What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? | Hacker News Reader

What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

edge.org

72 pointsdood32 comments

The first one is the one I had when I followed the links, and you can phrase it even more concisely: Always be looking for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right.

Works for engineering, too.

> Always be looking for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right.

Though it seems to work better for internal thought processes than in collaboration unless you are seriously tactful.

I've found sometimes I can force myself into "defense" mode just by stating to myself the opposite of what I'm trying to prove.

I may tell myself "it's impossible to use product X to accomplish this" then see that as a challenge and try to prove myself wrong. But this might only work because I can be an arrogant contrarian.

It's certainly a useful technique, but for best results you should spend most of your time in a more positive space: looking for things that work and how to get them to work better, leveraging your assets, etc. etc. Asset-based thinking suggests a 4-1 ratio; I remember reading a book once that had a complex model that claimed the optimum ratio was 3-1. Your mileage may vary.

Possibility spaces was a great suggestion.

It led me to look up and figure out for myself a scientifically important long-standing question I had not answered: Does the option to switch cases at the end of Deal or No Deal mirror the Monty Hall problem or not?

Short answer is that it does not; switching cases confers no advantage in Deal or No Deal. I've proven this to myself by mapping out the possible outcomes. But the idea that whether the opened cases are chosen at random or by a knowledgeable host making the difference between a 1/26 or a 1/2 chance of winning still baffles me. I'm going to have to thing about that one for a while.

Which is why you should do the math instead of trusting intuition.

"Haecceity also explains why you can gradually replace every atom in an object so that it not longer contains any of the original material and yet psychologically, we consider it to be the same object."

This is why sports fanaticism is very hard for me to relate to.

In my opinion, sports fanaticism is kind of a dangerous thing. It seems to me to be mostly about reinforcing "us vs 'them'" mentality, which in itself is a diluted "good vs evil."

To take it to the extreme, us-vs-them-good-vs-evil seems to be one of the biggest basis of most large scale oppressions ("the jews/blacks/muslims are less than us, less than human. it's us vs them."), and it facilitates the justification of war and the entrenching of religious bigotry through subconscious (and sometimes conscious) dehumanization.

I know I took your post off topic and to the extreme, but it just doesn't seem like a good mentality to grow up with. Thoughts?

I disagree. I think the "us vs them" mentality will exist in many people, and sports fanaticism creates a harmless outlet for it. If we deprive the "us vs them" minded people of harmless outlets like team sports, they may instead focus their attention on political or ethnic teams.

If there is any substitution affect at all, I suspect sports fanaticism is highly beneficial - compare the damage done by rampaging celtics fans to the damage done by rampaging communism fans or rampaging hutu fans.

An "outlet" is one of those Freudian concepts that hasn't been proven and Wikipedia says that scientific opinion is divided.

It just seems illogical to me.

When your options for spending time and energy are infinite, are we required to include a certain number of angry activities to expend anger? A certain number of negative activities to expend negativity? Then why should it be necessary to have a certain number of "us vs them" activities?

Sources:

Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? - https://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf

Catharsis on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses

I see sports fanaticism as an extension, or an abstraction, of a hard-wired tribalism that I expect was a defining feature of social life for pre-modern humans and probably pretty useful in that environment. (In much the way allenp notes below.)

I try to avoid loutish public expression of it as much as possible. But I still find myself impulsively taking sides in sports contests whether it's Packers vs. Bears on tv, or Android vs iPhone in my favorite online forum, with all the attendant assignments of good and evil.

It's hard in my experience to avoid tribalism but easier to hide. I like people who take a side (well, my side, anyway) where it counts and I recognize that where it counts is a slippery matter. Being able to suppress the expression of gratuitous tribalism is, for me, one of the markers of a cultivated mind.

I think the fanatics care more about belonging to a group than the virtues of the group itself. As far as I see, this has an evolutionary source in primate band behavior: belonging to a group means a chance at survival, being alone means being eaten. In that situation, wanting your group to win is the same as wanting to be alive, so it is easy to see why fan cheering is such a forceful (even to the point of violence) demonstration.

Is it just my imagination or is everybody who ventured an opinion there a guy?

Anyhow If I had to pick just one concept, I'd probably go with either standpoint epistemology or situated knowledges. Oppression theory, intersectionality, and gender theory would all be high on my list too. For those who have read the whole article, did anybody mention any of these?

None of the specific theories you mentioned were on the first page of that list (there are many more pages than the first).

The page seems to be working at a much higher level of abstraction than your suggested contributions. Most of the suggestions on the page focus on scientific methodology (falsifiability, probability distributions), not specific theories (gravitation) or particular schools of political advocacy (Oppression Theory).

thanks for checking. i downloaded the whole document using the trick from elsewhere in the thread and didn't see any of these topics.

> The page seems to be working at a much higher level of abstraction than your suggested contributions.

i'm not sure i see it that way. standpoint epistemology is in the same category as falsifiability: a model for knowledge. oppression theory provides a social science model for power vectors. intersectionality applies to graph theory as well as social sciences. if anything i think the abstraction level is higher.

You might be right about standpoint epistemiology, I can't say I understand it well enough to comment.

But intersectionality is merely the hypothesis that the dimensionality of experiencing oppression is O(a^n) rather than merely O(n). I.e., discrimination(black woman) != discrimination(black) `simple operation` discrimination(woman). Similarly, as you note, oppression theory is a hypothesis + moral conclusions narrowly restricted to a particular type of social science.

Probability and the concept of "Garbage In, Garbage Out" are useful to all fields. The CAP theorem, the schrodinger equation and oppression theory are pretty narrow in their scope.

