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sissij

The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html

new york times bias social media technology

shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
  • No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week.
  • “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.
  • The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the website Heat Street saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in The New York Times, in The Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Mr. Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
  • You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
  • Just watch out for that wall you’re about to walk into IRL (in real life). Or, hey, don’t — knock yourself out.
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    This new design reminds me of how the internet is limiting us in our comfort zone. Although in theory, there is almost infinite amount of information on the internet, we can only get a very small proportion of it. And people tends to read the information that support their idea or fit their interests. So the news servers start to design system that only provide readers with what they want to see or like to see. It does not do good to diversify people's mind as what internet should be doing. In the quote, Dan Wagner said: "you're a designer of reality", but I interpret this as we are the designer of our own reality. This will only isolate people from each other. Without living in the same reality, people won't have real communication, so I think this new design does have cons. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
sissij

Is the March for Science Going to Change Any Minds? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ence-going-to-change-any-minds

science research bias

shared by sissij on 22 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • "Make contact with that part of America that doesn’t know any scientists. Put a face on the debate. Help them understand what we do, and how we do it. Give them your email, or better yet, your phone number...  The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers."
  • sissij on 22 Apr 17
     
    Although the society now is closely intertwined with science, real and up-to-date science is still very far away from the general population. As we discussed in TOK when we talked about science, the science that the general population talk about and quote from is mostly not real or scientific science. They don't really care the scientific methods and all those theories behind those conclusions. They just use those "science facts" to satisfy their confirmation bias and support their argument. From this research, we can just see how the general population don't really care about real science. Science is becoming more like a special thing that is only in the hands of the minority elites. Although they say that general population is not important for science, I think it is really important that the science that the general population perceive is real science. --Sissi (4/21/2017)
Javier E

False consciousness - 0 views

www.economist.com/...st-century-false-consciousness

consciousness marx marxist influence economics theory

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Marx’s works, including “The Communist Manifesto”, written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, may have had more impact on the modern world than many suppose. Of the manifesto’s ten principal demands, perhaps four have been met in many rich countries, including “free education for all children in public schools” and a “progressive or graduated income tax”.
  • Mr Stedman Jones’s book is above all an intellectual biography, which focuses on the philosophical and political context in which Marx wrote.
  • Marx did not invent communism. Radicals, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) and the Chartist movement in England, had long used language that modern-day readers would identify as “Marxist”—“to enjoy political equality, abolish property”; “reserve army of labour” and so forth.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • What, then, was his contribution?
  • Far more significantly, he attempted to provide an overall theoretical description of how capitalism worked
  • in many parts the author is highly critical. For instance, he points out that Marx displayed “condescension towards developments in political economy”
  • More damning, the “Grundrisse”, an unfinished manuscript which many neo-Marxists see as a treasure trove of theory, has “defects [in the] core arguments”.
  • The author encapsulates a feeling of many students of Marx: read the dense, theoretical chapters of “Capital” closely, and no matter how much you try, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is plenty of nonsense in there.
  • The real value of such a work, in Mr Stedman Jones’s eyes, lies in its documentation of the actual day-to-day life faced by the English working classes.
  • He did not pay enough attention, for example, to objective measures of living standards (such as real wages), which by the 1850s were clearly improving.
Javier E

The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eal-world-very-beginning-their

