

What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? - dood
http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html

======
jerf
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.

~~~
MichaelGG
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.

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drblast
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.

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JoelMcCracken
"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.

~~~
AndrewMoffat
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?

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
edash
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>

------
jdp23
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?

~~~
yummyfajitas
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).

~~~
jdp23
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
jdp23
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?

~~~
yummyfajitas
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/>

~~~
jdp23
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.

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

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Jun8
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."

------
rman666
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.

~~~
theodore
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>

~~~
jdp23
very useful, thanks! worked like a charm ...

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InclinedPlane
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.

------
bobbo19852
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.

~~~
archgoon
>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.

~~~
bobbo19852
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".

~~~
cheriot
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.

------
maeon3
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...](http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-paying-
attention-zoning-out-crucial-mental-state)

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open:
[http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-
open-m...](http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open-
mindedness-requires-if.html)

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...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/9780596809515/learn-
to-estimate/learn_to_estimate)

Becoming a functional perfectionist:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-
be-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-too-
perfect)

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