You've misdescribed intersectionality [which isn't only about discrimination] and oppression theory [which doesn't necessarily have any morality embedded, and is very broad in its applicability]. How much do you do know about any of the topics you're being so dismissive of?

If somebody without any apparent background in your areas of expertise numerical wave propagation and exponential asymptotics described them incorrectly and said that they weren't as important as other areas, how would you react?

I don't know a lot about them (learned a little bit in college), and I admit I had to brush up on wikipedia before commenting. You'll note that I explicitly described my (former) field ("the Schrodinger equation") as being narrow in scope relative to the concept of probability. I didn't even bother mentioning exponential asymptotics since it's so obscure that most people need not even know it exists. It's a neat mathematical tool, useful for a few purposes. That's all.

Look, you use probability and the concept of GIGO everywhere - computing, sociology, physics, business, etc. Most people will never have any need for exponential asymptotics, oppression theory or the mechanics of securities markets.

Here is a diagram that most academics need to internalize: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

i use oppression theory, intersectionality, and standpoint epistemology as much as i use probability and GIGO. your mileage may vary.

good diagram but i'm not sure why its relevant. i don't have a PhD in any of these things, i just find them very useful transformative techniques that most people don't know about -- or don't understand well enough to apply in practice.

I nominate awareness of selection bias in all its glorious forms.

OK, my reading for self improvement for today (or this week) is done, this is so good.

A quick look at the first page reveals gems like the concept of haecceity (my Firefox dictionary doesn't have this) and Haim Harrari's wonderful analog of extremism and the "edge of a circle", although as you would expect, there is lesser stuff like Lakoff's blarney.

I was surprised to see people mention probability as an important concept. Totally right. I would add a favorite quote (more for the cognitive toolkit of grad EEs): "A random variable is neither random nor a variable."

How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.

for i in {1..17}; do curl http://edge.org/q2011/q11_$i.html >> edge.html; done

Courtesy of sivers / qcassidy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126642

very useful, thanks! worked like a charm ...

John Brockman often combines these into book form and sells them later. Look for it in a little while.

Here's previous edge question compilations:

What Is Your Dangerous Idea: http://amzn.to/fTgjYk

And others: http://amzn.to/fkoFdv

(yes, affiliate links) I have essys in two of them. :-)

Learn to debate issues factually without taking them personally. There's more harm in refusing to admit you are wrong than in being wrong. Humans are imperfect, it's better to admit you are wrong and then adjust your ideas (and thus become less wrong) than to take criticism personally and refuse to stop being wrong. The Universe doesn't care about your emotions, it just is.

That climate change is occurring is falsifiable. Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it: not falsifiable. That's what a climate skeptic really cares about.

>Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it: not falsifiable

Could you expand on this? There's a difference between 'hard to show through theory' and 'not falsifiable'.

Here are

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

If the IPCC's recommendations on CO2 are not followed, which seems likely, we will directly test most of these claims.

As long as you have a definition of 'negatively impact', that can be evaluated objectively, it seems like 'Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it' is eminently falsifiable, as there exists an experiment which allows us to see what happens. Expensive experiments, yes, but that's a different issue.

What's concerning is that people conflate the science that the earth is warming with the "non-science" that some catastrophic event is looming on the horizon if we don't stop that warming. The first is a testable hypothesis. The latter, when you consider the complexity of modeling climate and ecology, is at best no different than stock picking. That's why I disagree with the notion that climate skeptics are intellectually insincere in questioning climate change; whether they are right or not, there is a possibility this could be the next eugenics-like pop junk science where we are told we should make sacrifices because of some purported "theory".

Insincere is comparing climate change to eugenics. Eugenics was purely a theory and promoted taking away people's right to have children (or in the worst cases, genocide). Climate change involves hard evidence that the world is warming and demands economic changes to mitigate.

Any policy debate is going to be far more complicated that any testable hypothesis and scepticism is healthy, but your comparison to eugenics is bullshit.

It's not objective, it requires subjective values.

The argument is (generally) made that climate is changing; this will change various peoples' lives in various ways, and therefore must be avoided at all costs.

One rarely if ever sees a consideration of positive outcomes from climate change (and there certainly are some). We need to understand the pros AND cons. And then we need to use our own subjective values to consolidate them into a bottom line.

THEN, we need to understand what needs to be done to avert these eventualities, and what the costs of those efforts will be.

FINALLY, we can compare the costs with the benefits. But because the calculation necessarily included our subjective values of the different factors, it's not falsifiable.

As a global warming noob, I wonder how a controlled environment is simulated to link climate change directly to human activity. Also, how can these claims be tested given that man-induced global warming cannot be repeatedly tested? Is there a formula to calculate the relation of carbon levels to temperature that can be retroactively tested for accuracy? If not, how do we know the degree to which carbon must be curved?

When your mind wanders, it is dealing with necessary sub-thoght trails, don't abort unless necessary: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-payin...

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open-m...

Learn about cognitive fallacies and cognitive biases. The little thinking shortcuts minds take which lead to wrong conclusions.

Learn how to learn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276882

Start asking smart questions: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, discover that most of your thinking goes on without you trying at all.

Read "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin DeBecker, our emotional responses to our world can be sources of surprisingly accurate insight.

Develop the ability to create complete silence in your mind, no chit-chatter. Creativity is greater in people with this ability. *scientific american

Learn how to estimate and do it right: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/97805968095...

Becoming a functional perfectionist: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-...

Some of these links are behind pay-walls, sorry, but they are amazing articles, some google searching can get around them.

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