David McRaney's Blog, page 25

The Brain and Creativity Institute

Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence.

Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions

The Backfire Effect

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Published on January 13, 2017 16:20

YANSS 092 – Avoiding the many varieties of bullshit

How strong is your bullshit detector? And what exactly IS the scientific definition of bullshit?

In this rebroadcast, we explore both of those concepts as well as what makes a person susceptible to bullshit, how to identify and defend against it, and what kind of people are the most and least likely to be bowled over by bullshit artists and other merchants of feel-good woo.

[image error]You’ll hear how Gordon Pennycook and his team at the University of Waterloo set out to discover if there was a spectrum of receptivity for a certain kind of humbug they call pseudo-profound bullshit – the kind that sounds deep and meaningful at first glance, but upon closer inspection means nothing at all. They wondered, is there a “type” of person who is more susceptible to that kind of language, and if so, what other things about personalities and thinking styles correlate with that tolerance and lack of skepticism, and why?

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Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

The New Age Bullshit Generator

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

Gordon Pennycook

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

Cognitive Reflection Test

Big Think Article on Cognitive Reflection

Barbara Drescher’s ICBSEverywhere.com

WisdomOfChopra.com

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Published on January 13, 2017 16:14

YANSS 091 – Revisiting how we can escape the psychological trap of learned helplessness

Stuck in a bad situation, even when the prison doors are left wide open, we sometimes refuse to attempt escape.

In psychology, learned helplessness is a state of mind that can develop if you try and fail, and then try and fail again. After a few rounds of learning in this way you start to believe that it’s not the situation, or the problem, or some kind of unfair disadvantage, or a bad roll of the dice that caused you to fail – but that it had something to do with you as a person, something that indicates you’d likely continue to fail again and again and again, so why bother? Once that pattern is established, you mistakenly stop trying, and even though success it right there, easy, yours for the taking, you don’t even make the attempt. Your brain has changed, you’ve learned a new routine, you’ve learned to be act as through you are helpless regardless of whether you really are.

Learned helplessness is one of darker aspects of human nature. Among all the ways we delude ourselves, it’s easily one of the most damaging and most invisible. In this episode, we explore this strange mental phenomena by speaking to three experts, each exploring a different way it harms us. You’ll learn how it keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it might be to escape any one of those scenarios.

The good news is that learned helplessness can be unlearned, and each expert in the show offers a different tactic for removing it from our lives and the lives of others.

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[image error] This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

[image error] This episode is sponsored by EXO Protein Bars. EXO makes all-natural protein bars using cricket flour, a sustainable and complete source essential amino acids, high in iron, that produce 100x less greenhouse gas than cows. Oh yeah, and you’ll never know its crickets because they are delicious and designed by a three-Michelin-star chef. Get your four-bar sample pack by visiting EXOProtein.com/sosmart.

[image error] There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

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[image error]Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

Links and Sources

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Charisse Nixon in the Classroom YouTube Video

The Ophelia Project

Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence

Martin Seligman: Learned Helplessness

Seligman’s Learned Helplessness

Coping strategies in the workplace: Relationships with attributional style and job satisfaction

Pessimistic Explanatory Style and Cardiac Health: What is the Relation and the Mechanism that Links Them?

Ellen Langer Nursing Home Study

Rats, Cancer, and Learned Helplessness

Photo: By Dudva (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons

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Published on December 23, 2016 12:46

YANSS 090 – Questioning the nature of reality with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman

Back in the early 1900s, the German biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll couldn’t shake the implication that the inner lives of animals like jellyfish and sea urchins must be radically different from those of humans.

Uexküll was fascinated by how meaty, squishy nervous systems gave rise to perception. Noting that the sense organs of sea creatures and arachnids could perceive things that ours could not, he realized that giant portions of reality must therefore be missing from their subjective experience, which suggested that the same was true of us. In other words, most ticks can’t enjoy an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical because, among other reasons, they don’t have eyes. On the other hand, unlike ticks, most humans can’t smell butyric acid wafting on the breeze, and so no matter where you sit in the audience, smell isn’t an essential (or intended) element of a Broadway performance of Cats.

Uexküll imagined that each animal’s subjective experience was confined to a private sensory world he called an umwelt. Each animal’s umwelt was different, he said, distinctive from that of another animal in the same environment, and each therefore was tuned to take in only a small portion of the total picture. Not that any animal would likely know that, which was Uexküll’s other big idea. Because no organism can perceive the totality of objective reality, each animal likely assumes that what it can perceive is all that can be perceived. Each umwelt is a private universe, fitted to its niche, and the subjective experiences of all of Earth’s creatures are like a sea filled with a panoply of bounded virtual realities floating past one another, each unaware that it is unaware.

Like all ideas, Uexküll’s weren’t completely new. Philosophers had wondered about the differences in subjective and objective reality going back to Plato’s cave (and are still wondering). But even though Uexküll’s ideas weren’t strictly original, he brought them into a new academic silo – biology. In doing so, he generated lines of academic research into neuroscience and the nature of consciousness that are still going today.

