[ This is post #9 in the series, “Finding reality in a post truth world.” ] Scientific skepticism requires a scientific attitude. What is that? Lee McIntyre, in The Scientific Attitude – Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience – sums it up nicely: “The scientific attitude can be summed up in a commitment to
Tag: confirmationbias
Senses and reality – part 2
Posted By: Zorgi the CorgiPosted On:
[ This is post #5 in the series, “Finding reality in a post truth world.” ] In Part 1 on this subject, I looked at the vision system as a demonstration of Donald Hoffman’s FBT (Fitness Beats Truth) theorem. In this part, I’ll look at some of the other senses – touch, hearing, smell, and
Conspiracy Theories, Part 2
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[ This is post #2 in the series, “Finding reality in a post truth world.” ] In Part 1, I looked at some of the more prominent conspiracy theories, their prevalence, and the dangers they pose. In Part 2, I’ll examine the underpinnings of conspiracy theories, showing how they rest on cognitive fallacies that we
Zorgi’s Reading List
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by Dr. Steven Novella. In this tie-in to their incredibly popular “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe” podcast, Steven Novella, MD along with “Skeptical Rogues” Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies and conspiracy theories (Anti-vaccines, homeopathy, UFO sightings, etc.)
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by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall. In an age riven by factual disputes over everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief, and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.
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by Donald Hoffman. The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.
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By Daniel Kahneman. In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacationeach of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.