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Javier E

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

medical research bias error science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
  • even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you
  • studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes.
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  • studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller
  • The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.
  • nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.
  • Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.
  • Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.
  • The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
  • even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested
  • even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades.
  • much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s
  • Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right
  • His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work
  • while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”
  • “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.
  • What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.
  • Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.
  • We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough
  • Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
Javier E

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...1

medical research bias error science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community
  • for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem
  • he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals
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  • “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
  • Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.
  • if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.
  • He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals
  • Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.
Javier E

Proofiness - Charles Seife - NYTimes.com - 1 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...k-art-of-statistical-deception

numbers statistics causation regression randomness

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • From school days, we are trained to treat numbers as platonic, perfect objects. They are the closest we get to absolute truth. Two plus two always equals four. Numbers in the abstract are pure, perfect creatures. The numbers we deal with in the real world are different. They’re created by humans. And we humans are fallible. Our measurements have errors. Our research misses stuff, and we lie sometimes. The numbers we create aren’t perfect platonic ideals
  • We’re hard wired to reject the idea that there’s no reason for something happening. This is how Las Vegas makes its money. You’ll have people at the craps table thinking they’re set for a winning streak because they’ve been losing. And you’ll have people who have been winning so they think they’ll keep winning. Neither is true.
  • Randumbness is our stupidity about true randomness. We are unable to accept the fact that there’s not a pattern in certain things, so we project our own beliefs and patterns on data, which is pattern-free.
Javier E

What do the best classrooms in the world look like? - By Amanda Ripley - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/2271733

Technology learning education performance

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking. They look, in fact, a lot like American ones—circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard.
  • "I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets."
  • So how to explain that these old-fashioned classrooms tend to crank out kids who possess far more of the math and science skills valued by modern-day employers?
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  • The American system is a lot easier," De Jesus says. "When I was in California, I barely ever studied and did pretty well in my classes."
  • Finnish students start going to school a year later than American kids, and they do less homework on average. Standardized tests are rare. And yet, in 2006, Finnish teenagers ranked first in math and science among 30 OECD countries. (The United States ranked 25th in math and 21st in science.)
Javier E

From Jesus To Gandhi: Re-Reading the Gospels - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...al-protest-in-the-gospels.html

jesus religion ethics protest

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • what do you think Christ meant when he said that if a man asks for your coat, give him your cloak also?" This was taught to me by Jesuits NOT as a call for forgiveness but rather a call to Social Protest.
  • what this passage is saying is that if someone sues you for everything you have, then you might as well give him your cloak as well. Which would have left you stark-naked, and therefore embarrassing everyone in the room, from the court, to the judge, to the plaintiff themselves.
  • whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well. A strike on the right cheek would be a backhand (remember the striker wouldn’t have used the left, or sinister, hand). That backhand is an insult; to "offer the other cheek" is to offer an open-handed slap, which again for the time, would have been inviting a duel. A duel among equals.
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  • And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Meaning that if a master commands you to carry something a mile down the road, you carry it the mile, as commanded, but then you go the extra mile in protest
  • Non-violent protest of unfair civic institutions - a way to raise yourself up, without raising a hand. This is my Christ. This is why I still follow him.
Javier E

Global Warming Denial Explained by Rebecca Costa - The Daily Beast - 3 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...al-explained-by-rebecca-costa-

facts belief complexity irrationality global warming

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • While railing about how difficult it’s become for the man on the street to separate facts from beliefs, he brought up his favorite global impasse again: climate change. Despite scientific evidence that stacks higher than the Egyptian pyramids, Maher lamented that there are still Americans walking around who “don’t think the sun is hot.”
  • Maher asks why facts are becoming marginalized. The answer is right under his nose. When Darwin discovered the slow pace of evolutionary change (millions of years), he also explained what happens to us when the complexity of our problems exceeds the capabilities our brains have evolved to this point. It’s simple: when facts become incomprehensible, we switch to beliefs. In other words, all societies eventually become irrational when confronted with problems that are too complex, too large, too messy to solve.
  • Thankfully, we have two weapons earlier civilizations didn’t have: models for high failure rates and neuroscience. Take the venture capital model for example. No matter how much due diligence venture capitalists perform, they can’t pick a winner from a loser more than 20 percent of the time. But the enormous success of those winners overshadows the failures, so venture capitalists are successful in spite of themselves.
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  • Secondly, we can turn to neuroscience. Until recently we haven’t been able to look under the skull and see what the brain does when a problem is highly complex. The good news? The brain has a secret weapon against complexity, a process neuroscientists are now calling “insight.” We are learning more everyday about insight’s ability to catch the brain up to complexity—the real antidote to reverting to beliefs as a default.
Javier E

