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Javier E

Rationally Speaking: Razoring Ockham's razor - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...razoring-ockhams-razor.html

Ockham science logic explanation philosophy parsimony

shared by Javier E on 22 May 11 - No Cached
  • Philosophers often refer to this as the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony. Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of unusual phenomena
  • The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.
  • Pierre Duhem suggested in 1908 that, as Sober puts it: “it is wrong to think that hypothesis H makes predictions about observation O; it is the conjunction of H&A [where A is a set of auxiliary hypotheses] that issues in testable consequences.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The history of science is replete with examples of simpler (“more elegant,” if you are aesthetically inclined) hypotheses that had to yield to more clumsy and complicated ones.
  • This is both why there is no such thing as a “crucial” experiment in science (you always need to repeat them under a variety of conditions), and why naive Popperian falsificationism is wrong (you can never falsify a hypothesis directly, only the H&A complex can be falsified).
  • The Duhem thesis explains why Sober is right, I think, in maintaining that the razor works (when it does) given certain background assumptions that are bound to be discipline- and problem-specific.
  • So, Ockham’s razor is a sharp but not universal tool, and needs to be wielded with the proper care due to the specific circumstances.
  • There is no shortcut for a serious investigation of the world, including the spelling out of our auxiliary, and often unexplored, hypotheses and assumptions.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Will Kill Birtherism - Chris Good - Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...237578

public opinion facts belief politics

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • public views are probably less fact driven than we'd like to think. They're more like mass impressions, with feeling, logic, and "truth" leading individuals to answer polls, express views to other people, and vote (or not vote) in ways that connect them to morally and emotionally significant universes, as much as to agreed upon "facts."
  • It also persists out of reasonable agnosticism and empirical skepticism. If a rational person hasn't investigated Obama's birthplace, or read news stories written by those who have, he/she logically would say "I don't know" when asked if Obama was born here.
Javier E

Does meditation make people act more rationally? : Thoughts from Kansas - 1 views

scienceblogs.com/..._meditation_make_people_ac.php

meditation brain science research rationality

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • people who meditate frequently behave in a more rational manner than non-meditators, and they do so because different parts of their brain take charge of certain kinds of decisions.
  • in the Ultimatum Game, you only get one shot, and the smart move is to take the free money. Punishing greed serves no purpose there, but people do it consistently.
  • Meditators began rejecting offers at the same point, but the rate of their decline leveled off around 50% for very poor offers (18:2 and 19:1), while the control group kept dropping. In other words, they were less willing to punish greedy behavior, and more willing to behave rationally by accepting unfair offers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Comparing the networks of brain regions activated by unfair offers, they found that the control group matched previous studies' findings, while "In sharp contrast, meditators showed activity in an entirely separate network"
  • Surprisingly, given that they were behaving more rationally, the meditators "did not draw upon ... regions typically seen for mathematical and logical reasoning. Instead, they drew upon ... areas usually linked to visceral, emotional rather than rational, deliberative functions." Their brain patterns were not those associated with an abstract analysis of the game's logic, but rather matched patterns seen in people contemplating altruistic actions.
  • If meditation is retraining the brain, then it's entirely possible that we'd find similar effects from prayer, as other research has found comparable effects on the brain between prayer and meditation. If the trend holds, it may suggest that people who decide to pray or meditate may wind up behaving more rationally than those who reject prayer and meditation as irrational.
  • Richard Monari on 25 Apr 11
     
    I had always heard that meditation brings peace and clarity of mind, but I had not considered it from a strictly neurological sense. I wouldn't mind developing more rational activation patterns :).
jongardner04

8 Logical Fallacies That Fuel Anti-Science Sentiments - 0 views

io9.com/-science-sentiments-1679442426

shared by jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 15
     
    These fallacies help anti-science thoughts.
Adam Clark

Do People Only Use 10% of Their Brains? | Mental Floss - 1 views

mentalfloss.com/...eople-only-use-10-their-brains

shared by Adam Clark on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 11 Jul 14
     
