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Javier E

Reasons for Reason - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reasons-for-reason

epistemic principles rationality belief arbitrary science naturalism

shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Rick Perry’s recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his confident assertion that “God is how we got here” reflect an obvious divide in our culture.
  • underneath this divide is a deeper one. Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust.
  • I suspect that for most people, scientific evidence (or its lack) has nothing to do with it. Their belief in creationism is instead a reflection of a deeply held epistemic principle: that, at least on some topics, scripture is a more reliable source of information than science.  For others, including myself, this is never the case.
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  • appealing to another method won’t help either — for unless that method can be shown to be reliable, using it to determine the reliability of the first method answers nothing.
  • Every one of our beliefs is produced by some method or source, be it humble (like memory) or complex (like technologically assisted science). But why think our methods, whatever they are, are trustworthy or reliable for getting at the truth? If I challenge one of your methods, you can’t just appeal to the same method to show that it is reliable. That would be circular
  • How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.
  • it seems to suggest that in the end, all “rational” explanations end up grounding out on something arbitrary. It all just comes down to what you happen to believe, what you feel in your gut, your faith.  Human beings have historically found this to be a very seductive idea,
  • this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed towards in the United States. We live isolated in our separate bubbles of information culled from sources that only reinforce our prejudices and never challenge our basic assumptions. No wonder that — as in the debates over evolution, or what to include in textbooks illustrate — we so often fail to reach agreement over the history and physical structure of the world itself. No wonder joint action grinds to a halt. When you can’t agree on your principles of evidence and rationality, you can’t agree on the facts. And if you can’t agree on the facts, you can hardly agree on what to do in the face of the facts.
  • We can’t decide on what counts as a legitimate reason to doubt my epistemic principles unless we’ve already settled on our principles—and that is the very issue in question.
  • The problem that skepticism about reason raises is not about whether I have good evidence by my principles for my principles. Presumably I do.[1] The problem is whether I can give a more objective defense of them. That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”[2]
  • Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles.
  • So one reason we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it.
  • there is also another, even deeper, reason. We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view. Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.
  • democracies aren’t simply organizing a struggle for power between competing interests; democratic politics isn’t war by other means. Democracies are, or should be, spaces of reasons.
  • we need an epistemic common currency because we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement.
  • Sometimes we can accomplish this, in a democratic society, by voting. But we can’t decide every issue that way
  • We need some forms of common currency before we get to the voting booth.
  • Even if, as the skeptic says, we can’t defend the truth of our principles without circularity, we might still be able to show that some are better than others. Observation and experiment, for example, aren’t just good because they are reliable means to the truth. They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said.
  • that is one reason we need to resist skepticism about reason: we need to be able to give reasons for why some standards of reasons — some epistemic principles — should be part of that currency and some not.
  • Reasons for Reason By MICHAEL P. LYNCH
Javier E

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...liable-are-the-social-sciences

social science reliability confidence research

shared by Javier E on 18 May 12 - Cached
  • media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention. But this is hardly a reasonable view.  There is considerable distance between, say, the confidence we should place in astronomers’ calculations of eclipses and a small marketing study suggesting that consumers prefer laundry soap in blue boxes
  • A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science?
  • Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive.
  • Even the best-developed social sciences like economics have nothing like this status.
  • when it comes to generating reliable scientific knowledge, there is nothing more important than frequent and detailed predictions of future events.  We may have a theory that explains all the known data, but that may be just the result of our having fitted the theory to that data.  The strongest support for a theory comes from its ability to correctly predict data that it was not designed to explain.
  • The case for a negative answer lies in the predictive power of the core natural sciences compared with even the most highly developed social sciences
  • Is there any work on the effectiveness of teaching that is solidly enough established to support major policy decisions?
  • While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. 
  • most social science research falls far short of the natural sciences’ standard of controlled experiments.
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive.
  • Because of the many interrelated causes at work in social systems, many questions are simply “impervious to experimentation.”
  • even when we can get reliable experimental results, the causal complexity restricts us to “extremely conditional, statistical statements,” which severely limit the range of cases to which the results apply.
  • above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
kaylynfreeman

