What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?
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Even harder but oh so wonderful if it were true - knowing the difference between conditional and joint probabilities. Expecting to flip 5 heads in a row is a small chance. Flipping the 5th head is far more likely.
Another: the question, hypothesize, measure, discard/refine loop.
Oh and if you have lots of people doing something with a small chance of occurring, just because you managed it does not rule out mere luck. Being amongst those few who managed to fairly flip 5 heads in a row in a group of 160 is not to do with skill.
honorable mentions: opportunity cost, expected value, mean vs median, solving equations of one variable, newton's first law, how to write if statements and foreach loops. Finally in this day and age when I say graph to someone circles joined by lines and not a curve on a 2d grid should come to mind.
"even though the concept may not yet have percolated all parts of Kansas, and Alaska."
That's pretty cold, man. And since when is beating up on one's socio-political opponents to feed our prejudices and toot our own horns a scientific attitude? Yes, even when you happen to be right.
I mean, Dawkins I can expect that from, but from the President of the Royal Society / Master of Trinity College, Cambridge?
You need to scroll down the page and read that next bit there about cognitive humility, jerk.
But he's calling out people of national - if not global - stature, who wear scientific illiteracy as a badge of honor. Their stance on such issues gives gives millions of other similarly uninformed people the rationale for adopting such views as their own.
Not only is he right on the issue (the age of the earth, and the universe), but he's morally right for calling them out.
Do not consult any part of the political spectrum for scientific truth.
Editors ?
When did Rees identify anyone as a socio-political opponent? What prejudices does he have? Where did he toot his own horn? You seem to have read a completely different article than I did.
All he said was that evolutionary theory hasn't been fully accepted in some areas. I'm perplexed that you're so offended by that statement.
(For brevity's sake, I simplify the criterion for deciding what theory is false. I'm not sure the complexity of a full specification is called for here.)
Absolutely.
Now please note the following simple logical step:
> A theory which makes false predictions is not useful.
This is probably an assertion which is implicit in your mind, but is it really true? Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen cases where a theory which makes false predictions can be useful. It can be useful to motivate people, or manipulate them. It can be useful as a starting point for a better theory. It can be useful as an approximation when a better theory is not available. It can be useful as an argument to oppose someone with a different theory who is trying to manipulate people in a different direction.
Theories that make false predictions can be tremendously useful - even within the framework of science (as a starting point or an approximation).
You're not wrong, but the more sophisticated approach you're suggesting is also more dangerous in its own way.
Another one is to learn the transformative power of environment on a person. (see recent article on heroin addiction among Vietnam war soldiers). If we are so easily influenced and changed by our society, then what kind of society do we need to shape to create a better self?
The number one problem in my not so humble opinion: the 40 hour workweek.
What would happen to society if we could only work 4 hours a day? Would the economy crumble? Or would we learn to rationalize business processes, automate crapwork, prioritize better, stop consuming needless junk, think twice before engaging in wasteful projects, reflect more, etc?
Do less, but better and wiser. That sums up a sane society in my view.
It falls under experiment design, but it's a much more straightforward and easy to understand question. You can ask kids that question (they're quite good at it). Really helps narrow down avenues of inquiry & speed up your problem-solving.
It's only useful if the person is already interested in being less wrong, but everyone is interested in being less wrong about something. When they (you) are, this is an excellent question to ask.
The reality is a little more uncomfortable to accept, and a lot of it lies in the fact that we don't always know how to think, leading to us not knowing what to think.
Side note: I'm disappointed in the lack of copyediting in most of those essays.
Confronting a difficult problem we might fruitfully ask, "What would a microbe do?"
But it just seems so close to depersonalization, as witnessed by your interesting pluralization mismatch ('"you" only has'). That supposedly hostile methodology is actually very sensible once you understand it.
I suppose that's what comes from assuming that the hostile hardware is merely a statistical assertion of the Bayesian variety.
And apparently it is functional for some people, so... I suppose that's merit enough.
you win this round.
It wrinkled my brain and got my pulse quickened.