What do the best classrooms in the world look like? - By Amanda Ripley - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...2

learning education technology comparative international

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • school systems in Singapore, Finland, and Korea recruit 100 percent of their teachers from the top one-third of their academic cohort
  • In the United States, about 23 percent of new teachers—and only 14 percent in high-poverty schools—come from the top one-third. "It is a remarkably large difference in approach, and in results,
  • Suben, like most great teachers, is in a hurry. She said computers can be useful, but mostly because they save her time—by assessing what her kids know more efficiently than she can.
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  • When I ask Suben which gadget she would bring with her if she had to teach on a desert island, she chooses the overhead projector, without hesitation. "I wouldn't be able to give up the overhead, because then I'd have to turn my back to the class," she said. The oldest technology in the room is the one that helps her the most with a fundamental human skill—presenting material while staying connected to every student in the room, watching who is getting it and who is not, without having to turn to write on a chalkboard.
  • One of the most reliable indicators of academic achievement among English speakers in Canada is working knowledge of a second language, if it was one learned at school instead of natively, even better. Learning to think, write and speak in two or more languages has been proven repeatedly to boost intellectual development across a range of subjects
Javier E

Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ing-sad-makes-us-more-creative

sadness melancholy creativity focus persistence

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • For thousands of years, people have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative.
  • People who received negative feedback created better collages, at least when compared to those who received positive feedback or no feedback at all. Furthermore, those with low baselines of DHEAS proved particularly vulnerable to the external effects of frowns, so that they proved to be the most creative of all.
  • It turns out that states of sadness make us more attentive and detail oriented, more focused
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  • angst and sadness promote “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers and make fewer arithmetic mistakes.
  • shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
  • There are two important lessons of this research. The first is that our fleeting feelings can change the way we think. While sadness makes us more focused and diligent — the spotlight of attention is sharpened — happiness seems to have the opposite effect, so that good moods make us 20 percent more likely to have a moment of insight. The second takeaway is that many of our creative challenges involve tasks that require diligence, persistence and focus. It’s not easy making a collage or writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem, which is why sometimes being a little miserable can improve our creative performance.
  • Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.”
  • While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
Javier E

In Defense of Naïve Reading - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-defense-of-naive-reading

literature education knowledge science naive theory

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of  “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them.
  • But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting
  • The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on.
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  • literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy
  • Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view.
  • such works also can directly deliver a  kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such.
Javier E

Surveying religious knowledge « The Immanent Frame - 0 views

blogs.ssrc.org/...religious-knowledge

faith knowledge religion science literacy survey Pew Charitable Trust

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion. If, for example, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics “do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ,” then perhaps it is a mistake simply to identify Catholicism with what Catholic bishops say it is. To conclude that Americans are “uninformed” about “their own traditions” betrays a subtle bias in favor of elites and begs the question of what constitutes one’s “own” religion: are we “illiterate,” or do we simply disagree about what belongs in the “canon”?
  • Is ‘having correct beliefs’ the main point of religion? There may be socially useful reasons to play that down in favor of encouraging shared values: compassion, service, and social justice.
  • People do not know who Maimonides was, I think, for the same reason they do not know the origin of “devil’s advocate.” Our culture has become more pluralistic, and people draw upon its elements in the way of the bricoleur to construct a web of meanings that is flexible, contextually activated, and what we would call “post-modern”
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  • Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism.
  • if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed
  • To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism. If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do?
  • The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.
  • The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.
  • what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.
  • I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.
  • belief, faith and knowledge, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion and science, religion in the U.S., religious literacy, surveys, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey
Javier E

Mario Vargas Llosa On The History And Future Of Literature | The New Republic - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...mario-vargas-llosa-literature

history literature knowledge freedom books specialization humanities

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • literature's unrealities, literature's lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity.
  • prophecy
Javier E

The Spoils of Happiness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-spoils-of-happiness

happiness philosophy pleasure feeling knowledge belief

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.
  • If happiness is not a state of mind, if happiness is a kind of tango between your feelings on one hand and events and things in the world around you on the other, then there’s the possibility of error about whether you’re happy. If you believe you’re experiencing pleasure or, perhaps especially, pain, then, presumably, you are. But the view of happiness here allows that “you may think you’re happy, but you’re not.”
  • One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish.
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  • Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them.
  • viewing happiness as subject to external influence limits our control — not just in the sense that whether you get to live happily might depend on how things go, but also in the sense that what happiness is is partly a matter of how things beyond you are. We might do everything we can to live happily — and have everything it takes on our part to be happy, all the right thoughts and feelings — and yet fall short, even unbeknownst to us.
Javier E