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...liable-are-the-social-sciences

psychology science research knowledge brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science? 
  • Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.  The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. 
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  • While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not.  The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.  For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to  distinguish and study separately
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Social sciences may be surrounded by the “paraphernalia” of the natural sciences, such as technical terminology, mathematical equations, empirical data and even carefully designed experiments. 
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
Javier E

Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...hamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult

echo-chamber epistemic bubble trust goodwill Descartes network information truth rationality cult filter reliability corroborated bias psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.
  • they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention
  • An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
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  • start with epistemic bubbles
  • That omission might be purposeful
  • But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests
  • An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.
  • an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy.
  • In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
  • The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
  • Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly
  • They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017).
  • The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views
  • various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.
  • Such filters aren’t necessarily bad. The world is overstuffed with information, and one can’t sort through it all by oneself: filters need to be outsourced.
  • That’s why we all depend on extended social networks to deliver us knowledge
  • any such informational network needs the right sort of broadness and variety to work
  • Each individual person in my network might be superbly reliable about her particular informational patch but, as an aggregate structure, my network lacks what Sanford Goldberg in his book Relying on Others (2010) calls ‘coverage-reliability’. It doesn’t deliver to me a sufficiently broad and representative coverage of all the relevant information.
  • Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence.
  • An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission
  • Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection.
  • Luckily, though, epistemic bubbles are easily shattered. We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed.
  • echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.
  • amieson and Cappella’s book is the first empirical study into how echo chambers function
  • echo chambers work by systematically alienating their members from all outside epistemic sources.
  • Their research centres on Rush Limbaugh, a wildly successful conservative firebrand in the United States, along with Fox News and related media
  • His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view.
  • outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. The resulting worldview is one of deeply opposed force, an all-or-nothing war between good and evil
  • The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination
  • cult indoctrination involves new cult members being brought to distrust all non-cult members. This provides a social buffer against any attempts to extract the indoctrinated person from the cult.
  • The echo chamber doesn’t need any bad connectivity to function. Limbaugh’s followers have full access to outside sources of information
  • As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain
  • Their worldview can survive exposure to those outside voices because their belief system has prepared them for such intellectual onslaught.
  • exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media.
  • Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview.
  • ‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.
  • One might be tempted to think that the solution is just more intellectual autonomy. Echo chambers arise because we trust others too much, so the solution is to start thinking for ourselves.
  • that kind of radical intellectual autonomy is a pipe dream. If the philosophical study of knowledge has taught us anything in the past half-century, it is that we are irredeemably dependent on each other in almost every domain of knowledge
  • Limbaugh’s followers regularly read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources.
  • we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.
  • I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left. More importantly, nothing about echo chambers restricts them to the arena of politics
  • The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more
  • Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.
  • much of the recent analysis has lumped epistemic bubbles together with echo chambers into a single, unified phenomenon. But it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the two.
  • Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily
  • Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks
  • the two phenomena can also exist independently. And of the events we’re most worried about, it’s the echo-chamber effects that are really causing most of the trouble.
  • new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation.
  • their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.
  • Many people have claimed that we have entered an era of ‘post-truth’.
  • Not only do some political figures seem to speak with a blatant disregard for the facts, but their supporters seem utterly unswayed by evidence. It seems, to some, that truth no longer matters.
  • This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason.
  • echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers.
