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The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science.

But economic outcomes are the result of human decision-making. To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.

After so-called behavioral economics began to go mainstream, Professor Thaler turned his attention to helping solve a variety of business and, increasingly, public policy issues. As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”

it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”

Professor Thaler’s narrative ultimately demonstrates that by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.

Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.

It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.

Compared against alternative moral philosophies, like those of Kant or Aristotle, Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

The “misbehaving” of Professor Thaler’s title is supposed to refer to how human actions are inconsistent with rationalist economic theory

molecular biologists were soon speaking of information, not to mention codes, libraries, alphabets and transcription, without any sense of metaphor. In Gleick’s words, “Genes themselves are made of bits.” At the same time, physicists exploring what Einstein had called the “spooky” paradoxes of quantum mechanics began to see information as the substance from which everything else in the universe derives. As the physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it in a paper title, “It From Bit.”

It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

Mr. Sperber wanted to figure out why people persisted in picking out evidence that supported their views and ignored the rest — what is known as confirmation bias — leading them to hold on to a belief doggedly in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

Other scholars have previously argued that reasoning and irrationality are both products of evolution. But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia.

distortions in reasoning are unintended side effects of blind evolution. They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory. People are more likely to remember items they are familiar with, like their own beliefs, rather than those of others.

What is revolutionary about argumentative theory is that it presumes that since reason has a different purpose — to win over an opposing group — flawed reasoning is an adaptation in itself, useful for bolstering debating skills.

attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.

To Ms. Narvaez, “reasoning is something that develops from experience; it’s a subset of what we really know.” And much of what we know cannot be put into words, she explained, pointing out that language evolved relatively late in human development.

Mr. Sperber and Mr. Mercier contend that as people became better at producing and picking apart arguments, their assessment skills evolved as well.

“At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation of arguments,” they write. “When people are motivated to reason, they do a better job at accepting only sound arguments, which is quite generally to their advantage.” Groups are more likely than individuals to come up with better results, they say, because they will be exposed to the best arguments

In a new paper, he and Hélène Landemore, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, propose that the arguing and assessment skills employed by groups make democratic debate the best form of government for evolutionary reasons, regardless of philosophical or moral rationales.

Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock,

Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative,"

cultural memes. The Darwinesque concept originates in Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are analogous to genes, Dennett has said, "replicating units of culture" that spread from mind to mind like a virus. Religion, chess, songs, clothing, tolerance for free speech—all have been described as memes. Tallis considers it absurd to talk of a noun-phrase like "tolerance for free speech" as a discrete entity. But Dennett argues that Tallis's objections are based on "a simplistic idea of what one might mean by a unit." Memes aren't units? Well, in that spirit, says Dennett, organisms aren't units of biology, nor are species—they're too complex, with too much variation. "He's got to allow theory to talk about entities which are not simple building blocks," Dennett says.

How is it that he perceives the glass of water on the table? How is it that he feels a sense of self over time? How is it that he can remember a patient he saw in 1973, and then cast his mind forward to his impending visit to the zoo? There are serious problems with trying to reduce such things to impulses in the brain, he argues. We can explain "how the light gets in," he says, but not "how the gaze looks out." And isn't it astonishing, he adds, that much neural activity seems to have no link to consciousness? Instead, it's associated with things like controlling automatic movements and regulating blood pressure. Sure, we need the brain for consciousness: "Chop my head off, and my IQ descends." But it's not the whole story. There is more to perceptions, memories, and beliefs than neural impulses can explain. The human sphere encompasses a "community of minds," Tallis has written, "woven out of a trillion cognitive handshakes of shared attention, within which our freedom operates and our narrated lives are led." Those views on perception and memory anchor his attack on "neurobollocks." Because if you can't get the basics right, he says, then it's premature to look to neuroscience for clues to complex things like love.

Yes, many unanswered questions persist. But these are early days, and neuroscience remains immature, says Churchland, a professor emerita of philosophy at University of California at San Diego and author of the subfield-spawning 1986 book Neurophilosophy. In the 19th century, she points out, people thought we'd never understand light. "Well, by gosh," she says, "by the time the 20th century rolls around, it turns out that light is electromagnetic radiation. ... So the fact that at a certain point in time something seems like a smooth-walled mystery that we can't get a grip on, doesn't tell us anything about whether some real smart graduate student is going to sort it out in the next 10 years or not."

Dennett claims he's got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title "should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act," writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We're not aware of everything, he tells me, only a "limited window." He describes that stream of consciousness as "the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain." "You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you've learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?" Dennett asks. "The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain."

There are two theories that may explain the Stroop effect: Speed of Processing Theory: the interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named. Selective Attention Theory: the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words.

Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life

But the new findings, which are described in detail in a paper this week in the journal Science, are a 180-degree flip from a year ago, when mission scientists said that Curiosity had found no signs of methane, placing an upper limit of 1.3 parts per billion by volume.

When scientists first saw the data suggesting that they’d captured a gravitational wave, they thought the results seemed to good to be true. Past claims of gravitational waves have proven unreliable, and there are many possible sources of error.

Gravitational waves confirmedAstrophysicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples that travel at the speed of light through the fabric of space-time. A 1916 theory of Albert Einstein’s predicted their existence. .oembed-asset-photo-image { width: 100%; }

noting that the history of particle physics is rife with statistical flukes and anomalies that disappeared when more data was compiled

A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned

Physicists could not help wondering if history was about to repeat itself. It was four years ago this week that the same two teams’ detection of matching bumps in Large Hadron Collider data set the clock ticking for the discovery of the Higgs boson six months later.

If the particle is real, Dr. Lykken said, physicists should know by this summer, when they will have 10 times as much data to present to scientists from around the world who will convene in Chicago

The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.

CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.The main news since then has been mainly that there is no news yet, only tantalizing hints, bumps in the data, that might be new particles and signposts of new theories, or statistical demons.

Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.

“The more nonstandard the better,” said Joe Lykken, the director of research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a member of one of the CERN teams. “It will give people a lot to think about. We get paid to speculate.”

When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.It might, they hoped, be the end of the beginning.

Such a discovery would augur a fruitful future for cosmological wanderings and for the CERN collider, which will be running for the next 20 years.

The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive.

Even the best-developed social sciences like economics have nothing like this status.

Is there any work on the effectiveness of teaching that is solidly enough established to support major policy decisions?

The case for a negative answer lies in the predictive power of the core natural sciences compared with even the most highly developed social sciences

when it comes to generating reliable scientific knowledge, there is nothing more important than frequent and detailed predictions of future events.  We may have a theory that explains all the known data, but that may be just the result of our having fitted the theory to that data.  The strongest support for a theory comes from its ability to correctly predict data that it was not designed to explain.

While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. 

most social science research falls far short of the natural sciences’ standard of controlled experiments.

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive.

Because of the many interrelated causes at work in social systems, many questions are simply “impervious to experimentation.”

even when we can get reliable experimental results, the causal complexity restricts us to “extremely conditional, statistical statements,” which severely limit the range of cases to which the results apply.

above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.

One thing that’s changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There’s a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that’s changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.

The other thing that’s changed is that there’s more applied philosophy. Let’s apply philosophical theory to real-life problems, like medical ethics, environmental ethics, gender issues. This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory.

here’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world.

Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically. We take a lot for granted. It’s obvious to us, for example, that individual’s ethical truths are equally important.

it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious

The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.

About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Even criticizing it, or saying it’s not valid, is taking it seriously

This is what we have to teach our children. Even things that go against their intuition they need to take seriously. What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it’s arguments that change i

We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it’s inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power.

I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active

Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat.

how can you make the case that they should study philosophy?

ches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things. It makes life so much more interesting. It’s us at our most human. And it helps us increase our humanity. No matter what you do, that’s an asset.

What do you think are the biggest philosophical issues of our time? The growth in scientific knowledge presents new philosophical issues.

The idea of the multiverse. Where are we in the universe? Physics is blowing our minds about this.

The question of whether some of these scientific theories are really even scientific. Can we get predictions out of them?

And with the growth in cognitive science and neuroscience. We’re going into the brain and getting these images of the brain. Are we discovering what we really are? Are we solving the problem of free will? Are we learning that there isn’t any free will? How much do the advances in neuroscience tell us about the deep philosophical issues?

With the decline of religion is there a sense of the meaninglessness of life and the easy consumerist answer that’s filling the space religion used to occupy? This is something that philosophers ought to be addressing.

then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted.

we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality".

The credibility of the President's statements on the issue is also eroding."Russia is a ruse, I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does," Trump said during his news conference on February 16.But since then, details have emerged of repeated meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials, casting doubt on the president's words.

A second reason why questions about Russia will linger is because what some observers see as Trump's odd fixation with Moscow raises constant questions about his motives.

The President's unique personality also appears at times to be exacerbating the sense of crisis being fostered in Washington.In theory, he could flush away questions about whether undeclared links with Russia are influencing his attitude to Moscow by releasing his tax returns.His refusal to do so gives oxygen to claims that he has some secret business or creditor relationships with Russia that compromise him.

Democrats have a clear political incentive to prolong a situation which is helping to unify them, to slow Trump's agenda by bogging the White House down with investigations and to present the President in a scary light.

Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to empathize with others by predicting their reactions.

paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.

If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past,

If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists’ “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one’s cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.