Op-Ed Contributor - Scientifically Tested Tests - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...20engel.html

testing learning

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.
  • In recent years, psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle as the forces that govern our moral choices and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping. And many promising techniques already used by child development experts could provide a starting point for improving school assessments.
Javier E

Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...19fob-essay-t.html

information learning thinking education brain science technology computer

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Some of the top digital designs of the moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings. That is false. We don’t know how information is represented in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at this moment, we don’t.
  • At school, standardized testing rules. Outside school, something similar happens. Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption.
  • What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.
Javier E

Burke's Corner: Science, philosophy and humility - Hawking rejects all three - 0 views

burkescorner.blogspot.com/...ophy-and-humility-hawking.html

science religion humility metaphysics

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim - that "philosophy is dead". From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millenia has reflected on transcendence and humanity's place in a vast universe. Hawking's lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes "the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought", despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.
  • mathematician Eric Priest compares Hawking's claims with the humility that should be at the core of the pursuit of scientific knowledge:As a scientist, you are continually questioning, rarely coming up with a definitive answer. The limitations of your own knowledge and expertise together with the beauty and mystery of life and the universe often fill you with a sense of profound humility. Thus, unequivocal assertions are not part of a genuine scientific quest.
Javier E

Stephen Hawking on God, Science and the Origins of the Universe - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4206804575467921609024244.html

God universe anthropic principle multiverse cosmology

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
Javier E

Tell all the truth slant - Philosophy and Life - 1 views

www.markvernon.com/...index.php

religion truth poetry humanity Moses Socrates

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 10 - Cached
  • “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” wrote the poet Emily Dickinson: “Success in circuit lies.” The advice is itself a truth, a commendation in the art of looking sideways.
  • Dickinson lived in an age when it was becoming impossible to find truth straightforwardly,
  • What is striking about Dickinson, though, is that she both experienced the darkness of that doubt, and found a way to transform it into an experience that produced meaning. It’s all about the pursuit of the circuitous.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • That her medium was poetry is no mere detail. It is almost the whole story. Poetry not only allows her to express herself – her desire for consolation, her anxiety about what’s disappearing. It is also the form of writing par excellence that can keep an eye open for what is peripheral. It can discern truths that words otherwise struggle to articulate. It glimpses, and hopes.
  • to know Socrates was to know someone who sought all the truth, and in so doing, realised it mostly lies out of sight.
  • Moses too does not see anything directly. He apparently doesn’t see anything at all. Instead, an oblique experience is granted to him. It is better described as a kind of unknowing, rather than knowing. He must leave behind what he has previously observed because this seeing consists in not seeing. That which is sought transcends all knowledge.
  • What she realises is that the truth which is beyond us, which is discerned only indirectly, is the only truth that is truly worth seeking. That which we can readily grasp and manipulate is too easy for us. It’s humdrum. It leaves life too small for us, the creature with an eye for the transcendent. But look further, and what you are offered is what she calls truth’s ‘superb surprise’. That’s why success lies in circuit. Our humanity is spoken to, from a direction – a source – that we had not expected. And our humanity expands as a result.
Javier E

About My Job: The Mathematician - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...t-my-job-the-mathmetician.html

math creativity

shared by Javier E on 01 Sep 10 - Cached
  • For many people, math seems like an impenetrable subject that only a chosen few are able to understand
  • Most people also don't have a very good idea of what exactly it is that a mathematician does
  • students are taught a collection of algorithms for solving problems, but are rarely given insights into how these algorithms developed, what problems they were originally used to solve, or how different techniques are related.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • when students become stuck on a problem, they are often too eager to throw up their hands in frustration, rather than buckle down and try to think creatively (in the words of Dan Meyer, students often lack patient problem solving skills).  Many students don't even think of mathematics as a subject that requires creativity
  • a website called Math Goes Pop!.
Javier E

Scientists Square Off on Evolutionary Value of Helping Relatives - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31social.html

evolution altruism inclusive fitness family

shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Javier E on 31 Aug 10
     
    How a scientific revolution happens.
Javier E

We've Seen This Movie Before - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...weve-seen-this-movie-before

attribution bias cognitive bias partisan

shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 10 - Cached
  • If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.
  • The only thing more breathtaking than the effrontery of the move is the ease with which so many fall in with it. I guess it’s because both those who perform it and those who eagerly consume it save themselves the trouble of serious thought.
  • Javier E on 31 Aug 10
     
    Attribution bias at work.
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