

Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think - technology
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=your-scientific-reasoning-more-flawed-than-you-think

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EzGraphs
_Worse than simple ignorance, naïve ideas about science lead people to make
bad decisions with confidence._

This is the reason these articles capture my attention.

A related problem not discussed in the article is the tendency to use so-
called "scientific" explanations to a non-scientific area of life. A better
understanding of the scientific method itself in education is essential.
Simply prefacing a statement with phrases like "it has been scientifically
proven that..." or "statistics show..." is used to lend a vague scientific
credibility various claims. It shows up in a slightly more sophisticated form
in political diatribe and in educational settings as well.

Although of course there might be a flaw in my scientific reasoning about the
article ;).

~~~
beagle3
Quite a bit of the accepted "scientific" knowledge is wrong, and a lot of
people will fight for it vigorously without noticing, or otherwise thinking.
Even here on hacker news, and other scientifically minded forums, I've been
called a quack for pointing out that:

\- the "calories in - calories out" (and especially the carb=4kc/g,
protein=4kc/g, alcohol=7kc/g, fat=9kc/g and nothing else matters) is fragile,
based on a chain of unproven assumptions, and has countless counterexamples
(in other words, scientifically wrong, even if it is somewhat useful for ~80%
of the population).

\- dietary cholesterol was NEVER shown to be correlated with anything bad.
serum cholesterol was shown to be correlated with heart attacks and higher
probability of other events, but dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol are
almost uncorrelated.

\- sodium intake is correlated with high blood pressure only for 20% of the
population. For 80% of the population, sodium intake does not raise blood
pressure.

\- you need water, but if you are healthy, you can skip food for 40 days with
many benefits and no irreversible damage.

\- you do not need B12 in your food if you are healthy (and your intestinal
cultures are healthy), and animals can't make it any better than humans can,
so this argument for requiring meat consumption is utterly wrong.

\- red, yellow and blue do not constitute a "primary color" basis with respect
to addition - you can't even make green! (red green and blue almost do; no 3
colors can cover the whole human eye visible gamut, but specific red. green
and blue maximize this coverage).

I've had a chance to talk to Danny Shechtman (nobel laureate in chemistry,
awarded for discovering and documenting the quasi-crystal structure). It turns
out that this "make bad decisions with confidence" is not limited to "naive
ideas and simple ignorance" - the greatest minds of the century, first among
them Linus Pauling, refused to consider his discoveries. (In fact, the
definition of what a crystal is was revised to account for quasicrystals, but
this was done only after Pauling passed away). There are horror stories behind
the nobels given to McClintock ("jumping genes"), Warren (helicobacter pilori
is the immediate cause for stomach ulcers), Shechtman, and I would assume many
other great discoveries.

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jodoherty
Given a multiple choice True/False test with the statement “people turn food
into energy”, I would have had to spend some time deciding on what to answer,
not because I have to question whether or not the statement is true, but
because I'd have to wonder in whether or not the test writer understands the
nuanced implications of that statement.

The way I see it, people don't turn food into energy -- they simply move
energy around and transform it by breaking the chemical bonds in the food and
forming other chemical bonds using enzymes to keep the activation energies low
enough to make a net gain despite losses to heat. So based on the conservation
of energy, people don't turn anything into energy. The energy was already
there -- they simply transformed it.

But then with the conservation of mass-energy, we know that some mass is
converted to energy when chemical bonds are broken. So technically the
statement is true in a sense. But the amount of energy created from mass is so
small it can't even be measured or detected, so for all practical purposes,
the statement is false. You have to be breaking nuclear bonds before you see
that.

The article's author says the statement is true, using it as an example of a
statement that's consistent with our preconceived ideas, but instead of
explaining it, he simply does some pseudo-scientific hand-waving -- digestion,
respiration, metabolism, and all that. This suggests the author somehow
considers energy as something that is created and used up on a regular basis.

Which makes you wonder, what if the writer of the statement was an expert
biologist whose major focus isn't understanding the concept of energy or the
chemical underpinnings of microbiology? What if they also saw energy in the
same way as the author of the article? What if the answer on the answer key is
true, despite being arguably false? In that case, the answer is true in the
sense that that's what the writer of the test wanted you to answer.

I think a better test would give the option of adding a statement or two to
qualify or explain your choice on the test. I know that would allow me to
finish such a test sooner, especially if it was computerized and I could type
my explanations.

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yread
_the authors found that participants who had best mastered scientific concepts
(determined by their overall accuracy) were especially slow to verify
inconsistent statements_

I would expect that it's the other way around ie the people who take longer
time to think stuff through will have a higher accuracy. Which doesn't make
their results all that surprising

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jerf
Sounds like a System 1 vs. System 2 conflict: [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-
Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-
Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345778519&sr=8-1&keywords=thinking+fast+and+slow)
And not even a particularly interesting or surprising one, really.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Can you go into more detail? Specifically, how does this differ from the
second page if the article, where it discusses (somewhat refutes) learned
concepts that override naive concepts taking longer just because the pathways
aren't as strongly connected?

I have no idea what System 1 vs System 2 thinking is, much less how it applies
in this case.

