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from the I-don't-want-knowledge-I-want-certainty dept.
Jeremy P. Shapiro, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, has an article on The Conversation about one of the main cognitive errors at the root of science denial: dichotomous thinking, where entire spectra of possibilities are turned into dichotomies, and the division is usually highly skewed. Either something is perfect or it is a complete failure, either we have perfect knowledge of something or we know nothing.
Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.
This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.
Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.
[...] In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”
Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.
I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.
Dr. David "Orac" Gorski has further commentary on the article. Basically, science denialism works by exploiting the very human need for absolute certainty, which science can never truly provide.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:09AM (28 children)
And very, very humble, as well! If only we could possibly fathom how deeply humble the TMB is! He is so humble, he can slam a revolving door! Lightning comes out his eyes, and Fireballs come out his arze! And boy, does he know science, because he dropped out of community college!
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:18AM (27 children)
Dude, the lowest I've ever scored on an IQ test given by a shrink was 136 (plenty to qualify for MENSA); I'd got woken up to take it and hadn't had coffee or a cigarette yet. I average in the low 160s. Not going around all the time saying that average people are three times as far below me mentally as they are above retards is plenty humble, especially when they're talking shit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:26AM (11 children)
Ah, he went full "MUH IQ!"
Definitely trolling
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:38AM (10 children)
Nah, I just really, factually am that much smarter than most folks. If you think it's enjoyable, I have a pretty good idea where you'd fall.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:06AM (4 children)
Learn to troll bub, and get that dyslexia looked into.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:02PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:25AM (2 children)
Or it was a troll, and TMB has been hooked by his IQ. which has got to hurt. khallow, as everyone knows, is very bad at judging these things.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:10AM
Nope. When I troll, butthurt spreads far and wide. That shit's just the truth.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 15 2019, @01:22AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:39AM (4 children)
It's apparent that you are a legend in your own mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:57AM (1 child)
At the same time, the posts of TMB display a constant and troubling lack of awareness of basic concepts. He may be "smart", but he definitely is "stupid". Only such a "brilliant" libertarian could fail to understand the function of society, the need to share risk, and contribute based on ability to do so. Evidently he does so in his personal life, what with the Church conversion, but is unable to make the step to abstract thought, and the notion of Social Justice. Too bad, we will have to tax him all the same, and tax him more for being stupid, in spite of his "High IQ".
[Note, they tested my IQ once. Broke the scale. And I killed everyone in the testing center, so no one would ever know. So I am smarter than you, TMB, just pray you never have to find out.]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:12AM
Sucks to be you then. It's miserable as hell at 160 until you get your zen on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:19PM
For some reason I am reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-LTRwZb35A [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:17AM
Not especially. There're plenty of people out there as smart or smarter than I am just by sheer population numbers. NCommander's one of them. Besides which, it doesn't make me a better human being, happier, richer, better hung, or anything else but smarter. It's no different than saying "I'm very tall". That's nice and all but it's mostly just annoying unless it's currently relevant, like when you need to reach something on the top shelf.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:18AM (10 children)
Sorry, but I qualified for Mensa too, and I'm not impressed either by your argument or by them. The group I was a member for for awhile had some of the most opinionated idiots I ever met. Of course, calling them idiots is invalid, as they had IQ tests to prove that they weren't, but the arguments they got into showed that they were.
The thing is, if you're opinionated you tend to use your intelligence to prove your opinions correct regardless of the evidence. So, yeah, idiot is the wrong word, but what's the right one. Bigot isn't correct, because it has invalid connotations, and generally these arguments would be about something quite abstruse. I think some of them did it intentionally for the entertainment value they got out of it. But they'd land on an opinion about something and develop proofs that the most inherently absurd positions were correct. You can get the same kind of argument on a less refined level in arguments between true believers in various political systems.
And, no, you can't look at an experiment in an unfamiliar subject and know whether it's correct or not. You *may* be able to tell that it's wrong. Mistakes in arithmetic are pretty obvious, e.g. But usually you can't.
P.S.: Natural experiments in medicine over sufficiently large populations for a sufficient period of time are strongly indicative of valid results, and if you did them on purpose of really shoddy ethics. Quinine for malaria came out of that kind of "experiment".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:51AM
If you're so smart, why did you join Mensa?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:13AM (1 child)
Idiot is a correct word. Ignorant is someone that doesn't know the facts. But an idiot is someone that knows that facts but chooses to ignore the facts because they know better. I've been an idiot many times - I've given good advice to others but then chose to ignore that advice as I'm "smarter than that". And no, I wasn't smarter than that. I only should have listened to my own advice.
