Ted Talk Review Why people believe weird things | Hacker News Reader

Ted Talk Review Why people believe weird things

ctsciencenut.com

56 pointsctsciencenut43 comments

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The human species is just not build for logic. The process seems to be:

1. Search for a heuristic

2. Glue Logic Bits to the found heuristic

3. Generate a coherent backstory for heuristic

4. Query parts of the Backstory to check the heuristic.

5. If Part of the Backstory fall apart, reconstruct

6. If reconstruction fails, have a crisis.

7. If crisis continues, start to think it through for the first time or

8. Solve by discrediting facts (aka believes)

Its very efficient. The only time, its not completely efficient is during youth, as this is the time, one has to carve out a thiefdom for oneself. Also a slight trait of intellectual sado machismo helps.

I think to get normal people to think and question believes, education as proposed is a rather lousy tool, applied often too late. If you are tempted to question "everything" at 21, that phase of your life is almost over.

Kindergarten age and first years at school, should be ideal- basically teachers should weave in wrong "days" where they would tell falsehoods, and reward those discovering and questioning.

It's more than just measuring outcomes. There's also a very strong belief among the scientifically minded that there should be a valid causal chain between one event and another. Astrology, even if it succeeded, would fail this test because there is no causal chain acceptable to science that explains why astrology was correct.

Another test that must be met (and which many conspiracy theories fail miserably at) is the implication test: e.g., if that is true, then what else could be true? For example, if you believe Bush engineered 9/11, then surely he could have planted WMD evidence in Iraq (a far simpler conspiracy!) We never found WMD in Iraq, planted or otherwise, so the idea that Bush did anything special around 9/11 is just silly.

One conspiracy which I think is particularly potent is the moon landing deniers. This conspiracy is tough to argue against because ultimately it really is unlikely that humans ever made it to the moon, and only a very few people were actually involved, and indirect video evidence is indeed capable of being faked. The best reason I can think of to argue against this is that far too many people would have had to be in on it for it to work, but really that's not very satisfying.

(Next moon landing I hope the mission lays down an enormous silver blanket that can be seen by amateur astronomers and ordinary people are encouraged to come out and look through a 'scope for themselves!)

OT, the old moon landing joke comes to mind:

  Astronaut: “Houston, we have a problem.”
  Houston: “What?”
  Astronaut: “The Russians painted the moon red!”
  Houston: “Well, do you guys have white paint with you?”
  Astronaut: “Yes. Why?”
  Houston: “Write Coca-Cola on it.”

Well I mean for the moon landing hoax debate one can not only look at stuff left behind on the moon's surface let alone the fact that you can bounce a laser off of mirrors left on the surface to measure the distance from the Moon. It is also high unlikely that such items were placed there using automated methods.

Don't you need a gigantic laser and an observatory to perform the mirror bounce trick? I'm sure skeptics would casually dismiss that one.

I thought this was dismissed by saying they were left by an unmanned mission.

> one can not only look at stuff left behind on the moon's surface

I don't think we currently have telescopes that have the resolution to see objects on the moon that were left behind by the Apollo missions.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter already has imaged multiple Apollo sites. Lunar Rover tracks are easily seen.

You are suggesting this would convince moon landing deniers?

That's interesting. Where can I see those?

On NASAs website[1][2]

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.htm...

It's commonly asserted that with 1960's video editing technology, it would have been harder to accurately fabricate footage of humans on the moon than to actually send to and record humans on the moon.

Here's a fun video about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU

I can't see youtube at work, but I upvoted on the assumption that this was mitchel and web.

I clicked it, making that same assumption. But alas not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw

> Next moon landing I hope the mission lays down an enormous silver blanket that can be seen by amateur astronomers and ordinary people are encouraged to come out and look through a 'scope for themselves!

There are reflectors on the moon people can (or could?) point lasers towards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retroreflectors_on_the...

I am not very informed on this but what would you say to this? There is people claiming moon is naturally reflective, and that there were successful reflection experiments before moon landing.