~~~
andyjohnson0
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory#Systems>

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shasta
Surely the "inconsistent" questions are the ones that initially seem to be
possibly tricky or subtle questions. This is not the same as contradicting the
intuitive answer. For example, if you ask whether two masses fall at the same
speed in air, that would probably trigger a careful response in the same way
that asking whether two objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum would, even
though in the first case the correct answer ultimately matches natural
intuition. That's my guess as to what's going on.

------
taeric
This seems to me to be as much "you have a hard time replacing what you know
works in some (indeed many) cases with something that might be harder to apply
in simple cases but is always correct" as it is "you have a hard time learning
correct things."

That is, the ideas (that this piece mentioned) that people had a hard time
leaving behind seemed to be those that work as decent guidelines, even if they
are not accurate. Speed of processing is a value in our minds as much as it is
in a computer. If you have a rule of thumb that works rather well, why abandon
it?

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brudgers
The reason people persist with unscientific conceptions of the world even
after learning the scientifically correct explanation is because
scientifically correct explanations often have little benefit in our day to
day lives.

The heliocentric model of the solar system, for example, has no effect on our
normal lives, and thus by Pierce's Pragmatic Maxim is of little value.

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

------
K2h
I'm going to bet they used something like harvards implicit to run this test.
If you have never seen it, the results are surprising given how simple the
tests are (measure your time of response)

<https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/>

the warning statement alone should make you interested:

    
    
      I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations 
      of my IAT test performance with which I may not 
      agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed

------
ThomPete
Anyone interested traveling even further down the rabbit hole I recommend
Kuhn, Lakatos & Feyrabend.

~~~
technology
You mean this ?

[http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/wuthrich/teaching/...](http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/wuthrich/teaching/2011_145/Lect06_PopperEtAl.pdf)

~~~
ThomPete
Yes

------
nirvana
There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a
theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes.

For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a
naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that
means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying
increases economic activity.

The scientific reality is, this naive concept is ignoring the cost of that
government spending. All of the money government has comes from two sources-
inflation and taxes. Whichever way they raise the money, they do economic
damage.

Thus government spending, like Obama's so-called "stimulus" plan, actually
hurts the economy.

This is why, for instance, the unemployment rate ended up being higher than
Obama claimed it would be if his plan wasn't passed.. even though his plan was
passed.

But it is not very hard to find people who believe that some other thing
caused unemployment to be higher.

In fact, both the Republican and Demcorat parties, and their partisan's
ideologies, reject the science of economics and embrace pseudo-science.

In my lifetime, I've seen a great increase in embracing pseudo-scientific
concepts or even anti-science positions, most recently and alarmingly, by
people who insist that they are right because "science" agrees with them.

Another example: Glaciers are getting smaller because of global warming. This
belief is completely unscientific-- there is no way to know how many glaciers
there are on earth, let alone whether they are getting smaller, and nobody has
even tried to guess whether more of them are shrinking than growing.

Another example: The idea that the TSA protects us against airplane
hijackings. Or that somehow the government is protecting us against terrorism.
Or that mass shootings would be worse if guns were less regulated (the stats:
9.2 is the average number killed in areas where guns are banned, but only 2.2
people die in areas where the intended victims are allowed to be armed.)

Politics' natural enemy is science.

~~~
josephlord
Hmmm, a very political comment...

Firstly confusing Economics with a science rather than pseudo-science (or at
least very bad science in that in most cases the assumptions required for the
mathematical models are unrealistic and instantly forgotten), then stating as
a fact some simple controversial (among economists too) statements which if
true at all have a great deal more subtlety behind them and a number of which
I believe to be flat out wrong.

I think trying to tackle the points would go way off topic but in my view the
parent post gives a good example of some naive beliefs (although economics is
insufficiently scientific to be able to prove them inconsistent with reality).

Edit: Changed 'post' to 'comment' and 'unrealistically' to 'unrealistic'.

