Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
Randomness could trump expertise in this ancient game of strategy.
About one of my favorite podcasts WTF with Marc Maron.
Contradicting people's beliefs often doesn't change them, but agreeing with them just might.
Researchers found that showing people extreme versions of ideas
that confirmed -- not contradicted -- their opinions on a deeply
divisive issue actually caused them to reconsider their stance
and become more receptive to other points of view.
The scientists attribute this to the fact that the new information
caused people to see their views as irrational or absurd, according
to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.
"For example, the fact that they are the most moral society
in the world is one of the most basic beliefs of Israeli society,"
Halperin said. So when the researchers showed participants a video
that claimed Israel should continue the conflict so that its
citizens could continue to feel moral, people reacted angrily.
I wonder how many minds have been changed by The Colbert Report.
Procrastination Can Be A Positive Thing - Matt Richtel, NYT
They could pick up a bucket near the start of the alley and carry it
to the end, or they could pick up a different bucket that was closer
to the end of the alley, walk a few steps and put it down.
In particular, Dr. Rosenbaum said, people are seeking ways to limit
the burden to their "working memory," a critical but highly limited
mental resource that people use to perform immediate tasks.
By picking up the bucket earlier, the subjects were eliminating
the need to remember to do it later. In essence, they were freeing
their brains to focus on other potential tasks.
Gary Marcus
An example is the discovery of DNA, which allowed us to understand
how genetic information could be represented and replicated in a
physical structure. In one stroke, this bridge transformed biology
from a mystery - in which the physical basis of life was almost
entirely unknown - into a tractable if challenging set of problems,
such as sequencing genes, working out the proteins that they encode
and discerning the circumstances that govern their distribution in
the body.
Neuroscience awaits a similar breakthrough. We know that there
must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the
elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe
those laws. We don't know, for example, whether our memories for
individual words inhere in individual neurons or in sets of neurons,
or in what way sets of neurons might underwrite our memories for
words, if in fact they do.
Why do so many poor, working-class and lower-middle-class whites - many of them dependent for survival on government programs - vote for Republicans?
Identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to share traditional
values with their twin siblings, suggesting a biological link on cultural
outlook.
The significance of the different correlations for identical and fraternal
twins, Ludeke added, is that "when we see identical twins who are this
similar, while fraternal twins are much less similar, we have a good
indication that genes account for some of the difference between people
for the trait in question."
Browser add-on to see which companies are tracking you. Read about one user's experience using it at Pando.com
Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. Here's the problem. Logic is a pretty powerful tool, but it only works if you give it good input. As the famous computer science maxim says, "garbage in, garbage out." If you know all the constraints and weights - with perfect precision - then you can use logic to find the perfect answer. But when you don't, which is always, there's a pretty good chance your logic will lead you very, very far astray.
Blind tastings and academic studies robustly show that neither amateur consumers nor expert judges can consistently differentiate between fine wines and cheap wines, nor identify the flavors within them.
A new paper has catalogued retractions over the past few decades in business and economics journals -- and hasn't found very many.
This study reports the results of a survey of professional, mostly academic economists about their research norms and scientific misbehavior. Behavior such as data fabrication or plagiarism are (almost) unanimously rejected and admitted by less than 4% of participants. Research practices that are often considered "questionable," e.g., strategic behavior while analyzing results or in the publication process, are rejected by at least 60%. Despite their low justifiability, these behaviors are widespread. Ninety-four percent report having engaged in at least one unaccepted research practice. Surveyed economists perceive strong pressure to publish. The level of justifiability assigned to different misdemeanors does not increase with the perception of pressure. However, perceived pressure is found to be positively related to the admission of being involved in several unaccepted research practices. Although the results cannot prove causality, they are consistent with the notion that the "publish or perish" culture motivates researchers to violate research norms.