WHY BAD?

The inspiration:

Final Exam

Just a reminder: the final exam is Friday, December 18th, at 12:00 p.m. in our normal classroom. You'll have 50 minutes to take it.

After a Word from Our Sponsors...

Here are some links on advertising and reasoning.

• The first is about the underlying intellectual dishonesty in even the most honest of ad campaigns.
  
• By the way, if you're into advertising, that entire blog is great. I'm a bit biased, though, since I used to work with the guy who writes it.
• Here's a radio interview with the director of FactCheck.org, a great website devoted to debunking claims in political ads.
• I also used to work with the guy who interviewed FactCheck's director. Yup, I'm a pretty big deal.
• I wish those fact checking websites made a difference. Actually, I just wish they didn't hurt their own cause. Silly humans and your naturally biased minds!

Homework #3

Homework #3 is due at the beginning of class on Monday, December 14th. Your assignment is to choose an ad (on TV or from a magazine or wherever) and evaluate it from a logic & reasoning perspective.

• First, very briefly explain the argument that the ad offers to sell its product.
• Then, list and explain the mistakes in reasoning that the ad commits.
• Then, list and explain the psychological ploys the ad uses (what psychological impediments does the ad try to exploit?).
• Attach (if it's from a newspaper) or briefly explain the ad.
  

Wooden-Headed

Here's a little rant on that favorite topic of mine: intellectual honesty. A simple goal of this class is to get us all to recognize what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence for a claim. I think we're getting better at that. But this doesn't guarantee that we'll care about the difference once we figure it out.

Getting us to care is the real goal of this class. We should care about good evidence. We should care about evidence and arguments because they get us closer to the truth. When we judge an argument to be overall good, THE POWER OF LOGIC COMPELS US to believe the conclusion. If we are presented with decent evidence for some claim, but still stubbornly disagree with this claim, we are just being irrational. Worse, we're effectively saying that the truth doesn't matter to us.

This means we should be open-minded. We should be willing to challenge ourselves, and let new evidence change our current beliefs. We should be open to the possibility that we've currently gotten something wrong. This is how comedian Todd Glass puts it:


Here are the first two paragraphs of a great article I read last year on this:

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. Remember, in many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.

Metacognition

There's a name for all the studying of our natural thinking styles we've been doing in class lately: metacognition. When we think about the ways we think, we can vastly improve our learning abilities. This is what the Owning Our Ignorance club is about.

I think this is the most valuable concept we're learning all semester. So if you read any links, I hope it's these two:

• How Doctors Can Improve By Thinking About Thinking
  
• The Importance of Metacognition
  

When Status Quo Isn't Good Enough

Lazy, inert humans:

• If it already exists, we assume it's good.
• Our mind works like a computer that depends on cached responses to thoughtlessly complete common patterns.
  
• NYU psychologist John Jost does a lot of work on system justification theory: our tendency to unconsciously rationalize the status quo, especially unjust social institutions. Scarily, those of us oppressed by such institutions have a stronger tendency to justify their existence.
• Jost has a new book on this stuff. Here's a video dialogue about his research:
  

Let's All Nonconform Together

If you like these links, I'll let you in my exclusive club:

• On the influence of your in-groups and the formation of your identity: "If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false." (from Paul Graham's "Lies We Tell Our Kids.")
  
• Here's a summary of two recent studies which suggest that partisan mindset stems from a feeling of moral superiority.
• Here's that poll showing the Republican-Democrat switcharoo regarding their opinion of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke when the executive office changed parties.
  
• Our political loyalties also influence our view on the economy.
  
• Here's an article about a cool study on the relationship between risk and provincialism.
• Conformity hurts the advancement of science.
  

Wished Pots Never Boil

Here is a hodgepodge of links on some psychological impediments we're discussing recently:

• If you're a fan of The Secret, you should beware that it's basic message is wishful thinking run amok.
• Teachers have biases, too: we're self-serving and play favorites.
• Why don't we give more aid to those in need? Psychological impediments are at least partly to blame.
• Why do we believe medical myths (like "vitamin C cures the common cold," or "you should drink 8 glasses of water a day")? Psychological impediments, of course!
  

No, You're Not

One of my favorite topics is I'M-SPECIAL-ism. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that most Americans overestimate their own abilities. This is one of the biggest hurdles to proper reasoning: the natural tendency to think that we're smarter--or more powerful, or prettier, or whatever--than we really are.

You've probably noticed that one of my favorite blogs is Overcoming Bias. Their mission statement is sublimely anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ist:

"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."

This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me! That one. You again. Me again!

(By the way, this is especially true for the actually smart people among us: the more experienced you are, the more overconfident you're likely to become.)

So I hope you'll join the campaign to end I'M-SPECIAL-ism.

The Importance of Being Stochastic

Statistical reasoning is incredibly important. The vast majority of advancements in human knowledge (all sciences, social sciences, medicine, engineering...) is the result of using some kind of math. If I had to recommend one other course that could improve your ability to learn in general, it'd be Statistics.