National Geographic Vol. 130 No. 6 December 1966 'The Lasers Bright Magic' by Thomas Meloy Page 876 "Four years ago (1962) a ruby laser considerably smaller than those now available, shot a series of pulses at the Moon, 240,000 miles away. The beams illuminated a spot less than two miles in diameter, and were reflected back to Earth with enough strength to be measured by ultra sensitive electronic equipment."

[co-replying] Or an advertisement, you don't even need humans to go.

e.g. Robert A Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/advertising

Actually most people do not have access to the required gigawatt laser equipment that can precisely targeted.

Pointing a hundred milliwatts laser pointer, the common kind of laser people have access to, to the moon will have no effect.

> (Next moon landing I hope the mission lays down an enormous silver blanket that can be seen by amateur astronomers and ordinary people are encouraged to come out and look through a 'scope for themselves!)

Excuses will range from "we put it their with robots" to "aliens put it there for us". Some will use it as evidence of aliens.

While I am a firm believer in logic reasoning, we also have to realize its shortcomings. The shortcomings stem from the fact that it is our brain that is used to draw the inferences and causal chains that lead to our logical conclusions.

Therefore, when our brain is missing information, or just failing to piece together relevant causal chains, it is easy for it to come to the wrong conclusions.

Your 9/11 reasoning is a good example why you just can't blindly rely on logic, without being extra careful you are not using the shortest, cheapest, and least information dense causal chain (i.e. drawing too simple conclusion, because of lack of information which lead to lack of complex reasoning).

Let me present you with another causal chain that is equally "logical", but requires you to realize you have a complex causal network to decode, instead of the simple a-b-c 9/11-Bush-WMD reasoning you just used.

Let's say the Bush family wanted a war in the middle east. To start that war, an event was needed to unite the US population and steer the public opinion in order to further this agenda.

What has happened since 9/11 in the middle east? A new enemy was constructed; "The Terrorists", and Irak, Syria, Kuwait, Afghanistan etc....has become a war zone.

Did they need to plant WMDs in Iraq to start these wars?

Did they need to plant WMDs in Iraq to start the Iraq invasion?

Answer is no. They got what they wanted anyway.

Therefore, to say that planting WMDs was a requirement for 9/11 "conspiracies" to be true, is just not a valid conclusion.

I'm not saying that what I described above is what happened, I'm just pointing out that the logical reasoning you just used is far too simple, and does not take into account complex causal relationships that may be at work.

Such complex causal relationships only reveal themselves after you dig deep enough into all the available information.

So the problem of blindly relying on logical reasoning for decision making, is the failure to understand that lack of sufficient information can still lead to incorrect assumptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw&t=1m03s

In many cases it has been shown that conspiracies turn out to be true. And instead of the simple causal chains people believe that can be used to refute the conspiracies, it turns out that what you need to understand everything is not a simple chain, but something much more complex instead.

I like to call these complex things not causal chains, but causal networks. That is where the real logic brainwork starts.

> a valid causal chain between one event and another

I like fields. Uncomfortable with spooky action-at-a-distance? Just posit a field there, undetectable apart from its spooky action. Fields!

Luminiferous æther! It's a classic.

Just make sure that it is very well publicized, so that no one will discover it on their own. Finding an enormous structure on the moon could really freak people out.

I know, because it happened to me.

I was driving home in the evening after work, from Santa Monica to Pasadena, taking the 10 which goes through downtown Los Angeles. It was the middle of winter, so got dark early, and it was a foggy night.

As I approached downtown, I could see vaguely in the sky through the fog the full moon. But something was off about it. There was some kind of dark markings on it covering much of the visible surface.

I was totally confused. There was too much regularity and organization to the markings for them to be something natural, but no one on Earth had the technology to put anything so large on the moon that it would be easily visible to the naked eye, and even if that was possible they could not have done it so quickly--I had seen the moon the night before and it was completely normal.

As an avid science fiction fan, I had always thought that when we got our first clear signs of alien life I would be excited, especially if it was signs of intelligent alien life.

But as I came to realize that no one on Earth could be responsible for what I was seeing, and that what I was seeing was clearly the product of intelligence, I was not excited. Instead, I felt my mind realizing that it could not even begin to cope with such an enormous development, and it started to shut down. I could actually feel my sanity leaving.