economics teaching textbook theory

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Change, however, has been slow to reach the university economics curriculum. Many institutions still pump students through introductory courses untainted by recent economic history or the market shortcomings it illuminates.
  • A few plucky reformers are working to correct that: a grand and overdue idea. Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself.
  • Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons. Most introductory texts begin with the simplest of models. Workers are paid according to their productivity; trade never makes anyone worse off; and government interventions in the market always generate a “deadweight loss”. Practising economists know that these statements are more true at some times than others
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economics teaches that incentives matter and trade-offs are unavoidable. It shows how naive attempts to fix social problems, from poverty to climate change, can have unintended consequences. Introductory economics, at its best, enables people to see the unstated assumptions and hidden costs behind the rosy promises of politicians and businessmen.
  • A Chilean professor, Oscar Landerretche, worked with other economists to design a new curriculum. He, Sam Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin, of University College London (UCL), and Margaret Stevens, of Oxford University, painstakingly knitted contributions from economists around the world into a text that is free, online and offers interactive charts and videos of star economists. That text is the basis of economics modules taught by a small but growing number of instructors.
  • Students pay $300 or more for textbooks explaining that in competitive markets the price of a good should fall to the cost of producing an additional unit, and unsurprisingly regurgitate the expected answers. A study of 170 economics modules taught at seven universities found that marks in exams favoured the ability to “operate a model” over proofs of independent judgment.
  • “The Economy”, as the book is economically titled, covers the usual subjects, but in a very different way. It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today.
  • That could mean, eventually, a broader array of perspectives within economics departments, bigger and bolder research questions—and fewer profession-shaking traumas in future.
  • Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground.
  • It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did.
  • Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought.
  • “The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.
  • Homa Zarghamee, also at Barnard, appreciates having to spend less time “unteaching”, ie, explaining to students why the perfect-competition result they learned does not actually hold in most cases. A student who does not finish the course will not be left with a misleading idea of economics, she notes.
  • But the all-important exceptions are taught quite late in the curriculum—or, often, only in more advanced courses taken by those pursuing an economics degree.
  • Far from an unintended result of ill-conceived policies, she argues, the roughly 4m deaths from hunger in 1932 and 1933 were part of a deliberate campaign by Josef Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership to crush Ukrainian national aspirations, literally starving actual or potential bearers of those aspirations into submission to the Soviet order
  • The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised.
  • . “Red Famine” presents a Bolshevik government so hell-bent on extracting wealth and controlling labour that it was willing to confiscate the last remaining grain from hungry peasants (mostly but not exclusively in Ukraine) and then block them from fleeing famine-afflicted areas to search for food.
  • . Stalin was not only aware of the ensuing mass death (amounting to roughly 13% of Ukraine’s population). He actively sought to suppress knowledge of it (including banning the publication of census data), so as not to distract from the campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture and extend the Communist Party’s reach into the countryside—a campaign Ms Applebaum calls a “revolution...more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself”
  • The book’s most powerful passages describe the moral degradation that resulted from sustained hunger, as family solidarity and village traditions of hospitality withered in the face of the overwhelming desire to eat. Under a state of siege by Soviet authorities, hunger-crazed peasants took to consuming, grass, animal hides, manure and occasionally each other. People became indifferent to the sight of corpses lying in streets, and eventually to their own demis
  • While stressing Stalin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian nationalism, moreover, Ms Applebaum passes over a subtler truth. For along with its efforts to root out “bourgeois” nationalisms, the Kremlin relentlessly promoted a Soviet version of Ukrainian identity, as it did with most other ethnic minorities. Eight decades on, that legacy has done even more to shape today’s Ukraine than the Holodomor.
Javier E

Take it from the insiders: Silicon Valley is eating your soul | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ting-soul-google-facebook-tech

soul psychology tech addiction distraction misinformation conspiracy theory advertising technology

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The reality for millions of other people is a constant experience that all but buries the online world’s liberating possibilities in a mess of alerts, likes, messages, retweets and internet use so pathologically needy and frantic that it inevitably makes far too many people vulnerable to pernicious nonsense and real dangers.
  • if we’re not careful, we will soon be at risk of being locked into mindless behavioural loops, craving distraction even from other distractions.
  • There is a possible way out of this, of course.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we ought to listen to Tristan Harris and his campaign. “Religions and governments don’t have that much influence over people’s daily thoughts,” he recently told Wired magazine. “But we have three technology companies” – he meant Facebook, Google and Apple – “who have this system that frankly they don’t even have control over … Right now, 2 billion people’s minds are already jacked in to this automated system, and it’s steering people’s thoughts toward either personalised paid advertising or misinformation or conspiracy theories. And it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it.”
  • There is also a mounting understanding that one of the single most important aspects of modern parenting is to be all too aware of how much social media can mess with people’s minds, and to limit our children’s screen time.
  • a culture that actually embraces the idea of navigating the internet with a discriminating sensibility and an emphasis on basic moderation.
  • “This isn’t some kind of philosophical conversation. This is an urgent concern happening right now.” Amid an ocean of corporate sophistry and doublethink, those words have the distinct ring of truth.
clairemann