    "A 2013 poll surveying over 2000 Americans found that 65 percent thought that this statement is true. And yet, the simple and unequivocal answer is: No. Despite a myth so prevalent that it is easily accepted as a pivotal plot point in movies or a motivational tactic or even justification for psychic claims, everyone uses 100 percent of their brain. There are a number of logical refutations of this myth-why would big brains evolve if they're nothing but dead weight?-but outright proving its fallacy is relatively easy with modern technology. PET and fMRI scans show that even when we're sleeping, our entire brain is active on some level."
Javier E

Is Science Kind of a Scam? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...spooked-books-adam-gopnik

science knowledge physics einstein quantum facts social context history

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance
  • The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.
  • his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)
  • fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.
  • The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.
  • Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,
  • What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.
  • “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
  • Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,
  • There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”
  • Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.
  • The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.
  • the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”
  • Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.
  • The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.
  • Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge
  • What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn
  • Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.
  • In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.
  • Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.
  • They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
  • Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.
  • David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.
  • What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.
  • Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.
  • Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities
  • once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.
  • everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.
  • There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind
  • science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity
  • The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think
paisleyd

What's the Difference Between the Right Brain and Left Brain? - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ight-brain-and-left-brain.html

brain science knowledge

shared by paisleyd on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The two hemispheres communicate information, such as sensory observations, to each other through the thick corpus callosum that connects them.
  • left hemisphere
  • carrying out logic and exact mathematical computations.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • left brain pulls it from your memory.
  • face recognition and processing music.
  • right hemisphere
  • helps us to comprehend visual imagery and make sense of what we see.
  • increasing its processing capacity and avoiding situations of conflict where both sides of the brain try to take charge."
    • paisleyd
      paisleyd on 23 Oct 15
       
      The mind is strong but it has its flaws. Is that why the right side of our brain seems to take in most of the patterns we see. At the same time the right side of our brain seems to focus less on logic and more on emotion.
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
sissij

Want to Get From A to B Safer? The Color of Your Car Matters | Big Think - 2 views

bigthink.com/...w-taxis-may-be-safer-than-blue

brain science research education

shared by sissij on 16 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • If you’ve taken to the United States streets anytime lately, you may have noticed that most public school buses are a very particular shade of yellow. That shade is called National School Bus Glossy Yellow in Canada and the US, and it was specially designed by Dr. Frank Cyr.
  • Yellow is easy to see in the dim lights of early morning or late evening, and because it's seen across both the green and red cones in the eye, it pops in our vision faster than other colors.
  • What’s more, while the majority of those who are color blind have trouble distinguishing red from green, they can still see yellow just fine.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It makes sense that yellow taxi cabs are safer than the blue ones.
  • Furthermore, the drivers tend to drive at similar speeds, so the color of the cabs isn’t attracting certain driver personalities. It is mostly linked to the color of the cab.
  • The long-standing association of yellow being the color of cabs means many people purchase cars that are specifically not yellow, because of the connection, but they will purchase blue cars. People are more careful around the yellow vehicle for the same reason they are careful around the school bus: they know what the color means.
  • Of course, this is all a short-term worry: we won't be at the mercy human error for much longer.
  • sissij on 16 Mar 17
     
    I think this is very interesting that even the color of a car can be associated with the accident rate of the taxi. The yellow color on the taxi make use of the pattern recognition in human mind as people tends to make connection between yellow and caution. I really like this idea because it shows that sometimes the fallacies in our logic can benefit us in the modern society. It is not totally useless. --Sissi (3/15/2017)
sissij

