Random Thoughts

“The fishy part of neuroscience isn’t the data. It’s the spin we put on the data in the guise of explanation.”

j.mp/JhkF8g

bet you can’t guess who said this

‎”One thing that matters little to subjective confidence: the actual amount & quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.” 

everyone, meet Danny Kahneman

“The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right.”

“Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.”

“One of these themes is that people who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. We were required to predict a soldier’s performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation… . We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual’s future, which was almost everything that would actually matter.”

“You may be surprised by our failure: it is natural to expect the same leadership ability to manifest itself in various situations. But the exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives.”

“When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.”

“To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?pagewanted=all

characteristics of science

Some great quotes in these couple posts:

“Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

“The joy of not knowing, of learning by learning that you were wrong, is one of the chief joys—and one of the great benefits—of science.”

“As I began to think about it, I realized that, contrary to popular view, scientists don’t really care that much about facts. We recognize that facts are the most unreliable part of the whole operation. They don’t last, they’re always under revision. Whatever fact you seemed to have uncovered is likely to be revised by the next generation. That’s the difference between science and many other endeavors. Science revels in revision. 

“And in my course, I would use one of these neuroscience textbooks—this one that weighs seven and a half pounds, which is twice the weight of the human brain, by the way—to go along with 25 lectures, also chock full of facts, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. And I came to the realization at some point several years ago that these kids must actually think we know all there is to know about neuroscience. And that’s the difference. That’s not what we think in the lab. What we think in the lab is, we don’t know bupkis.”

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/06/what-is-science/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/22/stuart-firestein-author-of-ignorance-says-not-knowing-is-the-key-to-science.html

‎”The point is, some of our brightest social theorists seem over-ready to identify troubling trends or newly urgent problems when there is actually very little evidence of any trend, or that this or that problem has actually deepened. A simple explanation of this sort of error is that we intuitively take our own increasing awareness of a problem as evidence that the problem has become objectively more salient. We should watch out for this.” 

http://bigthink.com/the-moral-sciences-club/the-loneliness-myth

Here’s your fun distraction for the evening. (And I wanted to put this somewhere I’m sure to see it again.)

http://goo.gl/YnM5G

(via @kelleher_, twitter)

Annals of Great Sentences

So I have to share another great sentence. This one’s from Walter Russell Mead’s “Special Providence,” on the history of America’s schools of foreign policy thought. Background: he traces Great Britain’s decline into the first part of the 20th century, and then describes the US debates over its own future within that world order. He concludes with the only two options left for the US: take up Britain’s old role, or step away from the world stage and let whatever happens happen—to the decision-makers, “this was no choice at all.” Then he lands this beauty:

“Atlas shrugged, and the United States would shoulder the sky.”

Nice example of why it’s important to understand what confounding variables are, and why it’s important to correct for them.

http://goo.gl/1XSeO