Many QAnon followers report having mental health diagnoses - 0 views

theconversation.com/mental-health-diagnoses-157299

science research knowledge brain science social media

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • QAnon is often viewed as a group associated with conspiracy, terrorism and radical action, such as the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. But radical extremism and terror may not be the real concern from this group.
  • I noticed that QAnon followers are different from the radicals I usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.
  • I found that many QAnon followers revealed – in their own words on social media or in interviews – a wide range of mental health diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and addiction.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 68% reported they had received mental health diagnoses. The conditions they revealed included post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and Munchausen syndrome by proxy
  • Research has long revealed connections between psychological problems and beliefs in conspiracy theories. For example, anxiety increases conspiratorial thinking, as do social isolation and loneliness.
clairemann

Why Some People Love Black Friday-and Others Hate It | Time - 1 views

time.com/...black-friday-psychology

psychology research brain science

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • If the thought of taking part in the annual ritual of Black Friday gives you cold chills rather than a rush of excitement, you’re not alone.
  • It’s not just a lack of appreciation for bargains that drives this disconnect. Psychology research indicates that several factors determine which side of the shop-‘til-you-drop divide you land on. Some people just aren’t wired to enjoy the more social aspects of shopping.
  • Task-oriented shoppers typically focus on finding the things they need as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort. Socially oriented shoppers, on the other hand, enjoy the presence of others while they shop.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The same research suggests that social shoppers are actually energized by the presence of other consumers. These folks enjoy the experience more when there are others nearby, even if they don’t directly interact.
  • Psychology researchers talk about this preference in what they call field theory. If you’ve ever been bothered by a “close-talker” who leans in too close or touches your arm as they tell you a story, then you are likely someone who requires a little more personal space than that storyteller does.
  • Taken together, these two theories explain a lot about the way you feel about Black Friday-style shopping.
caelengrubb

Why economics needs economic history | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal - 1 views

voxeu.org/...onomics-needs-economic-history

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The current economic and financial crisis has given rise to a vigorous debate about the state of economics, and the training which graduate and undergraduates economics students are receiving.
  • Employers are increasingly complaining that young economists don’t understand how the financial system actually works, and are ill-prepared to think about appropriate policies at a time of crisis.
  • Knowledge of economic and financial history is crucial in thinking about the economy in several ways.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A second, related point is that economic history teaches students the importance of context
  • Third, economic history is an unapologetically empirical field, exclusively dedicated to understanding the real world.
  • Fourth, economic history is a rich source of informal theorising about the real world, which can help motivate more formal theoretical work later on (Wren-Lewis 2013).
  • ifth, even once the current economic and financial crisis has passed, the major long run challenges facing the world will still remain.
  • Sixth, economic theory itself has been emphasising – for well over 20 years now – that path dependence is ubiquitous (David 1985)
  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an undergraduate economics instructor, economic history is a great way of convincing undergraduates that the theory they are learning in their micro and macro classes is useful in helping them make sense of the real world.
katedriscoll

Is the Schrödinger Equation True? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...he-schroedinger-equation-true1

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • haped abstractions called vectors. Pondering Hilbert space makes me feel like a lump of dumb, decrepit flesh trapped in a squalid, 3-D prison. Far from exploring Hilbert space, I can’t even find a window through which to peer into it. I envision it as an immaterial paradise where luminescent cognoscenti glide to and fro, telepathically swapping witticisms about adjoint operators.
  • Reality, great sages have assured us, is essentially mathematical. Plato held that we and other things of this world are mere shadows of the sublime geometric forms that constitute reality. Galileo declared that “the great book of nature is written in mathematics.” We’re part of nature, aren’t we? So why does mathematics, once we get past natural numbers and basic arithmetic, feel so alien to most of us?
  • Physicists’ theories work. They predict the arc of planets and the flutter of electrons, and they have spawned smartphones, H-bombs and—well, what more do we need? But scientists, and especially physicists, aren’t just seeking practical advances. They’re after Truth. They want to believe that their theories are correct—exclusively correct—representations of nature. Physicists share this craving with religious folk, who need to believe that their path to salvation is the One True Path.
katedriscoll

