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Adam Clark

The power of irrationally positive thinking - The Week - 0 views

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    In The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, Tali Sharot argues that we have a neurobiological basis for imagining a positive future. "Humans," she writes, "do not hold a positivity bias on account of having read too many self-help books. Rather, optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain."
Adam Clark

Epistemic Intuitions - 0 views

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    We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone's condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology
Adam Clark

A color-coded map of the world's most and least emotional countries - 0 views

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    "Since 2009, the Gallup polling firm has surveyed people in 150 countries and territories on, among other things, their daily emotional experience. Their survey asks five questions, meant to gauge whether the respondent felt significant positive or negative emotions the day prior to the survey. The more times that people answer "yes" to questions such as "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the more emotional they're deemed to be."
Adam Clark

The changing face of psychology | Science | theguardian.com - 0 views

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    "In 1959, an American researcher named Ted Sterling reported something disturbing. Of 294 articles published across four major psychology journals, 286 had reported positive results - that is, a staggering 97% of published papers were underpinned by statistically significant effects. Where, he wondered, were all the negative results - the less exciting or less conclusive findings? Sterling labelled this publication bias a form of malpractice. After all, getting published in science should never depend on getting the "right results"."
Adam Clark

Formalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

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    "The guiding idea behind formalism is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an abstract sector of reality but is much more akin to a game, bringing with it no more commitment to an ontology of objects or properties than ludo or chess. This idea has some intuitive plausibility: consider the tyro toiling at multiplication tables or the student using a standard algorithm for differentiating or integrating a function. It also corresponds to some aspects of the practice of advanced mathematicians in some periods-for example, the treatment of imaginary numbers for some time after Bombelli's introduction of them, and perhaps the attitude of some contemporary mathematicians towards the higher flights of set theory. Finally, it is often the position to which philosophically naïve respondents will gesture towards, when pestered by questions as to the nature of mathematics."
Adam Clark

Room lighting affects decision making, study suggests - Medical News Today - 0 views

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    "Crime dramas frequently depict detectives interrogating suspected criminals under bright lights to get the truth out of them. Now, a new study may lend credence to this tactic, as it suggests human emotion - both positive or negative - is experienced more intensely under bright lights."
Adam Clark

Faith and Reason - 0 views

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    "Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of justification for religious belief. Because both can purportedly serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two-that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims-whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Those who have taken the latter view disagree as to whether faith or reason ought to prevail when the two are in conflict. Kierkegaard, for instance, prioritizes faith even to the point that it becomes positively irrational, while Locke emphasizes the reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine's irrationality-conflict with itself or with known facts-is a sign that it is unsound. Other thinkers have theorized that faith and reason each govern their own separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict are resolved on the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the disputed claim is, for example, empirical or logical. Some relatively recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have denied that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed by faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas are accessible to thorough rational examination. This has presented a challenge to religious thinkers to explain how an admittedly nonrational or transrational form of language can hold meaningful cognitive content."
Adam Clark

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
    • Adam Clark
       
      Sums up one of the main points of the article right here.
  • Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
    • Adam Clark
       
      Impressions or beliefs remain even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. Sounds like confirmation bias to me.
  • Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,”
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • reason is an evolved trait
  • Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
  • If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias.
  • The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
    • Adam Clark
       
      Here the counter-argument couched in evolutionary psych about its adaptive function - hypersociability.
  • Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.
  • reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group.
  • “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.
    • Adam Clark
       
      Environment changed too quickly for our evolutionary progress to keep up.
  • People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people.
  • “One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
  • When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
  • it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain
  • If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.
  • We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together,
    • Adam Clark
       
      This is the opposite side to doubting our group members, once we trust them, we can be somewhat blind in our trust.
  • This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,
  • If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views.
  • In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bia
    • Adam Clark
       
      This connects to the "methodology" of the Natural Sciences very clearly.
  • the system
    • Adam Clark
       
      aka Area of Knowledge
  • They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.
    • Adam Clark
       
      The dopamine, however, functions to reward adaptive behaviors so is not the ultimate aim in and of itself.
  • Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it.
  • emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science
  • figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
  • Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the
    • Adam Clark
       
      This is where the second section begins, arguing that our evolutionary emphasis on social collaboration also operates to short-circuit or undermine the effectiveness of reason as a WOK.
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