You can't divorce yourself from reality. The more you try, the harder the back slap.
The main issue with medicine is that medicine doesn't happen in a vacuum. For example, there is always the double-blind experiment used as a standard where the result can often be "indistinguishable from placebo". The problem is that the placebo-effect is real. You see that in the anti-depressant studies all the time. Medicine doesn't work because effect same as placebo. But the problem is that medicine has ignored that placebo actually works in many situations. Mind over body - it's not just a saying.
Lab experiments on animals, there is just an effect discovered that made last century of pain experiments questionable at best.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:04PM
When it comes to Mensa, it disproves the saying that there's a sucker born every minute - if it were true , their world membership would be much much higher . It probably proves that as soon as money is involved people become less stupid in their behaviour . To apply it to the trust study would require following up on people to see if later on their actual purchase behaviour matches their response to the survey with the loaded questions . My bet is people would do more research before spending money, unlike, say, voting.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:26PM (4 children)
Mensa IQ tests have very few dimensions as compared to real life.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:13PM (3 children)
Hey! I'll have you know my ability to rapidly test rearrangements of letters against a substantive, if incomplete, vocabulary is a crucial life skill that is definitely causal with life success and not an correlation with an unrelated shared root cause!
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:33PM (2 children)
There are some very real negative correlations between high scores on Mensa-like tests and what would typically be called "real-life success."
Company I worked for did a 2 day offsite psych profile evaluation prior to promoting anyone into management. Like 50 other management hopefuls, I figured: what the hell let 'em pay for it and see what comes out. I came, I saw, I performed above average (for existing management personnel within the company, who - themselves - performed well above general population average) in all areas, and also turned in a score on their logical analysis test consistent with my GRE, highest they had ever seen.
How many of those 50 other management candidates were promoted before me? The world will never know, I left the company a year later - but at least 15 of the other hopefuls were tapped and promoted with 30% raises during that year. Rather than stick around a company run by a dumb frat boy [businessinsider.com] I took a position with a smaller company, 20% salary bump and relocation to somewhere I'd rather live.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:02PM (1 child)
Anecdotes aside, I'm not a fan of how we use IQ, but the research finding that it has correlation with success in health and career is substantive enough that you cannot really say the opposite like that.
The problem I have with the subjective interpretation of that (i.e. that it's causal and being "smarter" in terms of working memory and visio-spatial skills) is entirely with the number of further assumptions that are made and immediately taken for granted by the mighty buzzard types, especially in light of contradictory evidence and non-confirmatory findings.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:55PM
I guess it can be a question of: what level of "success" do you aspire to? IQ at 2SD+ above the mean, correlates with "success" above average - matches with my limited ability to directly observe the world (few thousand examples, probably less than 0.1% sample size for US residents.) If you're looking to break into the 1% club, not so much IQ based anymore - no matter how high.
I was just musing about working memory and recall speed this morning - recall speed is at least roughly related to "skill" or at least proficiency/fluency. My recall speed for some things is insanely fast, others well below average, and any attempt to test and quantify this is going to be fraught with Heizenberg-like uncertainty.
Like Socrates, Coach Butterworth is hard to refute: https://encuruj.com/tag/bad-news-bears/ [encuruj.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:25AM (1 child)
I gave it a check out too. A bigger bunch of tools I have never met. Even in humanities courses in college.
The word you're looking for is "wrong". There are things intelligence helps with but in philosophy it mostly just opens up a hell of a lot more new and interesting ways to be wrong.
Oh but you absolutely can with as hilariously obvious as many of these guys make it. You might not be able to say whether their methodology was shitty because of bias or because of idiocy but it's been easy as hell to spot cocktacularly bad methodologies in many areas for a good long while.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @07:02PM
You think they're tools?
Must be a really nice group of people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 14 2019, @09:49AM (2 children)
You may be highly intelligent, but that doesn't mean you are smart. It just means you are good at solving logical puzzles.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:30PM (1 child)
Indeed. To be honest I'm amazed anyone still gives any credence to IQ tests, I thought they were debunked years ago as being an inaccurate and incomplete measure of just one aspect of a human intelligence, which is far too broad and complex to be captured in a 2-3 digit number.
But I guess if you've spent a lifetime building your sense of self worth on the foundation of your "high score" then it would be very hard to accept that it is largely meaningless.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 15 2019, @01:27AM
I think you need to look up the word "debunked". It does not mean "a bunch of idiots were incorrectly using this test to measure things it did not test". For what it measures, it's aces.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @09:00AM
136 on the Cattell is under 2 stdev, so, your statement isn't necessarily correct.