Theories of Truth - TOK RESOURCE.ORG - 0 views

www.tokresource.org/theories-of-truth

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In questioning some of their own student knowledge claims and in the knowledge as justified true belief session it soon emerges that truth is a slippery concept. Absolute certainty has an initial attraction to many beginning TOK students seeking a chimeric foundation; but it soon emerges that the word “truth” can be used in various ways and in differing contexts.We have already stressed that TOK is not text-based philosophy. It is much more about our Shared Knowledge—what the practitioners in the various Areas of Knowledge actually do, than it is about metaphysics and eternal questions. For example History is what historians actually do. It is not every last detail of what actually happened. Naturally, academic historians aim for truth in interpreting the traces of a past long gone; but they are realistic and fully aware of the inherent limitations of their discipline.
  • As embodied, fallible, human knowers we will nearly always be at some distance from "what is actually the case" or "things as they are in themselves." As the course progresses TOK students will embrace this constraint. Not being able to attain it, does not mean that TOK students should shy away from understanding some of various ways the word truth is used. Some facility with the three most famous iterations will be very useful for analyzing TOK Knowledge Questions.
  • Phineas Gage
Javier E

Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...who-decides-whats-racist

persuasion racism Critical Theory race Culture Politics epistemology perspective bias

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
caelengrubb

Believing in Overcoming Cognitive Biases | Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association - 0 views

journalofethics.ama-assn.org/...2020-09

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Cognitive biases contribute significantly to diagnostic and treatment errors
  • A 2016 review of their roles in decision making lists 4 domains of concern for physicians: gathering and interpreting evidence, taking action, and evaluating decisions
  • Confirmation bias is the selective gathering and interpretation of evidence consistent with current beliefs and the neglect of evidence that contradicts them.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It can occur when a physician refuses to consider alternative diagnoses once an initial diagnosis has been established, despite contradicting data, such as lab results. This bias leads physicians to see what they want to see
  • Anchoring bias is closely related to confirmation bias and comes into play when interpreting evidence. It refers to physicians’ practices of prioritizing information and data that support their initial impressions, even when first impressions are wrong
  • When physicians move from deliberation to action, they are sometimes swayed by emotional reactions rather than rational deliberation about risks and benefits. This is called the affect heuristic, and, while heuristics can often serve as efficient approaches to problem solving, they can sometimes lead to bias
  • Further down the treatment pathway, outcomes bias can come into play. This bias refers to the practice of believing that good or bad results are always attributable to prior decisions, even when there is no valid reason to do so
  • The dual-process theory, a cognitive model of reasoning, can be particularly relevant in matters of clinical decision making
  • This theory is based on the argument that we use 2 different cognitive systems, intuitive and analytical, when reasoning. The former is quick and uses information that is readily available; the latter is slower and more deliberate.
  • Consideration should be given to the difficulty physicians face in employing analytical thinking exclusively. Beyond constraints of time, information, and resources, many physicians are also likely to be sleep deprived, work in an environment full of distractions, and be required to respond quickly while managing heavy cognitive loads
  • Simply increasing physicians’ familiarity with the many types of cognitive biases—and how to avoid them—may be one of the best strategies to decrease bias-related errors
  • The same review suggests that cognitive forcing strategies may also have some success in improving diagnostic outcomes
  • Afterwards, the resident physicians were debriefed on both case-specific details and on cognitive forcing strategies, interviewed, and asked to complete a written survey. The results suggested that resident physicians further along in their training (ie, postgraduate year three) gained more awareness of cognitive strategies than resident physicians in earlier years of training, suggesting that this tool could be more useful after a certain level of training has been completed
  • A 2013 study examined the effect of a 3-part, 1-year curriculum on recognition and knowledge of cognitive biases and debiasing strategies in second-year residents
  • Cognitive biases in clinical practice have a significant impact on care, often in negative ways. They sometimes manifest as physicians seeing what they want to see rather than what is actually there. Or they come into play when physicians make snap decisions and then prioritize evidence that supports their conclusions, as opposed to drawing conclusions from evidence
  • Fortunately, cognitive psychology provides insight into how to prevent biases. Guided reflection and cognitive forcing strategies deflect bias through close examination of our own thinking processes.
  • During medical education and consistently thereafter, we must provide physicians with a full appreciation of the cost of biases and the potential benefits of combatting them.
jmfinizio

