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What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

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Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#11
post #9

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?

[deleted]

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#13
post #3

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.

> Always be looking for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right.

Though it seems to work better for internal thought processes than in collaboration unless you are seriously tactful.

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#14
post #9

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?

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).

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#15

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.

>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.

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#16

"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.

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?

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#17

"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.

I think the fanatics care more about belonging to a group than the virtues of the group itself. As far as I see, this has an evolutionary source in primate band behavior: belonging to a group means a chance at survival, being alone means being eaten. In that situation, wanting your group to win is the same as wanting to be alive, so it is easy to see why fan cheering is such a forceful (even to the point of violence) demonstration.

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#18
post #3

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.

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.

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#19
post #9

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?

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 (…

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.

Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

#20
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.
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