  • We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.
  • An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.
  • in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world
  • none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.
  • Notice how different what’s going on here is from, say, Orwellian doublespeak, a deliberately ambiguous, euphemism-filled language designed to hide the intent of the speaker.
  • echo chambers don’t trade in vague, ambiguous pseudo-speech. We should expect that echo chambers would deliver crisp, clear, unambiguous claims about who is trustworthy and who is not
  • clearly articulated conspiracy theories, and crisply worded accusations of an outside world rife with untrustworthiness and corruption.
  • Once an echo chamber starts to grip a person, its mechanisms will reinforce themselves.
  • In an epistemically healthy life, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit to how much we’re willing to trust any single person. Everybody’s fallible; a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out. This puts an upper ceiling on how much you can trust even your most beloved leader
  • nside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears.
  • Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber
  • when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place. That teenager will distrust all sources outside her echo chamber, and she will have gotten there by following normal procedures for trust and learning.
  • It certainly seems like our teenager is behaving reasonably. She could be going about her intellectual life in perfectly good faith. She might be intellectually voracious, seeking out new sources, investigating them, and evaluating them using what she already knows.
  • The worry is that she’s intellectually trapped. Her earnest attempts at intellectual investigation are led astray by her upbringing and the social structure in which she is embedded.
  • Echo chambers might function like addiction, under certain accounts. It might be irrational to become addicted, but all it takes is a momentary lapse – once you’re addicted, your internal landscape is sufficiently rearranged such that it’s rational to continue with your addiction
  • Similarly, all it takes to enter an echo chamber is a momentary lapse of intellectual vigilance. Once you’re in, the echo chamber’s belief systems function as a trap, making future acts of intellectual vigilance only reinforce the echo chamber’s worldview.
  • There is at least one possible escape route, however. Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. An echo chamber can bring our teenager to discredit outside beliefs precisely because she encountered the echo chamber’s claims first. Imagine a counterpart to our teenager who was raised outside of the echo chamber and exposed to a wide range of beliefs. Our free-range counterpart would, when she encounters that same echo chamber, likely see its many flaws
  • Those caught in an echo chamber are giving far too much weight to the evidence they encounter first, just because it’s first. Rationally, they should reconsider their beliefs without that arbitrary preference. But how does one enforce such informational a-historicity?
  • The escape route is a modified version of René Descartes’s infamous method.
  • Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). He had come to realise that many of the beliefs he had acquired in his early life were false. But early beliefs lead to all sorts of other beliefs, and any early falsehoods he’d accepted had surely infected the rest of his belief system.
  • The only solution, thought Descartes, was to throw all his beliefs away and start over again from scratch.
  • He could start over, trusting nothing and no one except those things that he could be entirely certain of, and stamping out those sneaky falsehoods once and for all. Let’s call this the Cartesian epistemic reboot.
  • Notice how close Descartes’s problem is to our hapless teenager’s, and how useful the solution might be. Our teenager, like Descartes, has problematic beliefs acquired in early childhood. These beliefs have infected outwards, infesting that teenager’s whole belief system. Our teenager, too, needs to throw everything away, and start over again.
  • Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot.
  • when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone
  • For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources
  • we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.
  • Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers
  • Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust.
  • It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
  • we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.
  • Stories of actual escapes from echo chambers often turn on particular encounters – moments when the echo-chambered individual starts to trust somebody on the outside.
  • Black’s is case in point. By high school, he was already something of a star on neo-Nazi media, with his own radio talk-show. He went on to college, openly neo-Nazi, and was shunned by almost every other student in his community college. But then Matthew Stevenson, a Jewish fellow undergraduate, started inviting Black to Stevenson’s Shabbat dinners. In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval – a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled
  • Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out.
  • hese encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.
  • We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field – we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept
  • goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.
  • f one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member – as Stevenson did with Black – then perhaps one can start to pierce that echo chamber.
  • the path I’m describing is a winding, narrow and fragile one. There is no guarantee that such trust can be established, and no clear path to its being established systematically.
  • what we’ve found here isn’t an escape route at all. It depends on the intervention of another. This path is not even one an echo-chamber member can trigger on her own; it is only a whisper-thin hope for rescue from the outside.
sandrine_h