Opinion: I've had it with interviewing Trump supporters who go off the deep end - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Trump capitol cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Or maybe you saw the one where a panelist told me he would believe Donald Trump over Jesus Christ.
  • The cries from right-wing politicians telling us we need to hear the feelings of Trump supporters are wearing thin, as is the idea that the mob at the Capitol was somehow "silenced" or "censored" for too long.
  • He left a "nasty note" for Nancy Pelosi and stole some of her mail. I guess he didn't know that's a federal crime. I'm not sure we should take any pointers from him either.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • , I don't think the arsonists and vandals who caused damage in Portland, Oregon and other cities last summer need to be listened to either
  • They broke windows, scaled walls, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol Rotunda, defecated in the halls of the Capitol, killed a police officer, savagely beat another one with a pole holding an American flag and crushed yet another officer in a door while he screamed for help.
  • 73% of Republican voters believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election
  • A Pew poll finds that roughly 41% of Republicans who have heard of QAnon, a group that peddles the conspiracy theory that a ring of satanic pedophiles have taken over the US government, say QAnon is a good thing for the country.
  • I think the time for listening to present-day Trump supporters is over.
  • I think at this point the smartest thing the rest of us could do is no longer give warped Trump supporters a platform and no longer lend them our ears. It's time to turn off their microphones.
pier-paolo

Logic and Neutrality - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...logic-and-neutrality

shared by pier-paolo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates
  • It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive conten
  • The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken,
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  • when we extend our knowledge by deducing logical consequences of what we already know. If you know that either Mary or Mark did the murder (only they had access to the crime scene at the right time), and then Mary produces a rock-solid alibi, so you know she didn’t do it, you can deduce that Mark did it
  • Logic also helps us recognize our mistakes, when our beliefs turn out to contain inconsistencies. If I believe that no politicians are honest, and that John is a politician, and that he is honest, at least one of those three beliefs must be false, although logic doesn’t tell me which one.
  • The power of logic becomes increasingly clear when we chain together such elementary steps into longer and longer chains of reasoning, and the idea of logic as uninformative becomes correspondingly less and less plausible. Mathematics provides the most striking examples, since all its theorems are ultimately derived from a few simple axioms by chains of logical reasoning
  • The conception of logic as a neutral umpire of debate also fails to withstand scrutiny, for similar reasons. Principles of logic can themselves be debated,
  • one principle of standard logic is the law of excluded middle, which says that something either is the case, or it isn’t. Either it’s raining, or it’s not.
  • Whichever side is right, logical theories are players in these debates, not neutral umpires.
caelengrubb

How Isaac Newton Changed the World | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/saac-newton-changed-world.html

