Monthly Archives: March 2011
Albert Einstein’s “The World As I See It”
Image via Wikipedia
Uploaded by C0nc0rdance on Mar 24, 2011
I think it’s interesting to read some of how Einstein saw the world he lived in. He addresses societal commitments, ethical ways of living, and religious views.
I’ve trimmed out huge sections of this book-length essay. For the full text, go to Amazon and buy it.
As the rain patters on my window…
…I sit here at my desktop without a written draft in front of me, neither in paper nor onscreen, and I think about how things have changed since that fateful day of posting on my first blog, on the evening of January 15th, 2008, only a little over three short years ago.
Forgive me if I ramble a bit…
Then I knew nothing of responsible blogging, and precious little of skepticism. But I certainly hope I’ve improved at least a little since then, having started out with the angry blogger persona and gotten to my current pseudonymous persona with an odd mixture of writing styles.
Those last have ranged from a sort of quasi-Carl Sagan-ish with lots of purple prose to the ‘evil and snarky’ style that has occasionally pissed people off, and for good reason – no one likes being ridiculed, especially when it comes to core beliefs – but let me make this clear: it’s people who have rights, it’s people, especially innocent victims of nonsensical claims, whom I think deserve respect, but not the ideas they hold, the claims they accept without thinking them over before doing so.
It’s not people I attack, only ideas. Even when it involves ridicule, that’s directed at the silliness of an idea, though the claims of cynical promoters of these ideas are fair game to me.
I’m not interested in controlling peeps, for example, telling peeps what to think, or telling them how to think just so. There are different perspectives on clear thinking, different styles of critical thought and various approaches to empirical rationalism, but without being dogmatic, they all boil down to a few essentials despite the differences in perspective: a respect for sound reasoning, valid evidence, and reality, with the use of science as the best criterion for what’s demonstrably true and real.
Most of you know of my interest in science, and in pseudoscience, and the distinctions between them. To me, being skeptical involves questioning everything within reason, though it’s nihilistic and strikes me as ill-founded to be skeptical of skepticism, since nobody can truly be skeptical of literally, consistently, and without qualification everything.
Even me. Especially me.
For newcomers to the site: My unequivocal view is that there is a real world, in which things exist external to myself, that are not dependent on my thoughts about them, my society, nor my theories about them, and which despite the legitimacy of our different internal maps of the territory of reality, our personal models of it, is what it is no matter who is doing the looking.
Why else can two people in different parts of the world see exactly the same thing when they look at a comet or spiral galaxy through a telescope, even the same spiral shape of the latter, and indeed can objectively compare what they see and come to some measure of agreement on it if neither is in error, and objectively resolve their dispute by resorting to some common ground upon which to base their conclusions if one or both are, common ground that would not exist if all truth were relative.
I’ve been reading a book, “Proofiness,” by Charles Seife, on all the ways in which we are all fooled by some form or other of mathematical deception, in thinking numbers that relate to real-world measurements infallible and so falling for all sorts of chicanery by others and ourselves simply because of the way numbers work with our attempts to quantify the things around us and the inherent impossibility of perfect precision in any measurement when so quantifying.
I must say, I’m about half-way through, and the book has been interesting so far, with more than a few of my sacred cows having been soundly debunked, but I feel less naive, not more cynical, about it, and I highly recommend the book.
Uncomfortable realities can be enlightening.
Even so, even by now, I’m still struggling to find a consistent ‘voice’ in my writing style, having tried lots of ways out, and found none of them completely satisfying. So I’m interested in hearing from you all which sort of writing style you would most prefer be used on this site. Thanks, and stay brilliant, all.
Baroque Mandelbrot Zoom
Uploaded by FlyByPC on Feb 18, 2007
A zoom into the “Seahorse Valley” region of the Mandelbrot Set. Set to “La Villageoise” by Rameau, performed by Trevor Pinnock. (Music — and therefore this video — are subject to the Creative Commons license. Check out www.magnatune.com.)
Neil deGrasse Tyson on “how smart we think we are”.
Uploaded by krissyeh on Sep 3, 2010
Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, the man who brings astrophysics down to the ordinary level for all to understand.
Additions to my Blogroll & RSS Widgets
Image via Wikipedia
Hey, Peeps. I’ve been getting traffic and some recognition via some really cool bloggers and friends of mine, and let’s face it: To me, one of the biggest rewards of posting on this site is my readership, and its commentary, without which I’m nothing but the lone crier in the void.
Any notoriety of the helpful sort I can get is always a good thing, and so it’s long since time to return the favors they’ve done for me.
