"There's been a range of interesting reactions to my piece on Pete Seeger's question about whether confidence in science as a source of human progress is underpinned by fact or faith.
Some readers may have missed that the discussion was not about confidence in science as an enterprise, but confidence that benefits would always accrue to society from applications of scientific knowledge. "
"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"."
It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.
"But what, exactly, lies behind this amorphous phenomenon we call "intuition"? That's precisely what CUNY philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci explores in a chapter of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life (public library)."
"Since 1955, The Journal of Irreproducible Results has offered "spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons and satires" about life in the laboratory. Among its greatest hits: "Acoustic Oscillations in Jell-O, With and Without Fruit, Subjected to Varying Levels of Stress" and "Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity." The good-natured jibes are a backhanded celebration of science. What really goes on in the lab is, by implication, of a loftier, more serious nature."
"In the study, published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers in Toronto examined the ways in which we deal with embarrassment. With help from 200 college students from Hong Kong, they found that embarrassment led to a significant desire to symbolically hide the face."
"In delivering aid to drought-stricken California last week, President Obama and his aides cited the state as an example of what could be in store for much of the rest of the country as human-caused climate change intensifies.
But in doing so, they were pushing at the boundaries of scientific knowledge about the relationship between climate change and drought. While a trend of increasing drought that may be linked to global warming has been documented in some regions, including parts of the Mediterranean and in the Southwestern United States, there is no scientific consensus yet that it is a worldwide phenomenon. Nor is there definitive evidence that it is causing California's problems."
"A weekly show where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week we have the incredibly knowledgeable Michael Stevens, from Vsauce, to look at some common inaccuracies found in scientific illustrations. "
Since 1955, The Journal of Irreproducible Results has offered "spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons and satires" about life in the laboratory. Among its greatest hits: "Acoustic Oscillations in Jell-O, With and Without Fruit, Subjected to Varying Levels of Stress" and "Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity." The good-natured jibes are a backhanded celebration of science. What really goes on in the lab is, by implication, of a loftier, more serious nature.
"This experiment is designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one
It has 20 questions and should take you 10 minutes
It is based on research by Professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California
Each video clip will take approximately 15 seconds to load on a 56k modem and you can only play each smile once"
"Ben Goldacre, doctor and author of Bad Science, explains what the placebo effect is and describes its role in medical research and in the pharmaceutical industry."
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.”
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.
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,
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
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.