God dammit, FINALLY. I am endlessly frustrated by the universal use of placebo effects as the CONTROL GROUP rather than an object of study to be enhanced.
The vegetarian article is also notable for demonstrating how many people have no problems pronouncing “I am a vegetarian” while chewing on chicken or fish...
To me the whole problem is fascinating. I can very easily understand the idea of not wanting to kill personally, but how does one jump to not eating pre-killed meat, and especially to things that processed to the point where they don’t look like meat at all such as sausage or salami? I mean, I understand that there are a handful of efficient utilitarian altruists who care about what the outcome is for the animal and now how doing the act feels for their own purity, but I would figure most people rate actions based on how they feel. And chewing pepperoni pizza does not feel the same way as a grimy, messy, bloody pig murder. I guess I am just surprised how many people think like utilitarians, caring about the outcome for the animal, instead of what I would think the more natural, namely avoiding to do actions that feel too gruesome but happily enjoying the results if others do them.
Not eating prekilled meat and processed meat allows you to be part of a social movement and gain status. Not killing the meat personally doesn’t.
Also, people do things based on how they feel, but don’t like to be reminded of that. If the particular rationalization for doing what they feel happens to include an ethical claim, even if it is just a rationalization and they don’t understand any theories of ethics, they will avoid a broad enough category to convince themselves that they really are doing it based on ethics.
Stop Rules is really important—in humans, they’re when someone’s mind stops working on cognitive material, and if pushed to do so, the person goes into attack/defense mode.
While all good points (and the tag is “For Science!”) they aren’t really doing science. Take the first case, the belief that rapidly clicking Kadala will affect what you get. Is it true or not? You don’t know until you test it. It is not true in the idealized world where Kadala has a perfect RNG. But it may or may not be true in the real world where a click triggers a message to the server and, depending on the latency, rapid clicks could tickle some bug involving a race condition or out-of-order messages or something like that.
It’s not like Diablo is known to be entirely bug-free :-/ You don’t get to say “actually” unless you actually tested it.
And they never claim to be doing science (other than that “For Science” tag, but who would take that seriously on an entertainment website?). They are introducing the idea that our minds have flaws and are full of bias to their audience through highly relatable example material.
I don’t know if the Kadala bug is real, and I don’t care, that is a tree in the forest. And the article is about the forest. (If the Kadala bug is real, that is just poor fact checking. The lesson on Confirmation Bias still stands.)
Recent sequence on mathematical ability and Scott A. being bad at math (or is he?) reminded me of this short story (possibly nonfiction), which I recommend: Bad At Math by Alone a.k.a. The Last Psychiatrist. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/03/bad_at_math.html
Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
“Measure for Measure: The strange science of Francis Galton” (on Galton, statistics, regression to the mean, and eugenics.)
Politics/religion:
“A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare”
“Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.”
“How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist”
“Why Are There So Few Vegetarians? Most ‘vegetarians’ eat meat. Huh?”
“The Live-and-Let-Live System in Trench Warfare in World War I”
Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944-50)
“Abraham Lincoln, Necromancer”,
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“The Non-parametric Bootstrap as a Bayesian Model”
“Crowdsourcing data analysis: Do soccer referees give more red cards to dark skin toned players?” (61 analysts examine the same dataset for the same research question to see how much variation in approach determines results; excerpts)
“Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit”
“The psychology of parapsychology, or why good researchers publishing good articles in good journals can still get it totally wrong”
“Predictive modeling, data leakage, model evaluation”
Psychology/biology:
“Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome”, Hall et al 2015 (excerpts)
“CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes”
“Mice Fall Short as Test Subjects for Some of Humans’ Deadly Ills”
“Rising Plague”
“Icing Organs: Why scientists are so near and yet so far from being able to cryopreserve organs”
“Discrepancies between clinical and autopsy diagnosis and the value of post mortem histology; a meta-analysis and review”, Roulson et al 2005 (excerpts)
“When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life: Should elaborate fantasies be considered a psychiatric disorder?”
“The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray’s brain injury” (medical ethics, dereliction of duty)
“The Price of a Stolen Childhood: When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet”
“The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness”, Bakker
“Nature makes no leaps”
Technology:
“The Tail at Scale”, Dean & Barroso 2013
“Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons”, MacKenzie & Spinardi 1995
“In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On”
Economics:
Children are net losses to parents, even in peasant or hunter-gatherer societies.
