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At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his staff members even coined their own name for his sometimes dubious assertions: “Flynn facts.”

“He has regularly engaged in the reckless public promotion of conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, with disregard for the risks that giving credence to those theories could pose to the public,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday.

“Someone who is so oblivious to the facts, or intentionally ignorant of them, should not be entrusted with policy decisions that affect the safety of the American people,” Mr. Smith added.

Today it feels like the days peel on by, and a vacation which may last days or weeks is gone in mere hours. This is a common human experience.

There are an awful lot of theories that give us insight. But a direct scientific law so far remains elusive.

In 1877, the “ratio theory” was born, which states that we compare intervals to the total amount of time we’ve been alive. This can also be called “proportional theory,” the idea that as we age, our sense of the present begins to feel short as compared to our total lifespan.

The British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington once wrote, “No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.”

Adding to the sense of finality was the simple fact — as Eddington might have pointed out — that faster-than-light neutrinos had never been confirmed by theory. Or as John G. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, put it in an e-mail, “An interesting result of all this fracas is that no new model I have seen (or heard of from my friends) really is credible to explain the faster-than-light neutrinos.”

Eddington’s dictum is not as radical as it might sound. He made it after early measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe made it appear that our planet was older than the cosmos in which it resides — an untenable notion. “It means that science is not just a book of facts, it is understanding as well,”

the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between). The problem is relevant for at least three reasons.

The first is philosophical: Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery.

The second reason is civic: our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard.

I am sitting across the table from my thesis advisor. We stare at one another in silence, our faces reflecting equal levels of frustration. After a 15-minute debate on the differences between a parameter and a constraint, it has become apparent my advisor is an engineer, and I am not. My advisor and I meet weekly to discuss my research. Each week we inevitably hit a wall; expressing the same words, but interpreting them in entirely different ways. With a background in biology and design, my definition of details often do not align with an engineer’s. However, we both know the objectives of my thesis, and both want to work towards that goal (and diploma)  So why are we having such a difficult time communicating?

ealization that our different disciplines do not speak the same language.

There was never room for another subject like art, no space for speaking two languages fluently. My educational system created silos between the different disciplines. Once I chose one path, essentially my language, other subjects became foreign.

Evolutionary biology is a science, so it can be legally taught in public schools when it's treated as a science and isn't promoted as a support for atheism or materialism.

few would deny that Darwinian evolution has larger implications that aren't friendly to theism

the Court held in Lynch v. Donnelly that "not every law that confers an indirect, remote, or incidental benefit upon [religion] is, for that reason alone, constitutionally invalid"

Until subsequent experiments back up these results, it would be foolish, they say, to throw out a foundational theory of physics.

"The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong."

"The implications could be huge. Particles that move faster than light are essentially moving backwards in time, which could make the phrase cause and effect obsolete."

What would a good theory of the brain actually look like?

Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations.

The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another.

DO you remember the controversy two years ago, when the Yale law professors Amy Chua (author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) and Jed Rubenfeld published “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America”?We sure do. As psychologists, we found the book intriguing, because its topic — why some people succeed and others don’t — has long been a basic research question in social science, and its authors were advancing a novel argument. They contended that certain ethnic and religious minority groups (among them, Cubans, Jews and Indians) had achieved disproportionate success in America because their individual members possessed a combination of three specific traits: a belief that their group was inherently superior to others; a sense of personal insecurity; and a high degree of impulse control.

it offered no rigorous quantitative evidence to support its theory. This, of course, didn’t stop people from attacking or defending the book. But it meant that the debate consisted largely of arguments based on circumstantial evidence.

we took the time to empirically test the triple package hypothesis directly. Our results have just been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. We found scant evidence for Professors Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory.

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.

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.

As the title suggests, Kaku’s latest concern is with what he calls the “holy grail” of all science, the metaphorical “umbilical cord” of our infant universe, whenever it was (or wasn’t) born out of the alleged multiverse. He wanted to write a balanced account of the physics community’s quest to prove string theory — and thus to resolve the messy, imperfect Standard Model of subatomic particles into one elegant theory of everything

This book is like a State of the Union where the union is all of existence.

Right now the known laws of the universe — “the theory of almost everything,” he calls it — can be written on a single sheet of paper. There’s Einstein’s general relativity on one line, and then a couple more for the Standard Model. “The problem is that the two theories hate each other,” he said. “They’re based on different math, different principles. Every time you put them together it blows up in your face. Why should nature be so clumsy?”

Conspiratorial videos and websites about COVID-19 are going viral. Here’s how one of the authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook” says you can fight back. One big takeaway: Focus your efforts on people who can hear evidence and think rationally.

Conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be proliferating, and some may even be taking root. So I asked Lewandowsky to share how he identifies and understands them, and what we can do to sort through the confusion. The interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is discussed at length on the internet by people who are not bona fide journalists or government officials or whistleblowers in an organization or investigative committees of regulators. They’re completely independent sources, individuals who self-nominate and put themselves forward as being in possession of the truth. In principle, that could be true. But then if you look at the way these people think and talk and communicate, you discover their cognition is different from what I would call conventional cognition.

ohannes Kepler was one of the leading characters in the history of astronomy. His most famous achievement was the three laws of planetary motion, still taught in courses today. However, like all other human beings, he was not perfect and made mistakes

Johannes Kepler was one of the most influential figures in the history of astronomy. His three laws of planetary movement changed the world of science significantly and became a foundation for other scientists to build theories upon.

Nonetheless, there are theories in his past that are not even close to reality.

However, there remains many fascinating and unanswered questions when it comes to light, many of which arise from its dual nature. For instance, how is it that light can be apparently without mass, but still behave as a particle? And how can it behave like a wave and pass through a vacuum, when all other waves require a medium to propagate?

This included rejecting Aristotle’s theory of light, which viewed it as being a disturbance in the air (one of his four “elements” that composed matter), and embracing the more mechanistic view that light was composed of indivisible atoms

In Young’s version of the experiment, he used a slip of paper with slits cut into it, and then pointed a light source at them to measure how light passed through it

we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought

if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I

Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.

How Phantom Limbs Explain Consciousness

Almost all people who have an amputation experience a phantom. Usually the effect fades within days, but in some cases it can remain for a lifetime.

The brain constructs a model of the self that neuroscientists call the body schema. The body schema is a simulation. It takes in touch, vision, and baseline information about what’s connected to what, and builds a virtual model of your body.

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.