Anyway, a few links:

• I brought up this article before, but I'll mention it again: most of us are pretty bad at statistical reasoning.
• That radio show I love recently devoted an entire episode to probability:
  
  
• Here's a review of a decent book (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives) on our tendency to misinterpret randomness as if it's an intentional pattern.
• This ability to see patterns where there are none may explain why so many of us believe in god (see section 5 in particular).
• What was that infinite monkey typewriter thing we were talking about in class?
  
• Statistics in sports is all the rage lately. It can justify counterintuitive decisions, like going for it instead of punting on 4th down... though don't expect the fans to buy that fancy math learnin'.
  

We Don't Know What Makes Us Happy

Here's psychologist Dan Gilbert's (we've mentioned him before) great TED talk on his happiness research:


I'd like to teach a class devoted entirely to TED talks.

Fight the Bias

How can we counteract these cognitive biases we're learning about? As Sam mentioned in class, one big point is to own our fallibility. Awareness of our limits and biases should lead us to lower our degree of confidence in our beliefs. Simply put, we should admit (and sincerely believe) that there's a real chance that we're wrong.

Here are two other big, simple points I think are important:

1. Actively seek out sources that you disagree with. We tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people and consume like-minded media. This hurts our chances of discovering that we've made a mistake. In effect, it puts up a wall of rationalization around our preexisting beliefs to protect them from any countervailing evidence.
2. When we do check out our opponents, it tends to be the obviously fallacious straw men rather than sophisticated sources that could legitimately challenge our beliefs. But this is bad! We should focus on the best points in the arguments against what you believe. Our opponents' good points are worth more attention than their obviously bad points. Yet we sometimes naturally focus on their mistakes rather than the reasons that hurt our case the most.

More to Forget

Here's more on the less of memory:

• Here's an overview on the way our memory is faulty by psychologist Gary Marcus. He's written a book called Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
  
• Even strong "flashbulb memories" like what you were doing on 9/11 are not very accurate.
• One leading expert on memory is psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Here is a pair of articles that summarize her research on false memories, and here's a video of her presenting on it.

Filling in Memory

Here's a section (pages 78-80) from psychologist Dan Gilbert's great book Stumbling on Happiness about how memory works:



The preview cuts off at the bottom of page 80. Here's the rest from that section:

"...reading the words you saw. But in this case, your brain was tricked by the fact that the gist word--the key word, the essential word--was not actually on the list. When your brain rewove the tapestry of your experience, it mistakenly included a word that was implied by the gist but that had not actually appeared, just as volunteers in the previous study mistakenly included a stop sign that was implied by the question they had been asked but that had not actually appeared in the slides they saw.

"This experiment has ben done dozens of times with dozens of different word lists, and these studies have revealed two surprising findings. First, people do not vaguely recall seeing the gist word and they do not simply guess that they saw the gist word. Rather, they vividly remember seeing it and they feel completely confident that it appeared. Second, this phenomenon happens even when people are warned about it beforehand. Knowing that a researcher is trying to trick you into falsely recalling the appearance of a gist word does not stop that false recollection from happening."

Too many words, Sean! Can't you just put up a video? You better make it funny, too!

Fine. Here's Dan Gilbert on The Colbert Report:

Direct Experience

Here's two videos on stuff we've been talking about in class lately. First, watch this:


Next, watch this:


Finally, here's an article on this issue. Still trust your direct experience?

Deodorants' Gender Norms

If you don't buy these products, you're being unnatural:

The Conspiracy Bug

Here's that article on the 9/11 conspiracy physicist that we talked about in class. I've quoted an excerpt of the relevant section on the lone-wolf semi-expert (physicist) versus the overwhelming consensus of more relevant experts (structural engineers):

While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.

"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.

"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.

Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.

And one more excerpt on reasons to be skeptical of conspiracy theories in general:

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.

Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to "them" — the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true.

Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.

Penguin Digestion Experts? You Bet!

So you didn't believe me when I said that there are experts on the subject of penguin digestion? Oh, you did? Fine, well, I'll prove it to you, anyway. Here are some academic articles on the topic:

• Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating king penguins from a 2004 issue of Journal of Experimental Biology
  
• Feeding Behavior of Free-Ranging King Penguins (Aptenodytes Patagonicus) from a 1994 issue of Ecology

Of course, no list would be complete without the often-cited, groundbreaking 1985 Ornis Scandinavica article:

• Differential Digestion of Fish and Squid in Jackass Penguins Spheniscus demersus

Perhaps my favorite, though, is the following:

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation from a 2003 issue of Polar Biology
  

If any of these articles are above your head (I think they're all above mine!), you might like this, uh, simpler video demonstration of penguin digestion.

Begging the Dinosaur

I couldn't resist giving you some stuff on begging the question. Here's my favorite video for Mims's logically delicious song "This is Why I'm Hot":