Tools for Thinking: Science for Everyday Life

Interesting article, interesting question.

[quote=“NYT: David Brooks: Tools for Thinking”]A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?

The good folks at Edge.org organized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of [color=#0000FF]path dependence[/color]. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.
[…]
Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the [color=#0000FF]Einstellung Effect[/color], the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.

Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the [color=#0000FF]Focusing Illusion[/color], which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has a brilliant entry on [color=#0000FF]Supervenience[/color]. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).

Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are taking over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new discoveries about the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive sciences even as they supervene them.

If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the [color=#0000FF]Fundamental Attribution Error[/color]: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.
[…]
Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of [color=#0000FF]emergence[/color]. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.

We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.

Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.
[…] [/quote]
The Edge website lists who’s answered. It’s quite the list of thoughtful people. I’m curious what other concepts might be suggested.

Thanks, that’s really interesting. My suggestion would be [wikipedia]confirmation bias[/wikipedia]. It’s the habit we have of thinking of or being suggested an idea, then noticing all things that support that idea and failing to notice or explaining away all those things that don’t support it. It explains why people are so easily duped by psychics, and will adhere to their own interpretation of things in spite of being presented with evidence that contradicts it.

I think more people should have a clear undertanding of how to do a controlled experiment. This determines, among other things, if medicine really works. I think too few people undertand what the following terms really mean:

double-blind experiments
random assignment
the placebo effect
subjective bias

These are critical for separating medicine from quakery.


I think too many people are weak at statistics (and math in general). Showing how stats are used to trick people might be more entertaining for students who dislike math.

Understanding how hard it is to do a good survey would also help a lot of people.

Jaboney and zender, this thread would be useful in the Religion & Spirituality forum, as an antidote to the truthiness and anti-intellectualism often found there.

[quote=“zender”]I think more people should have a clear undertanding of how to do a controlled experiment. This determines, among other things, if medicine really works. I think too few people undertand what the following terms really mean:

double-blind experiments
random assignment
the placebo effect
subjective bias

These are critical for separating medicine from quakery.


I think too many people are weak at statistics (and math in general). Showing how stats are used to trick people might be more entertaining for students who dislike math.

Understanding how hard it is to do a good survey would also help a lot of people.[/quote]

???

Just kidding, buddy.
Man, if every person walking around could understand the myriad ways in which stats can be manipulated or even just erroneous, why, 2/3 of public media sources would be right out of business.
If you look at the enormous extent to which just plain old survey results are used in common diatribe, it’s mind boggling, given how utterly unrepresentative they can be.
As can the results of nearly any experimental procedure one wishes to leverage to make a point.
:noway:

84.66% of stats are just made up anyway.

Isn’t that 84.67%? I read that somewhere. You haven’t rounded off, but the number sounds credible to me.

And only 13.4% of the population knows that.

And only 13.4% of the population knows that.[/quote]

I’ll give you 7 to 1 odds with a 3 point spread that you’re off by a floating 3~4% two out of three times.

Double or nothing?