Books are getting shorter; here's why - 0 views

www.consumeraffairs.com/...-shorter-heres-why-042613.html

social media bias technology

shared by sissij on 27 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • "A leading brain scientist in England points out that texting actually decreases the ability to think in complex ways because it eliminates complexity in sentence structure. Put it all together and it seems that no one has patience to sit quietly and read a book, as we might have a generation or even ten years ago."
  • "People are publishing books that are radically shorter than in the past," he says.
  • But books aren't just getting shorter, says Levin. What the reader wants from the author is changing too.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "But it's also a little bit of intellectual laziness," he adds. "That's what happens in an era when people are famous for being famous instead of famous for having accomplished something distinctive. If you and the media say you're special, you probably are."
  • "It's a paradox," he says. "We distrust authority if it's in the form of a major institution, like government, business or Wall Street. But if an individual claims authority in a given field, we assume the person must be telling the truth about his or her credentials. It's the natural trust we extend others -- we typically assume that people are who they say they are."
  • He says readers no longer want an author to prove his or her assertions. They just want to know the author is giving legitimate answers to their questions.
  • With a printed book people feel more committed to reading the entire thing, but with a digital book not so much, which is another reason a lot of today's books are shorter.
  • sissij on 27 Oct 17
     
    Interesting analysis on how social media affect human behavior. Intellectual laziness and our desire for simplicity leads us in the path of logical fallacies.
sissij

There's a New Cognitive Bias in Town: SPOT | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-is-true-if-i-do-say-so-myself

bias brain science psychology

shared by sissij on 07 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • You may be thinking, “just what we needed (sigh),” but anything that helps us see through the ways we fool ourselves is worth knowing about. It’s called the “Spontaneous Preference For Own Theories,” or “SPOT,” effect.
  • And now Aiden Gregg and colleagues at the University of Southampton have announced the SPOT effect, which is sort of a combination of all three. It posits that we’re more likely to believe a theory because it’s ours, and will even attempt to hold onto our faith in it in spite of mounting evidence.
  • The subjects were presented a series of seven facts about Wugworld, starting with some that supported the theory that Niffites were the predators — “Niffites are at least twice as large as Luupites.” — but changing over time to evidence that it was the Luupites who were actually the aggressors: “Luupites have been observed eating the dead bodies of Niffites.” After each new fact, the subjects were asked again if they still thought the theory was true.
  • sissij on 07 Mar 17
     
    This is a very interesting cognitive bias. It shows that people are very self-center and easily offended. I think it can be explained by the logic of evolution because people need to have a strong feeling for what belongs to them, no matter it is an object or some kind of idea. However, when the thing becomes others', people tend to care less. That's why it is always really hard to convince others to listen to your idea. --Sissi (3/6/2017)
sissij

Do You and Your Partner Fight Too Much, or Not Enough? Turns Out There's a "Magic Ratio" | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-for-much-couples-should-fight

psychology research brain science

shared by sissij on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Everyone knows couples break up when they fight too much. But what if they don't fight enough?
  • the “magic ratio” of positive and negative interactions in successful relationships is about 5 to 1.
  • So, too much fighting leads to breakups. That’s obvious. But what’s interesting about the theory is it implies that one sign of a doomed relationship could be not enough negativity.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The idea is that because people and environments are always changing, partners must provide one another with enough corrective feedback so they can be “on the same page.” 
  • Gottman and his colleagues found that couples who remained stoic during conflicts actually tended to fare worse than couples that were more “volatile".
  • These couples exert a healthy amount of influence on one another, both positively and negatively. But as long as their interactions favor the positive, they tend to enjoy relatively stable relationships over the long term.
  • The 5:1 ratio also seems to ring true in the business world.
  • The results showed that the most successful teams made an average of 5.6 positive comments per every negative one, while the average ratio among the lowest performing teams was just 0.36 to 1.
  • Negative feedback can prevent you from driving off a cliff.
  • sissij on 26 Apr 17
     
    I find it very interesting that sometimes having some negative things can result in a positive way. In TV series or books, we can always see a scene that when two people are arguing, there would be a third person saying that "wow, you guys have such a good relationship!" and they would reply "no" together. Bow there are research on that and we can see from the perspective of logic of evolution that human community needs correction and advices from others to adjust themselves. I think arguing may sometimes shorten the relationship between two people since they both show each other the worst side and there won't be much hide between them. --Sissi (4/26/2017)
dicindioha