I’ve recently added their sites to Teh Great Blogrollio, and to my RSS feed widgets in the sidebars of this blog, and I’ll present Links to their sites and a brief description of their sites here.
One good plug deserves another, and so here they are. Visit their sites or face my tentacled wrath!
♥ Books, Crafts & Pretty Things
This is a site run by my friend Kat, from Down Under, and on it she posts about books she’s read, crafts, anything that suits her fancy, and new social media she comes across, and she’s a much more well-rounded blogger than I am, not at all evil or snarky like me. If you’re looking for some ideas on what to make out of that set of nicknacks lying about on the bookshelf or coffee table, or what sort of cool online social media would be fun to check out, or even neat vintage items to restore or recycle, check out this blog!
krissthesexyatheist
This is one of the better atheist blogs, updated often by a self-described “Forty year old Barista wanna be rock star that has gone to college in the 80′s, 90′s and 00′s.” He’s more personable than me, and has a good writing style, and the ladies like him too. *ahem* Hailing from Sacramento California, his posts are informed and show a wit and humor I can only envy, though his site is not for the easily-offended. But he’s open and articulate about his views, and that more than counts. You are advised to have a thick skin, but I highly recommend this site for updates on atheist or religious-themed topics and trends.
Martin S Pribble
Another good rationalist blog, this has great articles, excellent interviews with prominent thinkers, be they scientists, skeptics, atheists, or any other sort. Marty always comes through with a good, informative post. Well-worth subscribing to, in my book.
The Tao of Chaos
Updated by a guy I’ve known since my early RPG gaming days, this is a great philosophy-oriented blog, and has posts on a number of topics besides that as well.
Lousy Canuck
Owned by, in his own words, “…an IT guy, skeptic, and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes, and debating on-line and off,” this is one of my more recent discoveries, and my view of the blogosphere is all the clearer for it. He posts on a lot of different things, yet always seems to keep his site on topic with a broad underlying rationalist theme, a good thing in my book. Check it out!
What Stereotype do I Belong to?
| What stereotype do you belong to?
Your Result: geek/nerd
smart, straight A’s, high GPA, band member, unpopular, would rather spend time on the computer than with friends, wears glasses, has been wearing the same clothes for years |
|
| Loner |
|
| Gamer |
|
| Jock |
|
| Emo |
|
| Preppy |
|
| No stereotype |
|
| Punk |
|
| What stereotype do you belong to? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz |
|
Confirmation Bias & The Availability Error
Image via Wikipedia
There are many ways by which we can deceive and delude ourselves, and two of the better known mechanisms for this are the well-established phenomena known as Confirmation Bias and, its partner in confusion, the Availability Error.
Confirmation Bias…
…is a universally human tendency to seek out and pay more heed to information which confirms our views and opinions, and is one of the major reasons why much scientific investigation involves attempts to falsify its hypotheses, at least in principle, when doing so would be more decisive than verifying them in the testing of an idea.
Verifying an idea may occasionally be useful, like finding even one actual example of an alien civilization in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but in many cases verification alone is so ambiguous, so trivial, that it tells us nothing new and interesting.
Confirmation bias is often evident in our daily lives, and is often seen in our tendency to read, watch, or listen to media outlets which support our ideologies and associate mostly with those who agree with us.
It can be offset by deliberately seeking out information which disagrees with us, and this can be entertaining as well. Personally, I find going on fringe-proponents’ websites interesting, amusing, and educational, and I highly recommend it, because it not only allows exposure to information contrary with my views, but also allows fascinating insights into the thinking and worldviews of proponents, and anything that helps me understand ‘the opposition’ better rather than remaining ignorant of what they are really saying and arguing is a good thing.
It’s far too easy to find data to validate any claim one wants to make if one were to ignore or avoid contrary data and cherry-pick from the unruly mass of information that which seems to support it, especially when the claim is framed in a way that makes it unfalsifiable even in principle, and it is primarily for this reason that this can be so misleading in any systematic search for the truth of a claim.
The Availability Error…
…only makes the above more likely, and is an equally natural tendency to pay more heed, to more easily notice and remember, or that otherwise gets our attention, that data which is more easy to think about and imagine, more vivid, more memorable, more salient to us, and to pay less attention to, even forget, that which doesn’t stand out to us and ‘stick’ in our heads.
This is evident when we derive assessments from information that really grabs our attention and interest rather than being accurate or reliable, and this leads to errors in reasoning such as the hasty generalization and the appeal to ignorance, as well as faulty anecdotal reasoning, such as our propensity to pay attention to testimonials, develop and hold superstitious beliefs, and make sweeping claims about an entire set or class of things from far too few examples of it, which is one way stereotypes are formed and perpetuated.
