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Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#21

Post by yummyfajitas »

nirvana wrote: post #14

There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes. For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying increases economic activity. The scientific reality is, this…

Your post would be much better if you avoided hot-button topics and focused on political examples that don't inspire strong emotional reactions. There are plenty of these - farm subsidies, a lot of occupational licensing, patent/copyright regimes, for example.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#22

Post by K2h »

I'm going to bet they used something like harvards implicit to run this test. If you have never seen it, the results are surprising given how simple the tests are (measure your time of response)

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

the warning statement alone should make you interested:

  I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations 
  of my IAT test performance with which I may not 
  agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed

Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#23

Post by hazov »

nirvana wrote: post #14

There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes. For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying increases economic activity. The scientific reality is, this…

The "market" that economists say about is their model of what they believe a market is, it's a mathematical model with a good amount of gaps, this is why you will always find economists disagreeing among them, it's not like physics because they have to decide to rely on more assumptions and less experimentation.

I used to work in earth sciences although not in glaciology, and their models are very sound to say about the now, not so much about the future, that glaciers retreats and expands is common knowledge (the Missoula flooding event is a good example), but I am sure with a warming planet, if that's the case, more glaciers would be retreating than expanding, this is easier to search for, but I know the World Glacier Monitoring Service have good data about that.

Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#24

Post by jodoherty »

Given a multiple choice True/False test with the statement “people turn food into energy”, I would have had to spend some time deciding on what to answer, not because I have to question whether or not the statement is true, but because I'd have to wonder in whether or not the test writer understands the nuanced implications of that statement.

The way I see it, people don't turn food into energy -- they simply move energy around and transform it by breaking the chemical bonds in the food and forming other chemical bonds using enzymes to keep the activation energies low enough to make a net gain despite losses to heat. So based on the conservation of energy, people don't turn anything into energy. The energy was already there -- they simply transformed it.

But then with the conservation of mass-energy, we know that some mass is converted to energy when chemical bonds are broken. So technically the statement is true in a sense. But the amount of energy created from mass is so small it can't even be measured or detected, so for all practical purposes, the statement is false. You have to be breaking nuclear bonds before you see that.

The article's author says the statement is true, using it as an example of a statement that's consistent with our preconceived ideas, but instead of explaining it, he simply does some pseudo-scientific hand-waving -- digestion, respiration, metabolism, and all that. This suggests the author somehow considers energy as something that is created and used up on a regular basis.

Which makes you wonder, what if the writer of the statement was an expert biologist whose major focus isn't understanding the concept of energy or the chemical underpinnings of microbiology? What if they also saw energy in the same way as the author of the article? What if the answer on the answer key is true, despite being arguably false? In that case, the answer is true in the sense that that's what the writer of the test wanted you to answer.

I think a better test would give the option of adding a statement or two to qualify or explain your choice on the test. I know that would allow me to finish such a test sooner, especially if it was computerized and I could type my explanations.

Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#25

Post by beagle3 »

EzGraphs wrote: post #13

Worse than simple ignorance, naïve ideas about science lead people to make bad decisions with confidence. This is the reason these articles capture my attention. A related problem not discussed in the article is the tendency to use so-called "scientific" explanations to a non-scientific area of life. A better understanding of the scientific method itself in education is essential. Simply prefacing a statement with ph…

Quite a bit of the accepted "scientific" knowledge is wrong, and a lot of people will fight for it vigorously without noticing, or otherwise thinking. Even here on hacker news, and other scientifically minded forums, I've been called a quack for pointing out that:

- the "calories in - calories out" (and especially the carb=4kc/g, protein=4kc/g, alcohol=7kc/g, fat=9kc/g and nothing else matters) is fragile, based on a chain of unproven assumptions, and has countless counterexamples (in other words, scientifically wrong, even if it is somewhat useful for ~80% of the population).

- dietary cholesterol was NEVER shown to be correlated with anything bad. serum cholesterol was shown to be correlated with heart attacks and higher probability of other events, but dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol are almost uncorrelated.

- sodium intake is correlated with high blood pressure only for 20% of the population. For 80% of the population, sodium intake does not raise blood pressure.

- you need water, but if you are healthy, you can skip food for 40 days with many benefits and no irreversible damage.

- you do not need B12 in your food if you are healthy (and your intestinal cultures are healthy), and animals can't make it any better than humans can, so this argument for requiring meat consumption is utterly wrong.

- red, yellow and blue do not constitute a "primary color" basis with respect to addition - you can't even make green! (red green and blue almost do; no 3 colors can cover the whole human eye visible gamut, but specific red. green and blue maximize this coverage).

I've had a chance to talk to Danny Shechtman (nobel laureate in chemistry, awarded for discovering and documenting the quasi-crystal structure). It turns out that this "make bad decisions with confidence" is not limited to "naive ideas and simple ignorance" - the greatest minds of the century, first among them Linus Pauling, refused to consider his discoveries. (In fact, the definition of what a crystal is was revised to account for quasicrystals, but this was done only after Pauling passed away). There are horror stories behind the nobels given to McClintock ("jumping genes"), Warren (helicobacter pilori is the immediate cause for stomach ulcers), Shechtman, and I would assume many other great discoveries.

Re: Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

#26

Post by igouy »

nirvana wrote: post #14

There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes. For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying increases economic activity. The scientific reality is, this…

>>... there is no way to know how many glaciers there are on earth ...Because...?
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