Right and Left React to the Paris Climate Agreement News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...paris-treaty-reactions.html

shared by dicindioha on 04 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen.
  • “Its breakthrough was not in lifting nations up to higher levels of ambition, but rather in dropping expectations to the lowest common denominator.”
  • He argues that the treaty did little to reduce emissions because of one central flaw in the agreement’s logic: the “pledge and review” process that governed international talks. “That logic relied on a misunderstanding of what motivates developing nations,” he writes.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “There are a few reasons that explain conservatives who were Never-Trumpers during the election, and who remain anti-Trump today. [...] They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
       
      um interesting...
  • “That means praise him when he’s right, and find the most plausible possible defense when he’s wrong.”
  • “The conservative reaction to Trump’s Paris decision really drove home how this is all — and I do mean all — about waging culture war against the left.”
  • Rather than seeing the science in “pragmatic terms,” the president and the G.O.P. have made the issue into a “tribal struggle.” The cost of the right’s “desire to piss off lefty tree-huggers,” however, is an uncertain future for our grandchildren.
  • “A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world [...] was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence.”
  • “When it comes to decisions about strangers, the easiest, most accessible shortcut is our first impression. Unknowledgeable voters go for this shortcut.”
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
       
      choosing a favored candidate
  • he writes about his work on first impressions and their effect on political outcomes. When we don’t have a lot of information, he explains, our brains rely on “shortcuts”; low-information voters tend to rely on appearance to guide their decisions.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
       
      ***
  • dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
     
    the right and the left are presented to be in heavy disagreement from the quotes in these articles. understanding climate change is a thing that needs to be stopped will not get through some minds and it is very frustrating. this article also has a brief excerpt on quickly choosing a favored candidate based on limited information, similar to an interview!
sissij

New Research Suggests Working Out With a Friend, Even Online, Makes You Healthier | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ven-online-makes-you-healthier

research psychology social media

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • That exercise is a social activity is not surprising. For millions of years our forebears physically worked together to provide shelter, craft rudimentary tools, hunt, and gather. If anything is strange today it’s how little we need to use our bodies to survive, which helps account for so many of our physical and emotional problems. 
  • Being socially active is the main reason I’m drawn to teaching group fitness, which has accounted for half of my career since 2004 (and complements the solitary time spent writing and editing nicely).
  • As it turns out, your friends don’t even have to live near you—social media is helping foster this trend as well.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The researchers collected over five years of data from over a million runners, who collectively clocked in nearly 225 million miles. 
  • They noticed similar training patterns even if the runners were separated.
  • Weather, it turns out, did not dissuade one friend who saw their counterpart clocking in an extra ten minutes that day.
  • Risk of lagging behind proved to be a necessary catalyst for upping the ante. 
  • Which, obviously, is in good humor. But it helps.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    Human is essentially a social animal. People cannot live without a community. Although loneliness is a aspect of life deep in everybody's heart, nobody can refuse their nature to make friends, talk to people, and emotionally engaged with others. This follows the logic of revolution. In cross-country, our coach always tells us to run together and work together in practices and races. I think maybe he is doing that in purpose since people tends to perform better with their friends around them.
sissij

