What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by smokeyj » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 10:34 PM UTC

archgoon wrote: post #15

bobbo19852 wrote: post #4

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…

As a global warming noob, I wonder how a controlled environment is simulated to link climate change directly to human activity. Also, how can these claims be tested given that man-induced global warming cannot be repeatedly tested? Is there a formula to calculate the relation of carbon levels to temperature that can be retroactively tested for accuracy? If not, how do we know the degree to which carbon must be curved?

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

#32

Post by maeon3 » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 10:57 PM UTC

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...

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open-m...

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...

Becoming a functional perfectionist: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-...

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

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

#33

Post by edash » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 12:13 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #23

AndrewMoffat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 celtic…

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

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

#34

Post by jdp23 » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 12:29 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #30

jdp23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inco…

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 math…

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.

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

#35

Post by cheriot » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 4:54 PM UTC

bobbo19852 wrote: post #25

archgoon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 intellect…

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.