
What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit? - diego
http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit
======
Dn_Ab
Those are all too specialized. Although not exactly science, I would recommend
number sense. This is how to estimate. Approximate, ratios, percents, add,
subtract, divide, multiply and apply them to daily life. Many people can
divide but a lot of people don't know how to figure out how long it will take
to travel 2 miles when going approximately 60mph.

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.

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vbtemp
I'd highly encourage everyone to read Kahneman's book. It really makes you
appreciate the fact that what we consider "thinking" and "decision making" are
usually just sequences of lazy cognitive biases that [poorly] approximate
solutions for substituted questions. Unfortunately, I suspect that there
already is a response bias to the readership of that book, since only those
who are willing to question their own thinking process and metacognition would
be interested in this kind of book.

~~~
diego
I also enjoyed that book very much, and I'm trying to expose it to people who
otherwise would not come in contact with it or the general topics it
discusses. We're probably preaching to the choir here :)

~~~
x3c
I hadn't heard of that book and because of this post, its on my reading list.
So, some people in this choir maybe wayward and would do well with sermons
like these :)

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fennecfoxen
Martin Rees, I'm calling you out:

"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.

~~~
stfu
Makes a fascinating read but it is sad how some of these highly reputed
thinkers proclaim their personal views as the sole truth. Their attitude
reminds me on politicians with their same old black and white demagogy.

~~~
Appaled
There is a reply that says "Evolution is a scientific fact, not a personal
view." that has been permbanned !

Editors ?

------
jerf
A theory which makes false predictions is false. It doesn't matter how many
words you can marshal in its support, it doesn't matter how many celebrities
you get to approve of it, it doesn't matter how great the universe would be if
it were true, it doesn't matter how many people wearing white lab coats swear
up and down it's true or how many pieces of paper they wave at you claiming
it's true, a theory which makes false predictions is false. That is the only
relevant metric for a scientific theory.

(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.)

~~~
swombat
_A theory which makes false predictions is false._

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).

~~~
jerf
It's a simplified POV for generic people's cognitive toolkits. If they can
internalize this idea, then you can move on to trying them on the caveats and
details and levels of falseness and etc etc etc. But _way_ too often, the
existence of caveats and details is used as an excuse to simply discard the
undesirable theory, or to claim that theory A has caveats (example: "Newtonian
physics isn't quite right") and theory B has caveats (example: epicycles), so
why not just go with theory B?

You're not wrong, but the more sophisticated approach you're suggesting is
also more dangerous in its own way.

------
teyc
Learning to believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast I'd say is
the most illuminating. It informs us how easy it is for our views to be shaped
and cautions us to act with more humility and more tolerance for people who
believe in something different.

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?

~~~
itmag
"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.

------
nosignal
"What would prove my assumption (or idea) wrong?"

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.

------
InclinedPlane
No human is perfect. The only way to expand your pool of _correct_ knowledge
is to spend time seeing things from competing perspectives, allow the
possibility of being wrong, and to evaluate ideas based on evidence.

------
kylemaxwell
I'm greatly enjoying the read, and it's a question that appeals to me greatly.
Most of us frequently make a statement akin to "everybody else is stupid",
although we usually except those around us at that time. After all, only
__other __people make that class of mistake. We'd never do that. It's just
pruning the gene pool!

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.

~~~
thret
Vilayanur Ramachandran should probably have proof-read his, after listing four
examples he forgets one. He was probably trying to decide which was the better
example, cold fusion or telepathy.

------
T_S_
My favorite, from Steward Brand:

 _Confronting a difficult problem we might fruitfully ask, "What would a
microbe do?"_

------
nazgulnarsil
That you are running on hostile hardware, and that "you" only has access to a
small part of this hardware. This clears upa lot of confusion once it clicks
for people IME.

~~~
Helianthus
I always find this Yudkowsky-esque conceit somewhat lacking. It's not that one
shouldn't examine the motivations of your various... motivations.

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.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
"personalization" to me implies some sort of narrative that strings together
your behaviors into a supposedly coherent personality. In this respect
depersonalization is good.