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  • To the probable dismay of some befuddled calculus and physics students the world over, Isaac Newton didn't just live, he grew up and lived long enough to become the single-most influential scientist of the 17th-century.
  • Newton's wide range of discoveries, from his theories of optics to his groundbreaking work on the laws of motion and gravity, formed the basis for modern physics.
  • The true genius of his work, experts think, is how he ultimately took those theories and applied them to the universe at large, explaining the motions of the Sun and planets in a way that had never been done before.
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  • Upon getting bumped on the head by a falling apple, Newton airily dreams up the laws of gravity and the rest, as they say, is history
  • When the black plague closed Cambridge University, where he was a student, for two years starting in 1665, he spent the long months locked up at home studying complex mathematics, physics and optics.
  • It was during this fruitful time that Newton, with the help of a crystal prism, became the first to discover that white light is made up a spectrum of colors
  • He also developed the concept of infinite-series calculus, the kind of scary math studied today by engineering and statistics scholars.
  • By 1666, Newton had even laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students everywhere:An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.The relationship between acceleration and applied force is F=ma.For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
  • Across the pages of the Principia, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system into "'simple"' equations, explaining away the nature of planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies.
caelengrubb

Universe Is Created, According to Kepler - HISTORY - 0 views

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  • On April 27, 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science
  • Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.
  • Kepler’s main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars.
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  • When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe’s extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye
  • Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things
  • In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away.
  • Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force
  • Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and math.
  • As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.
caelengrubb

Linguistic Relativity: the Impact of Language & Society | THE ELLIPSIS... - 0 views

www.theellipsis.org/the-impact-of-language-society

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  • As English speakers, we experience life in English. Our every thought is formulated with the English terminology available to us. But how might our experience and our thinking be different if our primary language was not English but German or Arabic?
  • It is this very question that has motivated linguists for hundreds of years to grapple with the validity of linguistic relativity
  • When we consider the theory of linguistic relativity, we must take into account that languages develop within and emerge from distinct cultures
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  • Those who subscribe to the theory of linguistic relativity believe that a person’s way of thinking is influenced by the language he or she speaks
  • Language is a result of society. Therefore, language does not deserve the credit for shaping the way we process information.
  • Differences in the thought processes of speakers of different languages should be accredited to the distinct cultures from which these languages emerge.
  • Nevertheless, language is an important factor in the way a culture evolves. Ultimately, although it is our society rather than our language that shapes the way we think, language helps to enforce the way society is.
  • Language cannot be said to be responsible for the way a society functions since language itself is a result of that society. A key example of this can be found in the substance of a language, which tends to reflect the values of its speakers and the culture it comes from
  • A proponent of linguistic relativity might argue that this is an example of language shaping the way people think by defining age as the primary quality to know about a person.
  • However, this assertion fails to recognize the big picture. A more accurate analysis might indicate that society is responsible for this way of thinking, not language.
  • However, language still plays an important role in affecting cultures and social norms. Although languages are reflections of cultures, languages do influence how cultures will look in the future.
  • We can see this phenomenon in the history of the English language, which dates back to sometime between the 5th and 7th century AD, with Modern English gaining prominence in the late 17th century.
  • As we see with English sentence structure, the influence of cultural institutions on a language is often left intact even after that institution has weakened or disappeared.
  • Since language is our only proficient method of communication, what we can communicate is limited to the words and phrases available to us. While the society we live in may limit our perspective, the extent and strength of these limitations do not compare to that which language imposes. Cultural change comes more easily to us than linguistic change.
  • t took centuries for the Great Vowel Shift to occur while the world experienced revolutions, literary movements, great awakenings and deadly plagues at a much faster pace. This pattern is demonstrated in American culture as the language we speak fails to keep up with the progress we make. Patterns in our vocabulary tend to reflect this.
  • A commonly cited phenomenon is the negative and positive associations that English seems to make with “black” and “white.”
  • The limits of language may prevent us from progressing as quickly as we may want to, but we do have the ability to overcome some of these linguistic limits.
mshilling1

How QAnon-Like Conspiracy Theories Tear Families Apart : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...y-theories-tear-families-apart

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  • Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.
  • UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.
  • Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.
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  • Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.
  • If you think about somebody who either is addicted to heroin or you think about someone who has fallen into a religious cult or you think about someone who has fallen into QAnon, they all are creating boundaries that divide them from their families. They're all engaging in dysfunctional behaviors and holding dysfunctional attitudes that make their participation in regular life more difficult.
  • Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.
  • No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.
caelengrubb