All that saved me at that point was that I realized it wasn't the moon I was looking at. What I was actually seeing was the logo of some company on a downtown skyscraper. Their logo was a white circle with some symbol in it, and they had that on a big lighted sign on the top of the building. The fog had hidden the rest of the building, leaving only that sign visible.

Actually, there are things planted on the moon by humans already. Like the retroreflectors[0] left by the Apollo 11 mission.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experime...

The Bush test is inadequately chosen, first I remember the Bush government actually used false WMD evidence such as satellite pictures, second finding WMD was unnecessary as objective was met and war had already been declared. History shows that the US uses such mischief to start wars (see Tonkin gulf incident, nurse Nayirah).

The moon landing is actually easy to argue against, there are retroreflectors that were set up on the moon that are used with lasers measure the distance between Earth and Moon. http://www.moonlandinghoax.org/8.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

this is a low-quality submission of a site that was created just a month ago and filled with affiliate links.

I have a cousin who participates in this willing cognitive bias (really crazy ideas like flat Earth theory). Of course he only cherry picks from the unfounded conspiracy bucket that suits his chosen political view and what he wants to be true. Nothing rooted in any evidence review or similar approach.

Go science?

Science has become such a cult.

*Pop science

I don't think any scientists consider TED talks a serious venue. Anyone who thinks they are learning rather than being entertained is mistaken. Not saying there is anything wrong with entertainment, it is just bad for us all when people confuse the two.

But that's the whole point of TED. It's upmarket standup that you can feel like you're improving yourself by watching, which is why so many of the jokes suck - laughing might make the pretense impossible to maintain.

Sometimes it does show serious topics that are or have been pretty seriously researched. It'd is quite easy to filter out the entertainment or worthless talks in fact: See if math or diagrams are used.

Some talks are pie in the sky idea talks, essentially fuel for hypotheses. Filtered by talking about a serious subject but not showing math or diagrams.

And finally there are stories. Spotted by a typically "human" talk and "social" topic. Not useful.

I can't tell if this comment is serious or not but I find it odd that people who know fuck all about science go around bashing people over the head with it.

They only bash in defense. Non scientific people have been bashing people over the head with non science for centuries.

I think it's a serious comment lamenting the rise of "scientism" which is a dogmatic belief in the supremacy of rationalism and materialism.

it's possible to be very opposed to scientism while also being very supportive of good science.

The dogmatic belief also has side effects. If you have ever been with someone you considered generally wise but also held on to some non-scientific belief, you know two things.

1. Taking away the non-scientific belief will cause a genuine vacuum in their life, and what comes in to fill it usually takes away the happiness they had earlier

2. The dogmatic folks don't put any/much importance on what a moving target science is, and how badly it conflicts with normal folks need for permanence. Some of them will scoff at this as "unwillingness to change", but realistically speaking no one likes change just for the heck of change unless it is an actual improvement of some aspect of their life. Society has "changed" towards embracing more materialism, but its side effect of less human connection is not an improvement that most people actually desire.

So do you wish to be happy and contented? Don't expect science to give you an answer.

If there is something that science cannot provide, then it is just another tool in your toolkit and will continue to co-exist with other things which can make you happier, no matter how "unscientific" those things are.

What's the alternative to rationalism and materialism? How can good science be practiced without rational reasoning and physical (i.e. material) evidence?

you missed something important

> dogmatic belief in the supremacy of rationalism and materialism

good science absolutely must take a rationalist and materialist view. however, the needs of good science are not necessarily the supreme values which to make any and all decisions.

What else do you base decisions on?

Lots of things! Because I'm not actually a practicing researcher. And the set of practicing researchers I've known is, perhaps not so oddly, disjoint with the set of dogmatic scientific positivists I've known. No one has a better grasp of the vast difference between ideal science and real science than someone who actually does science for a living.

Can you name some of those lots of things?

Science can tell you how things work and how to achieve particular results. It can't tell you what is important, because that's fundamentally a question of human values.

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