No, the significance of double-blind studies is in why scientists have to go to such extraordinary lengths to escape bias. The ways bias can influence judgment and can be communicated subconsciously between people are pretty amazing, and they justify the skepticism that scientifically literate people take for granted but other people take for unreasonable stubbornness. "My uncle has seen ghosts, my cousin has seen ghosts, and I just told you I saw a ghost. Why don't you believe in ghosts? You just refuse to believe because paranormal phenomena are embarrassing to your narrow scientific worldview."
To help people understand why scientifically literate people think they way they do, we need to tell them stories about how bias affects experiments and leads to bogus results. In his essay about cargo cult science, Richard Feynman tells a great story about an experimenter who discovered an unexpected source of bias in an experimental setup for rats running a maze. That's a perfect example for the general scientific audience, for whom rats running mazes is an icon of objective quantitative science, but the general public needs examples where psychological bias creates results that they personally know to be important and know to be false. Understanding those stories will give them a completely new outlook on the information they take in every day.
Also, the stories need to put people in a serious frame of mind. No matter what their level of ignorance, people have enough meta-cognitive sophistication to worry that if they absorb our scientific skepticism they will miss out on a lot of fun things. They like believing in ghosts. They like believing in aliens. They like believing that there are extraordinary things in the world that are as accessible to them as science and technology are to the nerds. We're trying to rob them of their fun. Sure, they can still play at believing, but it won't be quite as thrilling. (It really is just as fun to watch The X-Files or read Harry Potter when you're scientifically literate, but I don't think they'd believe us if we told them :-) Also, it's a lot less fun to listen to your friends tell stories about how they saw a ghost in the Winchester Mystery House and how they know it was real because the tour guide knew what it looked like without being told because other people had seen the same one. Sigh.)
To get around resistance to the lifeless, booooring scientific worldview, we need something awful to shake people out of that fun frame of mind. Children dying of cancer because of biased studies, something like that. Even better, children getting abducted and molested. TV news shows know how to make people pay attention; let's put their techniques to good use. Unfortunately, my scientific education stopped after my sophomore year of college, so I'll leave it up to others to provide concrete examples ;-)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...
And for some biases, e.g. anchoring bias telling someone explicitly that they ought to be resisting anchoring bias in an experiment doesn't seem to actually cause them to suffer from anchoring bias any less. There are some biases that can be eliminated this easily, but many that can't. Presumably you would need some sort of explicit training to resist anchoring bias.
My New Year's resolution (last year) was to always make a New Year's resolution to re-read it that year, because the insights tend to slip away with time.
"Free will does not exist"
For example - when I debug program, I often fail to apply this concept, and change things randomly to guess what's wrong, or stare at screen guessing. Most often, controlled experiment answers the question faster and more definitely, than guessing, or experimenting without plan.
Thought is about clearing the table, placing the tools on the table, moving the tools around, isolating the product, removing it, then starting over by clearing the table. Most humans never take anything off the table. Learn to clear your mind's table.
Hypothesis testing.
Statistics inverts your thinking, because it asks you to only tentatively accept every single conclusion you make ("fail to reject").
All science rests on this, the twinned ideas that 1) something must be testable for it to be useful and 2) it is only through embracing uncertainty (it _is_ possible for a coin flipped 50 times to come up heads 50 times) that one can mediate certainty.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
And get Motivated, this video gave me years of motivation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsSC2vx7zFQ
Hold a man underwater, watch him fight, tell him, when you want to succeed as much as you want to breath there, then you will be successful. Thing is, most people don't want to be successful, they want to date, they want to party, they want to EAT, they want to sleep and have sex and have nice cars, nice houses, nice wives. When you want to be successful as much as you want to breath, you will be successful. It's all about priority.
To improve your cognitive toolkit, understand how and why your brain processes data, and change the way you think to improve processing speed 100 times. This book tells you how.
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools-Overclock...
Understand the power of the drugs in these drinks, and respect them, only use these drugs on things where you are growing yourself in a positive way. Use them while you are in a self destructing situation and your brain orients itself to optimize for that.
Philip Zimbardo talked about the formation of will-power in children, it has a direct influence on the success later in life. Improve your own cognitive toolkit by getting another child off on the right foot.
From the video, children who are predisposed to deny themselves pleasure by holding out for a future reward differentiate the rich from the poor.
Video about how our educational system produces (or doesn't) entrepreneurs, the keyword is tenacity.
http://fora.tv/2010/04/14/Developing_the_Next_Generation_of_...