Top court says evidence from hypnosis not reliable - Canada - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...hypnosis-not-reliable-1.642024

brain science

shared by sandrine_h on 30 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Thursday that evidence obtained through hypnosis should not be used in criminal cases because testimony based on such evidence is not "sufficiently reliable" in a court of law.
  • evidence obtained through hypnosis has been used byCanadian courtsfor nearly 30 years.
  • the technique of hypnosis and its impact on human memory are not understood well enough for post-hypnosis testimony to be sufficiently reliable in a court of law
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • hypnosis can, in certain circumstances, result in the distortion of memory.
  • Initially, the neighbour told police she saw Trochym on the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 15, 1992,but after she underwent hypnosis at the request of police, she remembered she sawthe accusedleave on Wednesday afternoon.
  • In its ruling, the court said the dangers posed by problems with the evidence could deprive an accused of a fair trial.
  • But dissenting judges, in their reasons, expressed concern about the majority ruling in which hypnosis is described as a "novel science" and "hypnotically refreshed memories" are now consideredinadmissible as evidence. "This ignores the fact that the technique has been used in Canada for almost 30 years, and has been employed in Canadian criminal investigations to assist in memory retrieval of both Crown and defence witnesses for a similar amount of time," they wrote. "Hypnosis is not new science, nor is its use in forensic investigation new."
Javier E

Opinion | A New Dark Age Looms - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-new-dark-age-looms.html

dark age prediction evidence evolution loss basis knowledge research

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.
  • as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
  • Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.
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  • Such a dark age is a growing possibility. In a recent report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that human-caused global warming was already altering patterns of some extreme weather events
  • disrupting nature’s patterns could extend well beyond extreme weather, with far more pervasive impacts.
  • Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress.
  • Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors
  • As Earth’s warming stabilizes, new patterns begin to appear. At first, they are confusing and hard to identify. Scientists note similarities to Earth’s emergence from the last ice age. These new patterns need many years — sometimes decades or more — to reveal themselves fully, even when monitored with our sophisticated observing systems
  • The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming. We could see changes to the prevalence of crop and human pests, like locust plagues set off by drought conditions; forest fire frequency; the dynamics of the predator-prey food chain; the identification and productivity of reliably arable land, and the predictability of agriculture output.
  • Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies
  • The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. The problem is, as the planet warms, these patterns will become increasingly difficult to discern.
  • The oceans, which play a major role in global weather patterns, will also see substantial changes as global temperatures rise. Ocean currents and circulation patterns evolve on time scales of decades and longer, and fisheries change in response. We lack reliable, physics-based models to tell us how this occurs
  • Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed
  • Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring this happens.
karenmcgregor

Is ComputerNetworkAssignmentHelp.com a Legitimate Source for Network Security Assignmen... - 0 views

In the dynamic landscape of academic support services, finding a trustworthy platform for network security assignment writing help is crucial. Today, we'll delve into the legitimacy of https://www....

#networksecurityassignmentwritinghelp #networksecurity #onlineassignmenthelp education

started by karenmcgregor on 08 Jan 24 no follow-up yet
sissij

What Facebook Owes to Journalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cebook-owes-to-journalism.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.”
  • Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.
  • As advertising spending shifted from print, TV and radio to the internet, the money didn’t mostly go to digital news organizations. Increasingly, it goes to Facebook and Google.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But just because the result is unintentional doesn’t mean it is fantasy: Newsrooms have been decimated, with basic accountability reporting slashed as a result.
  • I’m not saying that the good stuff — the mobile revolution, blocking intrusive ads, better marketing options for small businesses — doesn’t outweigh the bad. And local news organizations absolutely contributed to the problem with their sluggish and often uncreative reaction to the digital revolution.
  • sissij on 22 Feb 17
     
    This article discuss the impact of internet on local news organizations. I agree with the author that the internet do get a lot of ad money and make local news organizations have less funding. Although there are donations, it is still very little compare to what local news organizations used to have. This might be part of the reason why local news organizations don't do well on giving great informations.But I think the time is moving forward, Facebook and google should take some of the responsibility as they get more funding and resources. This article is very persuasive as it has many data and evidence in support. I really like that the author acknowledge the counterargument in his article to make it more reliable. --Sissi (2/22/2017)
sissij