How Behavioral Economics Can Produce Better Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...care-behavioral-economics.html

new york times psychology research brain science

shared by sissij on 13 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • I’ll sometimes prescribe a particular brand of medication not because it has proved to be better, but because it happens to be the default option in my hospital’s electronic ordering system.
  • if a poster outside your room prompts me to think of your health instead of mine.
  • I’ll more readily change my practice if I’m shown data that my colleagues do something differently than if I’m shown data that a treatment does or doesn’t work.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • These confessions can be explained by the field of behavioral economics, which holds that human decision-making departs frequently, significantly and predictably from what would be expected if we acted in purely “rational” ways.
  • Rather, our behavior is powerfully influenced by our emotions, identity and environment, as well as by how options are presented to us.
  • (organ donation rates are over 90 percent in countries where citizens need to override a default and opt out of donation compared with 4 to 27 percent where they much choose to opt in)
  • Employees were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first was “usual care,” in which they received educational materials and free smoking cessation aids. The second was a reward program: Employees could receive up to $800 over six months if they quit. The third was a deposit program, in which smokers initially forked over $150 of their money, but if they quit, they got their deposit back along with a $650 bonus.
  • Those in the lottery group were eligible for a daily lottery prize with frequent small payouts and occasional large rewards — but only if they clocked in at or below their weight loss goal.
  • sissij on 13 Apr 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, people tend to follow the default. I think there is a phenomenon like inertia in human social behavior. Once we make up our mind doing something, we are very unlikely to make a change or make a correction. This has a subconscious influence on people so people can't notice it unless they are trained to avoid their logical fallacy. I found this a really good example of policy making can manipulate people's action and thoughts. --Sissi (4/13/2017)
katedriscoll

The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience | Boston Review - 0 views

bostonreview.net/...est-tell-science-pseudoscience

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it
  • pper’s answer emerged. Popper was born just after the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna—the birthplace of psychoanalysis—and received his doctorate in psychology in 1928. In the early 1920s Popper volunteered in the clinics of Alfred Adler, who had split with his former mentor, the creator of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Precocious interest in psychoanalysis, and his subsequent rejection of it, were crucial in Popper’s later formulation of his philosophical views on science.
  • At first, Popper was quite taken with logical empiricism, but he would diverge from the mainstream of the movement and develop his own framework for understanding scientific thought in his two influential books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, revised and translated to English in 1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1962). Popper claimed to have formulated his initial ideas about demarcation in 1919, when he was seventeen years old. He had, he writes, “wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”
caelengrubb

Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift | Simply Psychology - 0 views

www.simplypsychology.org/Kuhn-Paradigm.html

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth.
  • Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
  • A scientific revolution occurs when: (i) the new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality; and (ii) the new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Kuhn looked at the history of science and argued that science does not simply progress by stages based upon neutral observations
  • For Kuhn, the history of science is characterized by revolutions in scientific outlook. Scientists have a worldview or "paradigm"
  • A paradigm is a universally recognizable scientific achievement that, for a time, provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
  • Scientists accept the dominant paradigm until anomalies are thrown up.  Scientists then begin to question the basis of the paradigm itself, new theories emerge which challenge the dominant paradigm and eventually one of these new theories becomes accepted as the new paradigm.
  • A particular work may “define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.”
  • This is where the paradigm shift occurs.
  • The pre-paradigmatic state refers to a period before a scientific consensus has been reached.
  • Phase 2: Normal Science
  • A paradigm is established which lays the foundations for legitimate work within the discipline. Scientific work then consists in articulation of the paradigm, in solving puzzles that it throws up.
  • It is necessary for normal science to be uncritical. If all scientists were critical of a theory and spent time trying to falsify it, no detailed work would ever get done.
  • Phase 1: Pre-sciencePhase 1: Pre-science
  • Phase 3: Crisis
  • "Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like
  • Anomalies become serious, and a crisis develops if the anomalies undermine the basic assumptions of the paradigm and attempts to remove them consistently fail
  • If the anomalies can be resolved, the crisis is over and normal science resumes. If not, there is a scientific revolution which involves a change of paradigm.
  • Revoluti
  • Phase 4: Revolution
  • Eventually a new paradigm will be established, but not as a result of any logically compelling justification.
  • The enormous impact of Thomas Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning.
  • For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes.
  • Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists
  • Successive paradigms are incommensurable. Kuhn says that a later paradigm may be a better instrument for solving puzzles than an earlier one.  But if each paradigm defines its own puzzles, what is a puzzle for one paradigm may be no puzzle at all for another
  • Science does not change its paradigm over night. Younger scientists take a new paradigm forward
ilanaprincilus06

Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-diagnose-you-as-a-psychopath

psychopathology logical fallacies neuroscience scientific method

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers.
  • Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film.
  • What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy. Based on this, and some genetic tests, Fallon concluded that he himself was a psychopath
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.
  • areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.
  • The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.
  • these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.
  • just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.
  • In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.
  • “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.
  • This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.
  • By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.
  • real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.
  • it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
pier-paolo

ON EDUCATION; A Failure of Logic And Logistics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-of-logic-and-logistics.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 may go down in history as the most unpopular piece of education legislation ever created. It has been criticized for setting impossibly high standards -- that every child in America must be proficient in reading and math by 2014
  • Now it turns out that about a third of the 8,000 transfers -- children often traveling over an hour to attend crowded schools -- have been moved from one school labeled failing under the law to another failing school.
  • Overcrowding breeds tension.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • How could they? As might be expected from a law that tries to create a single accountability formula for every American school, No Child Left Behind is replete with technicalities and split hairs.
  • Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not want to take on the Bush administration over the federal law. The chancellor denied this, saying ''nothing is served'' by turning a tough equity issue into politics.
  • Recently, Mr. Klein had his photo taken with Bill Gates, who presented the city with $51 million to create small high schools. But principals of small high schools, like Louis Delgado of Vanguard in Manhattan, say transfers have devastated them this year.
mmckenziejr01

The Most Egregious Straw Men of 2016 | Inverse - 0 views

www.inverse.com/...aw-men-arguments-politics-2016

straw man fallacy cognitive biases politics

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Fallacies are illicit shortcuts in reasoning, bad arguments that sound good but don’t actually make logical sense. Politicians and other public figures use them all the time ad nauseam in speeches and debates in order to better capture the hearts and minds of their audience.
  • But of all the logical fallacies out there, one stands out as being particularly powerful and popular, especially in politics: the straw man.
  • But that’s the truth, and the truth is irrelevant when it comes to fallacies. Just the fact that Clinton mentioned the term open borders, combined with her more liberal stance on immigration, was enough for Trump to say that she’s in favor of totally open borders
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The straw man fallacy involves the construction of a second argument that to some degree resembles, in a simplified or exaggerated way, the argument that your opponent is really making. It is much easier for you to attack that perverted point than it is to address the original point being made.
  • Clinton did not say she wanted to get rid of the Second Amendment in any sense. She had expressed support for expanding background checks and a possible assault weapons ban. Those things are reasonable (moderate, even), so it’s much simpler for Trump to ignore her argument and make one up for her
  • What are in large part reasonable measures taken to avoid unnecessary offences are recast by these Republicans to be softness or attacks on people’s freedom of speech. By connoting political correctness with these attributes, Republican politicians can ensure that their constituent remains hostile to the idea. Then, when they come across an argument in need of simplification, they can call back to that already-crafted association.
  • Sanders’s healthcare plan would have ended Medicare and the ACA as we know them, but only to replace them with a universal healthcare system. No one stood to lose their coverage, but the way Clinton was arguing, it looked like people might. By essentially leaving out half of Sanders’s argument, Clinton made a case against a fictional version of Sanders that seemed just real enough to fool the average voter.
  • Still, mostly everyone today understands that the Earth isn’t flat. They recognize that, as Scaramucci said, “science” got one wrong there. By equating these two concepts, he assumes any argument that recognizes climate change to also be one that claims the Earth is flat. For that reason, this particular brand of climate change denial wins the award for best (or maybe worst) straw man of 2016.
  • mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17
     
    Here are a few examples of candidates using straw man fallacies to try to win over voters during the 2016 election. This shows just how prevalent cognitive biases are in our everyday lives without us even noticing them.
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