Tag: epistemology
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Most hot ideas and discoveries fade with time. But some scientific papers are genuine breakthroughs, whose importance only increases as the decades pass. This one, published in Science last week, which describes a database of words from millions of books digitized by Google—4 percent of all books ... Read More
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Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is "really out there" or an accident, so, as a number of psychologists have been saying lately to the public, it is kind of a problem that many ... Read More
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This week's theme is epistemological unease in the sciences: Complaints in a number of disciplines that studies didn't really find the effects they're reporting. One reason for these worries is that many studies nowadays are never repeated. So today I'm going to consciously and rationally resist ... Read More
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One of the frustrations that comes with a new and interesting idea is the large number of people who will tell you that you're actually saying something old and familiar. Most of us heartily dislike changing our minds about anything important, and we're all pretty busy. So a lot of your audience ... Read More
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Daryl J. Bem's experiments on psi caught the world's attention, as I posted last month, because he used standard psychology-lab methods to gather and analyze his data. Imagine what astronomers might feel if NASA announced that the Hubble space telescope had found evidence for astrology: How do you ... Read More
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When you're an infant, the brain makes three dots and a line into a face; later in life, it turns a creak and a shadow into a ghost. Adults too often perceive bad luck as the work of a conscious (if vindictive) mind. You can resist it with logical thought, but the mind's default setting—what ... Read More
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Before there were abstract concepts, and probably before there were numbers, there were stories. She did this; it made him do that; then I heard her say this. According to narrative psychologists the story is our fundamental tool for describing ourselves and the people around us.But story-telling ... Read More
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Psychologists often joke that their insights into human nature come from experiments with American university students, on duty for required credit or beer money. "So we see that human beings--or at least, Michigan sophomores...'' Ha-ha, chuckle-chuckle. Then, on with the PowerPoint.It's a laughing ... Read More
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Footnote about the Pinker-Gladwell kerfuffle: To discredit Gladwell, Pinker takes advantage of a truly embarrassing mistake (the science-writer's nightmare) in which Gladwell misspelled "eigenvalue'' as "igon value.'' (It seems a less successful gambit, though, after you learn that Pinker ... Read More
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Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter are the scientists whose names will always be associated with mapping of the human genome -- after racing to complete the job, the two announced in 2000 that it was done, three years early. So it's impressive that this year they both announced another shared ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male