By Demanding Too Much from Science, We Became a Post-Truth Society | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...dont-trust-the-experts-anymore

society science brain science research

shared by sissij on 10 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The number of people who today openly question reality are not the tin-foil hat-wearing kind. Increasingly they are our friends, and those who hold positions of power.
  • Indeed, the public understanding of what constitutes valid evidence, and a worthy expert opinion, seems to be at an all time low.
  • Well, a new study suggests that this wealth of information might be the problem.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A new study out of Germany has found that people are much more confident in the claims of a popular science article then they are in the claims of an academic article written for experts
  • It was also found that the subjects were more confident in their own judgments after reading a popular article, and that this was tied to a lessened desire to seek out more information from expert sources.
  • "easiness effect”
  • the issue arises from the manner in which popular science is presented; as opposed to how scientists themselves present data to each other and to the public.
  • This emboldens people to reject the ideas of experts who they see as superfluous to their understanding of an idea (which they have already grasped).
  • notably health
  • sissij on 10 Feb 17
     
    Although many people allege themselves being scientific when trying to convince others by using the scientific researches they read on the mass media, does that really make their points more reliable? Not really. The popular science is sometimes not as meticulous as the academic article article written for experts. In popular science articles, the authors often changed their writing style to favor the general population, like having a more certain tone. This appeals to readers' desire for simplicity and this tendency is called the "easiness effect", which I find is really similar to the logic fallacy we talked about in TOK. Science itself has more and more become a table that can make an argument seem more rational. However, science is all about the scientific method used in the research that is an art of systematic simplification. Without these element, the title "science" means nothing. --Sissi (2/10/2017)
oliviaodon

What is George Orwell's 1984 about, why have sales soared since Trump adviser Kellyanne... - 0 views

www.thesun.co.uk/...nway-alternative-facts-april-4

social media

shared by oliviaodon on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • GEORGE Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has had “doublegood” sales this week after one of Trump’s advisers used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview.
  • Orwell's novel 1984 is a bleak portrayal of Great Britain re-imagined as a dystopian superstate governed by a dictatorial regime.
  • Many concepts of the novel have crossed over to popular culture or have entered common use in everyday life - the repressive regime is overseen by Big Brother, and the government's invented language "newspeak" was designed to limit freedom of thought. The term "doublethink" - where a person can accept two contradicting beliefs as both being correct - first emerged in the dystopian landscape of Airstrip One.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The public started drawing comparisons between the Inner Party's regime and Trump's presidency when his adviser used the phrase "alternative facts" in an interview. Kellyanne Conway was being quizzed after the White House press secretary Sean Spicer apparently lied about the number of people who attended Trump's inauguration. The presenter asked why President Trump has asked Spicer to come out to speak to the press and "utter a falsehood". Conway responded that Spicer didn't utter a falsehood but gave "alternative facts". People drew comparisons with "newspeak" which was aimed at wiping out original thought. Her chose of language was also accused of representing "doublespeak" - which Orwell wrote "means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously." Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty said: "Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase".
  • Sales of 1984 also soared in 2013 when news broke of the National Security Administration's Prism surveillance scandal.
  • oliviaodon on 28 Feb 17
     
    *note: the Sun is not a reliable source, but I thought this was an interesting read nonetheless
sissij

The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-memory-brain-forgetting.html

new york times science social media

shared by sissij on 04 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.
  • It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses — at least in a dish.
  • Dr. Diering and his colleagues then searched for the molecular trigger for this change. They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night. But one protein in particular, called Homer1A, stood out.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Once you know a little bit of what happens at the ground-truth level, you can get a better idea of what to do for therapy,” Dr. Tononi said.
  • sissij on 04 Feb 17
     
    I find this article very interesting. Everyday, there are all sorts of articles alleges that scientist says this and that. Sometimes, they even contradicts each other. I feel like the science today on the newspaper is hardly reliable. Since science is a social project that's only accessible for a community of specialists. The general population usually plays a role of acceptors. Then many mass media uses the name of science to put up claims that mislead the people. It's really hard for us, the general population, to make sure what we read about on newspaper science section is really science, not another piece of fake news. --Sissi (2/4/2017)
Javier E

"Wikipedia Is Not Truth" - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...wikipedia-is-not-truth.html

wikipedia truth social media coherence

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 12 - Cached
  • entriesOnPage.push("6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c"); facebookButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; twitterButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; email permalink 20 Feb 2012 12:30 PM "Wikipedia Is Not Truth" Timothy Messer-Kruse tried to update the Wiki page on the Haymarket riot of 1886 to correct a long-standing inaccurate claim. Even though he's written two books and numerous articles on the subject, his changes were instantly rejected: I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views."
  • "Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. ...  Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
Roth johnson