Arab slave trade
Social impact bond
“Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers”
“What Happened with LEGO: The price of a brick”
“So You Discovered an Anomaly … Gonna Publish It? An Investigation Into the Rationality of Publishing a Market Anomaly”, Doran & Wright 2007
“Superiority” (Arthur C. Clarke)
Philosophy:
“Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person”
Moral Anti-Realism
Fiction:
“Birdless Country”, by Burton Watson
“The Garden of Proserpine”
God dammit, FINALLY. I am endlessly frustrated by the universal use of placebo effects as the CONTROL GROUP rather than an object of study to be enhanced.
The vegetarian article seems to be saying “because the argument against eating meat is so good, we need to explain the lack of vegetarians by....”
Popular psychology is an easy place to draw conclusions based on assuming that your side is in the right.
The vegetarian article is also notable for demonstrating how many people have no problems pronouncing “I am a vegetarian” while chewing on chicken or fish...
To me the whole problem is fascinating. I can very easily understand the idea of not wanting to kill personally, but how does one jump to not eating pre-killed meat, and especially to things that processed to the point where they don’t look like meat at all such as sausage or salami? I mean, I understand that there are a handful of efficient utilitarian altruists who care about what the outcome is for the animal and now how doing the act feels for their own purity, but I would figure most people rate actions based on how they feel. And chewing pepperoni pizza does not feel the same way as a grimy, messy, bloody pig murder. I guess I am just surprised how many people think like utilitarians, caring about the outcome for the animal, instead of what I would think the more natural, namely avoiding to do actions that feel too gruesome but happily enjoying the results if others do them.
Not eating prekilled meat and processed meat allows you to be part of a social movement and gain status. Not killing the meat personally doesn’t.
Also, people do things based on how they feel, but don’t like to be reminded of that. If the particular rationalization for doing what they feel happens to include an ethical claim, even if it is just a rationalization and they don’t understand any theories of ethics, they will avoid a broad enough category to convince themselves that they really are doing it based on ethics.
There’s been rumors about this paper for some time before it actually came out. If there’s interest I could break it down...
The link goes to:
The Grumpy Programmer—“RFIDs, Encryption, and Stop Rules… Oh My!”—A bit rambly in the middle, but an interesting post on trying to get people to look past their cached thoughts.
Stop Rules is really important—in humans, they’re when someone’s mind stops working on cognitive material, and if pushed to do so, the person goes into attack/defense mode.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament
Mostly about a rational look at what causes car accidents, and how car companies decide what’s safe enough.
14 Ways Cognitive Biases Hamper Your Diablo Toon
It is actually titled “How Your Mind Screws with You in Games Like Diablo”. Not novel material, but novel to see on a gaming website.
While all good points (and the tag is “For Science!”) they aren’t really doing science. Take the first case, the belief that rapidly clicking Kadala will affect what you get. Is it true or not? You don’t know until you test it. It is not true in the idealized world where Kadala has a perfect RNG. But it may or may not be true in the real world where a click triggers a message to the server and, depending on the latency, rapid clicks could tickle some bug involving a race condition or out-of-order messages or something like that.
It’s not like Diablo is known to be entirely bug-free :-/ You don’t get to say “actually” unless you actually tested it.
And they never claim to be doing science (other than that “For Science” tag, but who would take that seriously on an entertainment website?). They are introducing the idea that our minds have flaws and are full of bias to their audience through highly relatable example material.
I don’t know if the Kadala bug is real, and I don’t care, that is a tree in the forest. And the article is about the forest. (If the Kadala bug is real, that is just poor fact checking. The lesson on Confirmation Bias still stands.)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande
Overtesting and overtreatment in American medicine, and what’s being done to have more sensible medical treatment.
Recent sequence on mathematical ability and Scott A. being bad at math (or is he?) reminded me of this short story (possibly nonfiction), which I recommend: Bad At Math by Alone a.k.a. The Last Psychiatrist. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/03/bad_at_math.html
Barbie fucks it up again is a short article about how an attempt at feminist Barbie can turn up creepy and sexist.
The piece is hilarious, in a depressing way, and inspiring, as in “inspiring me to write a rational!Barbie fanfic”.
Yeah, the Barbie book seems kind of unfortunate. On the other hand, lambdaphagy wrote an also hillarious/depressing post about the criticism of the book: women writing about their experiences in IT is very problematic.