~~~
Helianthus
That's hilarious. You guys (assuming you're arguing the lesswrong perspective)
are an intellectual house of cards, you know. Eliezer can't even keep his
house in order.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Quinean naturalism + cognitive science is a house of cards. Good to know. Do
you have any other useful information?

~~~
Helianthus
Attacks are directed at the weakest point, not the strongest.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
do you have a substantive critique to link to or should I take it on faith
that such a thing exists?

------
obtu
This one is more method than concept, but it's pretty central to science: It's
okay to change your mind. Knowledge is based on facts devoid of moral value,
and some of these facts will be replaced as we learn more about reality. A
body of knowledge that can rebuild itself in the face of new evidence, and
goes so far as to seek out new evidence, is one that gets stronger and
healthier.

------
darkxanthos
My favorite: Signal Detection Theory. It seems applicable to many different
areas in life especially as we become more and more data oriented. Which
emails to read, which server exceptions to respond to, which person talking to
you is attracted to you, which visitors will buy, etc., etc.

It wrinkled my brain and got my pulse quickened.

------
moultano
My pick, "marginal benefit" and conversely, the sunk cost fallacy.

------
dkarl
I liked Richard Dawkins' pick of the double-blind experiment. However, the
significance of it for the lay person is entirely in why it is necessary. The
concept itself is only a consequence. It's nice for people to know what a
double-blind experiment is, but it doesn't give them an instant ability to
evaluate scientific research. Even double-blind experiments can be flawed, and
you wouldn't want people thinking they could trust the validity of a study
just because it's double-blind. If consumers and voters started demanding
double-blind experiments, advertisers and other liars would have no problem
producing misleading results from double-blind studies.

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 ;-)

~~~
buss
Just making people aware that _any_ cognitive biases exist would be a huge
win.

~~~
mcobrien
Whenever I'm pretty sure of a hunch I have, I like to review this list to
remember how utterly useless human cognition is:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

------
zerostar07
Are we supposed to add ours now? If so then

"Free will does not exist"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will>

------
ajuc
Designing experiments to differentiate between possible explanations. It is
the key to problem solving in general.

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.

------
maeon3
Develop your ability to create complete silence in your mind. Subconscious
control over the inner workings of your subconscious mind is what Richard
Feynman was working on.

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.

<http://www.cyberbore.com/puzzle/klok.html>

~~~
obtu
That sounds useful, but not a scientific notion from what you're telling us.
Could you start by defining what you mean by clearing the table? Is there any
way to compare/contrast it to what sleep does?

------
Helianthus
Not a scientific one, but a mathematical one:

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.

------
maeon3
Stop asking dumb questions:

<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.

------
maeon3
Your mind is a symphony of interdependent systems, specifically sulfur ion
channels, like dominoes that right themselves. The software that runs on these
sulfur ion channels are not optimized for how your brain works because our
schools today were designed by people who didn't believe processing was done
in the brain.

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...](http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools-
Overclocking/dp/0596101538)

------
maeon3
You need to learn how to learn, read the article on page 22 of this HN
Magazine, When I read it my life changed.

<http://issuu.com/babo/docs/hackermonthly-issue1>

------
maeon3
Coffee, Espresso, monster energy, redbulls and certain Chocolates are drugs
that can put your body into panic, fight or flight mode, use too many of these
drugs and your overall output is greatly diminished.

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.

<http://visual.ly/15ish-things-worth-knowing-about-coffee>

------
maeon3
Will power is a muscle, like your forearm, if it is atrophied then you are not
taking time out to purposefully exercise it.

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.

<http://fora.tv/2008/11/12/Philip_Zimbardo_The_Time_Paradox>

------
maeon3
Learn by heart and be able to name all of the fallacies used in conversation,
there are about 200 of them used every day. Practice spotting them on tv,
radio and in conversation. Humans are remarkably illogical, knowing the names
of every fallacy helps, commit all of these to memory:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

------
maeon3
You need to focus on and cultivate your tenacity, listen to this video.

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_...](http://fora.tv/2010/04/14/Developing_the_Next_Generation_of_Entrepreneurs)