'Life Keeps Changing': Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World - Joe Fassler - The ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283219

shared by Roth johnson on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Roth johnson on 22 Jan 14
     
    Exactly what we're talking about! Are stories more reliable than science or vise versa?
gszumel

North Korea Deletes 350,000 Articles From Its Highly Reliable State-Run News Site - Yah... - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/highly-reliable-161316934.html

north korea information social sciences history delete bias

shared by gszumel on 18 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • gszumel on 18 Dec 13
     
    North Korea attempting to alter history by deleting it.
Javier E

After the Fact - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...net-of-us-and-the-end-of-facts

Truth Internet epistemology proof civil society bias fact evidence data reason

shared by Javier E on 01 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.
  • the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.
  • . Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • In England, the abolition of trial by ordeal led to the adoption of trial by jury for criminal cases. This required a new doctrine of evidence and a new method of inquiry, and led to what the historian Barbara Shapiro has called “the culture of fact”: the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth and the only kind of evidence that’s admissible not only in court but also in other realms where truth is arbitrated. Between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, the fact spread from law outward to science, history, and journalism.
  • Lynch isn’t terribly interested in how we got here. He begins at the arrival gate. But altering the flight plan would seem to require going back to the gate of departure.
  • Lynch thinks we are frighteningly close to this point: blind to proof, no longer able to know. After all, we’re already no longer able to agree about how to know. (See: climate change, above.)
  • We now only rarely discover facts, Lynch observes; instead, we download them.
  • For the length of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, truth seemed more knowable, but after that it got murkier. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error.
  • That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence. An American Presidential debate has a lot more in common with trial by combat than with trial by jury,
  • came the Internet. The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.” This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of facts require investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data are outsourced to machines
  • “Most knowing now is Google-knowing—knowledge acquired online,”
  • Empiricists believed they had deduced a method by which they could discover a universe of truth: impartial, verifiable knowledge. But the movement of judgment from God to man wreaked epistemological havoc.
  • “The Internet didn’t create this problem, but it is exaggerating it,”
  • nothing could be less well settled in the twenty-first century than whether people know what they know from faith or from facts, or whether anything, in the end, can really be said to be fully proved.
  • In his 2012 book, “In Praise of Reason,” Lynch identified three sources of skepticism about reason: the suspicion that all reasoning is rationalization, the idea that science is just another faith, and the notion that objectivity is an illusion. These ideas have a specific intellectual history, and none of them are on the wane.
  • Their consequences, he believes, are dire: “Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.
  • When we Google-know, Lynch argues, we no longer take responsibility for our own beliefs, and we lack the capacity to see how bits of facts fit into a larger whole
  • Essentially, we forfeit our reason and, in a republic, our citizenship. You can see how this works every time you try to get to the bottom of a story by reading the news on your smartphone.
  • what you see when you Google “Polish workers” is a function of, among other things, your language, your location, and your personal Web history. Reason can’t defend itself. Neither can Google.
  • rump doesn’t reason. He’s a lot like that kid who stole my bat. He wants combat. Cruz’s appeal is to the judgment of God. “Father God, please . . . awaken the body of Christ, that we might pull back from the abyss,” he preached on the campaign trail. Rubio’s appeal is to Google.
  • Is there another appeal? People who care about civil society have two choices: find some epistemic principles other than empiricism on which everyone can agree or else find some method other than reason with which to defend empiricism
  • Lynch suspects that doing the first of these things is not possible, but that the second might be. He thinks the best defense of reason is a common practical and ethical commitment.
  • That, anyway, is what Alexander Hamilton meant in the Federalist Papers, when he explained that the United States is an act of empirical inquiry: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
Javier E

A New Dark Age Looms - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-new-dark-age-looms.html

history crisis culture dark age patterns prediction climate change global warming knowledge science