To make a valid, reliable assessment, it’s a good idea to make sure that the sample used to make a generalization has enough members, and that all members of the population that the sample is taken from are equally likely to be represented.
Anecdotes are useful in science only if they are both true, and representative of the class they are drawn from, and even then they are best suited for hypothesis formulation rather than testing.
Misjudgments of probability are common when psychologically available information is used in assessing something’s likelihood, such as errors in determining the relative chance of accidents in traffic, airplane crashes, shark attacks, and injury or deaths from malfunctioning amusement park rides, all of which tend to be meaningful, vivid, and lend themselves well to visualization.
The availability error is sometimes oversimplified in pop psychology as ‘remembering the hits and forgetting the misses,’ but disconfirming evidence can be memorable as well if it too is more psychologically available, such as losing a costly wager when playing in a casino or when betting on a horse race.
Neither of these tendencies should be taken as a slur against anyone’s intelligence, sobriety, sanity, or integrity. We all do these things, including yours truly. It’s just an unfortunate side-effect of how our brains perform their normal functions. But we can offset this error in otherwise reliable thought processes if not avoid it, like confirmation bias, and I’ll offer a couple of suggestions below:
Try to come up with many explanations for a claim, while looking for alternate views, even opposing ones, and attempting to avoid hasty judgments, for these are often greatly misleading. Try then to think of and test ways to show each of these hypotheses in turn wrong rather than right, which leads to a more fertile understanding, and a more decisive though provisional evaluation.
Try to seek out all of the relevant evidence, time and energy allowing, rather than just that which stands out, or that which most easily comes to mind, since even seemingly unimportant or counterintuitive data can be vital for testing the truth-value of a claim and its attendant hypotheses.
Reference (How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, 4th edition, by Theodore Schick Jr. & Lewis Vaughn – pp. 67-73.)
Into the Spider’s Lair [via SpaceRip]
A look at the famed Tarantula nebula in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud galaxy, courtesy of SpaceRip‘s YouTube channel. Enjoy.
[w/apologies to Jeff Foxworthy] You Might Be Skeptical If…
Certainly, the vast majority of critical thinking types are not terribly likely to show the following traits universally, but the more that happen to apply to you, the better the chance that you might be skeptical if…
…you regularly surf forums on the Web looking for arguments to pedantically dissect for flawed reasoning.
…you like to debate fringe-believers because they’re entertaining and amusing.
…you’ve read Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World” 97 times from cover to cover, and it’s still on your personal ‘must read again’ list.
…you even know who Carl Sagan was.
…you consider Martin Gardner’s “Fads & Fallacies” to be one of the top ten all-time literary classics.
…you remember who Martin Gardner was.
…the words “logical fallacy” don’t instantly make you think about Vulcan adult entertainment.
…you can name all the components and their relations of both deductive and inductive logical arguments.
…you regularly scrutinize the credibility of any information source you read, hear, or watch.
…you have more than twice in your life said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and actually remember who is credited for it.
…you hear the words “neurologist,” “magician,” & “psychologist,” and the names and faces of Steven Novella, James Randi, & Ray Hyman come to mind.
…you hear of a paranormal claim, and try to think of all the likely ways it can be explained without resorting to woo.
…once you come up with likely ways to explain something, you start thinking of ways to test each explanation by falsifying them one by one.
…you regularly introspect and test your own beliefs against that most harsh of taskmistresses, Reality herself.
…one of your hobbies, if not a professional psychologist, is learning all the ways that sane, honest, intelligent people can fool themselves, including you.
…you make a habit of obsessively analyzing your most frequently used arguments for specious logic for the next time you use them.
…every time you hear someone argue, the sequence, “Logical fallacy number one, logical fallacy number two,…etc.” goes through your mind.
…you hear the acronym “UFO” and actually remember what the “U” stands for…
…you can think of several very good reasons to conclude that Atlantis is just a made-up place in a piece of allegorical fiction written by Plato.
…when hearing accounts of Near Death Experiences, you are well aware of the medical distinctions between ‘near death’ and actual death.
…when hearing someone talk about faith healing claims, you immediately respond, “But why doesn’t god heal amputees?”
…you know the difference between skepticism and cynicism.
…you take being called ‘a closed-minded debunker,’ or ‘pseudoskeptic’ in stride as an everyday non-event.
…you know that possibility alone is not evidence than something is or ever will be true.
…you know that, “a mountain of anecdotal evidence” is the same thing as “a mountain of crappy, worthless evidence.”
…you can smell the use of loaded language on the Web like stink on a lemur’s tail.
…you know that Carl Sagan never actually said, “Billions & billions..,” but also know who got that ball rolling.
