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Why facts don't change our minds
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you
The Oatmeal. This is a comic about the backfire effect.
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Science is often flawed. It's time we embraced that.
Science per se cannot be "broken" but it can be corrupted. This article explains the problem with contemporaneous research and why exactly so much of it is utter garbage.
"Recently, the conversation about science's wrongness has gone mainstream. You can read, in publications like Vox, the New York Times or the Economist, about how the research process is far from perfect — from the inadequacies of peer review to the fact that many published results simply can't be replicated. The crisis has gotten so bad that the editor of The Lancet medical journal Richard Horton recently lamented, "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." (actually 90% per Ioannidis - RJS)
"And that's not the only way science can go awry. In his seminal paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Stanford professor John Ioannidis developed a mathematical model to show how broken the research process is. Researchers run badly designed and biased experiments, too often focusing on sensational and unlikely theories instead of ones that are likely to be plausible. That ultimately distorts the evidence base — and what we think we know to be true in fields like health care and medicine."
"One recent British Medical Journal study looked at 462 press releases about human health studies that came from 20 leading UK research universities in 2011. The authors compared these press releases with both the actual studies and the resulting news coverage. What they wanted to find out was how overblown claims got made.
Take, for example, the notion that coffee can prevent cancer. Did that come from the study itself, or from the press release, or was it a figment of the journalist's imagination? The researchers discovered that university press offices were a major source of overhype: more than one-third of press releases contained either exaggerated claims of causation (when the study itself only suggested correlation), unwarranted implications about animal studies for people, or unfounded health advice."
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5 Logical Fallacies That Make Humans Terrible at Democracy
Did you know that 63-65 percent of Americans think we're spending too little on welfare? Well, as long as the polls calls it "assistance to the poor." Use the word "welfare", and that number drops to 20-25 percent. Yeah, as we've mentioned before, just the way you word a question can change people's opinion on important matters, but, at least, this isn't a U.S.-only problem: The entire human race sucks at democracy. And we can't even help it because ...
"Put yourself in this scenario: Someone asks you and seven other people a stupidly simple question, but all of the others give the wrong answer. Do you contradict the majority and answer correctly, or do you say the wrong thing, too, despite everyone else being a dumbass? If you said, "I'd tell the truth and laugh in their faces," you're either in the minority or delusional -- in a series of famous experiments in the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch put people in that exact same situation, and 75 percent of them conformed and gave the blatantly wrong answer at least once. And it's not like they were solving complex arithmetic problems: They just had to look at four lines and tell which ones were the same length. When there wasn't a group of actors being wrong around them, the rate of error was less than 1 percent.
And no, it's not just because everyone was a bunch of mindless conformists in the 1950s -- the experiment has been repeated over and over again with similar results. "
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Descartes’s 12 Tenets of Critical Thinking
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The aim of our studies must be the direction of our mind so that it may form solid and true judgments on whatever matters arise.
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We must occupy ourselves only with those objects that our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly and indubitably.
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As regards any subject we propose to investigate, we must inquire not what other people have thought, or what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can clearly and manifestly perceive by intuition or deduce with certainty. For there is no other way of acquiring knowledge.
There is need of a method for finding out the truth.
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Method consists entirely in the order and disposition of the objects towards which our mental vision must be directed if we would find out any truth. We shall comply with it exactly if we reduce involved and obscure propositions step by step to those that are simpler, and then starting with the intuitive apprehension of all those that are absolutely simple, attempt to ascend to the knowledge of all others by precisely similar steps.
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In order to separate out what is quite simple from what is complex, and to arrange these matters methodically, we ought, in the case of every series in which we have deduced certain facts the one from the other, to notice which fact is simple, and to mark the interval, greater, less, or equal, which separates all the others from this.
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If we wish our science to be complete, those matters which promote the end we have in view must one and all be scrutinized by a movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted; they must also be included in an enumeration which is both adequate and methodical.
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If in the matters to be examined we come to a step in the series of which our understanding is not sufficiently well able to have an intuitive cognition, we must stop short there. We must make no attempt to examine what follows; thus we shall spare ourselves superfluous labour.
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We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly.
In order that it may acquire sagacity the mind should be exercised in pursuing just those inquiries of which the solution has already been found by others; and it ought to traverse in a systematic way even the most trifling of men’s inventions though those ought to be preferred in which order is explained or implied.
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If, after we have recognized intuitively a number of simple truths, we wish to draw any inference from them, it is useful to run them over in a continuous and uninterrupted act of thought, to reflect upon their relations to one another, and to grasp together distinctly a number of these propositions so far as is possible at the same time. For this is a way of making our knowledge much more certain, and of greatly increasing the power of the mind.
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Finally we ought to employ all the aids of understanding, imagination, sense and memory, first for the purpose of having a distinct intuition of simple propositions; partly also in order to compare the propositions
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Why The Incompetent Don't Know They're Incompetent - an article in Psychology Ptoday.
You can read the original paper:
"Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments."
Abstract
"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities."
You can read it here
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How To Recognize A Fake News Story
- Read Past The Headline
- Check What News Outlet Published It
- Check The Publish Date And Time
- Who Is The Author?
- Look At What Links And Sources Are Used
- Look Out For Questionable Quotes And Photos
- Beware Confirmation Bias
- Search If Other News Outlets Are Reporting It
- Think Before You Share
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After Mayan Apocalypse Failure, Believers May Suffer
When nothing happened in 2012 when the world didn't end as predicted, believers, for a couple of reasons couldn't cope. This is going to happen again.
Yesterday (Dec. 21) was widely rumored online to be the end of the world, a misunderstanding of a calendar used by the ancient Maya people. Although the Maya made no doomsday predictions, some modern individuals and groups claimed they had foretold the end on Dec. 21, 2012.
Because the doomsday predictions were largely grassroots and spread online, the fallout from their failure is likely to be more varied than in doomsdays past, said Stephen Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist. Most of the time, doomsday predictions are made by charismatic leaders, often in cultlike settings. [Tales of the 10 Craziest Cults]
"It appears that believers in the Mayan calendar apocalypse range from troubled individuals to groups following charismatic leaders," Kent told LiveScience. "Consequently, the fallout could be very complicated."
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Is this a rational discussion?
How to tell if you're having a rational discussion with somebody. And how to tell if you aren't.
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Only 9% of 15-year-olds can tell the difference between fact and opinion
By Jenny AndersonDecember 3, 2019
In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, it’s just 11.5%.
Those results are both better than the OECD average of 9%, according to the latest results of PISA, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, an international test of math, science, and reading which is administered by the OECD every three years.
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One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
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