical models. [10] Galileo continued to work, and while he "formally (23)claimed to prove nothing," [11] he passed his mathematical advances and his observational data to Newton, who would not only invent a new mathematics but would solve the remaining problems posed by Copernicus. [12]
-
Thus without pretending that his method could find the underlying causes of things such as gravity, Newton believed that his method produced theory, based upon empirical evidence, that was a close approximation of physical reality.
- ...27 more annotations...
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost.
-
Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.
-
Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
- ...4 more annotations...
The Social Side of Reasoning - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
We have a very hard time sticking to rules of deductive logic, and we constantly make basic errors in statistical reasoning. Most importantly, we are strongly inclined to “confirmation-bias”: we systematically focus on data that support a view we hold and ignore data that count against it.
-
These facts suggest that our evolutionary development has not done an especially good job of making us competent reasoners. Sperber and Mercier, however, point out that this is true only if the point of reasoning is to draw true conclusions.
-
it makes sense to think that the evolutionary point of human reasoning is to win arguments, not to reach the truth.
- ...7 more annotations...
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-P... - 0 views
-
The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
-
You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.
-
Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free. Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.
- ...97 more annotations...
The Importance of Logic and Critical Thinking | WIRED - 0 views
-
The rationality of the world is what is at risk. Too many people are taken advantage of because of their lack of critical thinking, logic and deductive reasoning
-
These same people are raising children without these same skills, creating a whole new generation of clueless people.
-
However, valid logic does not always guarantee truth or a sound argument.
- ...3 more annotations...
Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
-
it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.
-
some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.
-
For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies.
Humans need to become smarter thinkers to beat climate denial | Dana Nuccitelli | Envir... - 0 views
-
using ‘misconception-based learning’ to dislodge climate myths from peoples’ brains and replace them with facts, and beating denial by inoculating people against misinformers’ tricks.
-
The idea is that when people are faced with a myth and a competing fact, the fact will more easily win out if the fallacy underpinning the myth is revealed.
-
If people can learn to implement a simple six-step critical thinking process, they’ll be able to evaluate whether climate-related claims are valid.
- ...13 more annotations...
Why US travel warnings for Hong Kong are the ultimate irony | South China Morning Post - 0 views
-
Yes, developers have contributed – and still do – to various charities. But be assured this is only window dressing, since their donations are tax deductible.
-
Like the anti-Trump Democrats in the United States, they seem to be falling over themselves to obstruct the workings of the government at every opportunity
-
Such efforts can’t come from the underprivileged, they can’t come from the ignored majority. They have to come from the establishment, which means our government – together with the vested interests.
- ...2 more annotations...
Psychology and Sociology - What is the Difference? » Degree in Sociology - 0 views
-
Sociology looks beyond individuals and examines societies through the specific lenses or associations.
-
People with a background in sociology can work in these specific positions and more:
-
While it is interesting to note all the places that they overlap – eventual deductions about the behaviors of people, humanity, societal structures – they are also very different and attract different kinds of people to each of their disciplines.
- ...1 more annotation...
Technopoly-Chs. 4.5--The Broken Defenses - 0 views
-
r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.
-
The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.
-
From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.
- ...86 more annotations...
1 - 20 of 20
Showing 20▼ items per page