Copernicus, the Revolutionary who Feared Changing the World | OpenMind - 0 views

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  • The sages had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe for nearly two thousand years until Copernicus arrived on the scene and let it spin like a top around the Sun, as we know it today.
  • Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was not the first to explain that everything revolves around the Sun, but he did it so thoroughly, in that book, that he initiated a scientific revolution against the universal order established by the greatest scholar ever known, the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
  • Aristotle said in the fourth century BC that a mystical force moved the Sun and the planets in perfect circles around the Earth. Although this was much to the taste of the Church, in order to fit this idea with the strange movements of the planets seen in the sky, astronomers had to resort to the mathematical juggling that another Greek, Ptolemy, invented in the second century AD.
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  • hus Copernicus started to look for something simpler, almost at the same time that Michelangelo undertook another great project, that of decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
  • Copernicus had a full Renaissance résumé: studies in medicine, art, mathematics, canon law and philosophy; experience as an economist and a diplomat; and also a good position as an ecclesiastical official.
  • By 1514, he had already written a sketch of his theory, although he did not publish it for fear of being condemned as a heretic and also because he was a perfectionist. He spent 15 more years repeating his calculations, diagrams and observations with the naked eye, prior to the invention of the telescope.
  • Copernicus was the first to recite them in order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the 6 planets that were then known.
  • When Copernicus finally decided to publish his theory, the book’s publisher softened it in the prologue: he said that there were “only easier mathematics” for predicting the movements of the planets, and not a whole new way of looking at the reality of the universe. But this was understood as a challenge to Aristotle, to the Church, and to common sense.
  • It would be 150 years before the Copernican revolution triumphed, and the world finally admitted that the Earth was just one more spinning top.
caelengrubb

How Einstein Challenged Newtonian Physics - 0 views

www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/n-challenged-newtonian-physics

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  • Any discussion of Einstein should begin with what is probably his single greatest contribution to physics—the theory of relativity.
  • Between the late 1600s and the beginning of the 20th century, the field of physics was dominated by the ideas of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian laws of motion and gravitation had, up to that point in time, been the most successful scientific theory in all of history.
  • Newton’s ideas were, of course, challenged from time to time during those two centuries, but these ideas always seemed to hold up
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  • There were many new phenomena that were discovered and that came to be understood in the centuries that followed Newton’s era. Take electricity and magnetism, for example. Until the 19th century, we didn’t really know what electricity or magnetism were, or how they worked. Isaac Newton certainly didn’t have a clue.
  • To many physicists around the turn of the 20th century, the state of physics seemed very settled. The Newtonian worldview had been very successful, and for a very long time.
  • In 1905, however, a revolution in physics did come. And perhaps even more surprising than the revolution itself was where that revolution came from. In 1905, Albert Einstein was not working as a professor at some prestigious university. He was not famous, or even well-known among other physicists.
  • Things didn’t stay this way for long, however. In 1905, Einstein wrote not one or two, but four absolutely groundbreaking papers. Any one of these four papers would have made him a star within the field of physics, and would have certainly secured him a position of prominence in the history of science.
  • It seems that having so many breakthroughs of this magnitude in such a short period of time had never happened before, and has never happened since. In the first of Einstein’s 1905 papers, he proposed that light doesn’t only behave like a wave, but that it is also made up of individual pieces or particles.
  • But Einstein’s paper provided concrete empirical evidence that atoms were, in fact, real and tangible objects. He was even able to use these arguments to make a pretty good estimate for the size and mass of atoms and molecules. It was a huge step forward.
  • The equations that physicists use to describe the propagation of light waves—what are known as Maxwell’s equations—predict that light should move through space at a speed of about 670 million miles per hour. And more interestingly, these equations don’t make any reference to any medium that the light waves propagate through.
  • Although no experiment had ever detected this aether, they argued that it must fill virtually all of space. After all, they argued, the light from a distant star could only reach us if there was a continuous path filled with aether, extending all the way from the star to us.
  • ventually, though, physicists discovered that there was no aether. It would be Einstein who would come up with an equation to explain this conundrum.
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