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation.
  • As Earth’s warming stabilizes, new patterns begin to appear. At first, they are confusing and hard to identify. Scientists note similarities to Earth’s emergence from the last ice age. These new patterns need many years — sometimes decades or more — to reveal themselves fully, even when monitored with our sophisticated observing systems
  • Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors.
  • But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected
  • The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming.
  • Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies
  • One exception to this pattern-based knowledge is the weather, whose underlying physics governs how the atmosphere moves and adjusts. Because we understand the physics, we can replicate the atmosphere with computer models.
  • But farmers need to think a season or more ahead. So do infrastructure planners as they design new energy and water systems
  • The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. The problem is, as the planet warms, these patterns will become increasingly difficult to discern.
  • The oceans, which play a major role in global weather patterns, will also see substantial changes as global temperatures rise. Ocean currents and circulation patterns evolve on time scales of decades and longer, and fisheries change in response. We lack reliable, physics-based models to tell us how this occurs.
  • Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring this happens.
sissij

Unsealed Documents Raise Questions on Monsanto Weed Killer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html

new york times science research bias

shared by sissij on 15 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
  • The safety of glyphosate is not settled science.
  • In a statement, Monsanto said, “Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Monsanto also rebutted suggestions that the disclosures highlighted concerns that the academic research it underwrites is compromised.
  • they could ghostwrite research on glyphosate by hiring academics to put their names on papers that were actually written by Monsanto.
  • The issue of glyphosate’s safety is not a trivial one for Americans. Over the last two decades, Monsanto has genetically re-engineered corn, soybeans and cotton so it is much easier to spray them with the weed killer, and some 220 million pounds of glyphosate were used in 2015 in the United States.
  • sissij on 15 Mar 17
     
    This news shows that there are a lot of cases that companies use science as a shield to convince people that their product is safe and good. Honesty is scientific papers has always been an important issue when we talk about the reliability of those papers. As we discussed in TOK, science is more like a social project that involves a lot of people and all human works are more or less biased and subjective. Now, science is intertwined with benefit and economics so the issue become much more complicated. I think we should identify the sources of the paper before citing any word from the paper because who write the paper is a big factor of which side the paper is standing. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
dicindioha

Daniel Kahneman On Hiring Decisions - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/man-on-hiring-decisions-2013-1

shared by dicindioha on 03 May 17 - No Cached
  • Most hiring decisions come down to a gut decision. According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, however, this process is extremely flawed and there's a much better way.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 03 May 17
       
      hiring comes down to 'gut feeling'
  • First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on. Don't overdo it — six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1-5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call "very weak" or "very strong."
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 03 May 17
       
      WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IN AN INTERVIEW
  • Kahneman asked interviewers to put aside personal judgments and limit interviews to a series of factual questions meant to generate a score on six separate personality traits. A few months later, it became clear that Kahneman's systematic approach was a vast improvement over gut decisions. It was so effective that the army would use his exact method for decades to come. Why you should care is because this superior method can be copied by any organization — and really, by anyone facing a hard decision.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate add up the six scores ... Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better — try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking.
  • than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw."
  • dicindioha on 03 May 17
     
    we cannot always use simply a 'gut feeling' from our so called 'reasoning' and emotional response to make big decisions like job hiring, which is what happens much of the time. this is a really interesting way to do it systematically. you still use your own perspective, but the questions asked will hopefully lead you to a better outcome
sissij

Is Crime Forensics Flawed? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...is-crime-forensics-flawed

science research bias

shared by sissij on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • This is concerning because in recent years, time honored methods such as fingerprinting, hair and fiber analysis, firearm analysis, and others, have come under intense scrutiny.
  • Sessions plans to replace the commission with an internal body called the department crime task force, headed by a senior forensic adviser who will report to him directly. No one has been named for the position as of yet.
  • Since 1989, DNA evidence has exonerated 329 individuals. Bite mark and hair analysis—part of what is known as pattern forensics, helped convict 25% of them.
  • sissij on 21 Apr 17
     
    I have long been interested in forensics. There was a late night show called forensic files that I really like to watch. As I learned in biology that human fingerprint is very unique, I have never imagined that there are actually serious flaws in forensics. As long as there is human involvement in this activity, it couldn't be one hundred percent reliable. --Sissi (4/21/2017)
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