For instance, when the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” he thought there was no answer to his question because it would be impossible to think in that way. Bat sonar, he said, is nothing like anything we possess, “and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.” All one can do, said Nagel, is imagine what it would be like for a person, like yourself, to be a bat. Imagining what it would be like for a bat to be a bat is impossible. This was part of an overall criticism on the limits of reductionist thinking, and is, of course, still the subject of much debate.

The siblings of these notions appear in the writings of everyone from Timothy Leary with his “reality tunnels” to J.J. Gibson’s “ecological optics” to psychologist Charles Tart and his “consensus trances.” From the Wachowski’s Matrix to Kant’s “noumenon” to Daniel Dennett’s “conscious robots,” we’ve been wondering about these questions for a very long time. You too, I suspect, have stumbled on these problems, asking something along the lines of “do we all see the same colors?” at some point. The answer, by the way, is no.

The assumption in most of these musings is that we humans are unique because we can escape our umwelten. We have reason, philosophy, science, and physics which free us from the prison of our limited human perceptions. We can use tools to extend our senses, to see the background radiation left behind by the big bang or hear the ultrasonic laughter of ticklish mice. Sure, the table seems solid enough when we knock on it, and if you were still trapped in your umwelt, you wouldn’t think otherwise, but now you know it is actually mostly empty space thanks to your understanding of protons and electrons. We assume that more layers of truth reveal themselves to us with each successive paradigm shift.

In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast, we sit down with a scientist who is challenging these assumptions.

hoffman-portrait-2x Donald Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California with a background in artificial intelligence, game theory, and evolutionary biology has developed a new theory of consciousness that, should it prove true, would rearrange our understanding of not only the mind and the brain, but physics itself.

“I agree up to a point,” said Hoffman, “that different organisms are in effectively different perceptual worlds, but where I disagree is that these worlds are seeing different parts of the truth. I don’t think they are seeing the truth at all.”

Hoffman wondered if evolution truly favored veridical minds, so he and his graduate students created computer models of natural selection that included accurate perceptions of reality as a variable.

“We simulated hundreds of thousands of random worlds and put organisms in those worlds that could see all of the truth, part of the truth, or none of the truth,” explained Hoffman. “What we found in our simulations was that organisms that saw reality as-it-is could never outcompete organisms that saw none of reality and were just tuned to fitness, as long as they were of equal complexity.”

The implication, Hoffman said, is that an organism that can see the truth will never be favored by natural selection. This suggests that literally nothing we can conceive of can be said to represent objective reality, not even atoms, molecules, or physical laws. Physics and chemistry are still inside the umwelt. There’s no escape.

“If our perceptual systems evolved by natural selection, then the probability that we see reality as it actually is, in any way, is zero. Precisely zero,” said Hoffman.

Well aware that these ideas come across as woo, Hoffman welcomes challenges from his peers and other interested parties, and in the interview you’ll hear what they’ve said so far and how you can investigate these concepts for yourself.

Also in the show, Hoffman explains his ideas in detail in addition to discussing the bicameral mind, artificial intelligence, and the hard problem of consciousness in this mindbending episode about how we make sense of our world, our existence, and ourselves.

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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

This episode is sponsored by EXO Protein Bars. EXO makes all-natural protein bars using cricket flour, a sustainable and complete source essential amino acids, high in iron, that produce 100x less greenhouse gas than cows. Oh yeah, and you’ll never know its crickets because they are delicious and designed by a three-Michelin-star chef. Get your four-bar sample pack by visiting EXOProtein.com/sosmart.

There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

purchase.

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

Links and Sources

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What if Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us?

Donald Hoffman’s Website

The Case Against Reality

Mr. Jaynes Wild Ride

The Human Intellect is Like Peacock Feathers

XKCD: Umwelt

David Eagleman on the Umwelt

IMAGE SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons

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Published on December 02, 2016 15:52

YANSS 089 – James Burke’s new project aims to help us deal with change, think connectively, and benefit from surprise

In this episode of the YANSS Podcast, we sit down with legendary science historian James Burke, who returns to the show to explain his newest project, a Connections app that will allow anyone to search and think “connectively” when exploring Wikipedia.

He launched the Kickstarter for the app this month. This is a link to learn more.

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For much of his career, science historian James Burke has been creating documentaries and writing books aimed at helping us to make better sense of the enormous amount of information that he predicted would one day be at our fingertips.

JamesBurkeSmall In Connections, he offered an “alternate view of history” in which great insights took place because of anomalies and mistakes, because people were pursuing one thing, but it lead somewhere surprising or was combined with some other object or idea they could never have imagined by themselves. Innovation took place in the spaces between disciplines, when people outside of intellectual and professional silos, unrestrained by categorical and linear views, synthesized the work of people still trapped in those institutions, who, because of those institutions, had no idea what each other was up to and therefore couldn’t predict the trajectory of even their own disciplines, much less history itself.

In The Day the Universe Changed, Burke explored the sequential impact of discovery, innovation, and invention on how people defined reality itself. “You are what we know,” he wrote “and when the body of knowledge changes, so do we.” In this view of change, knowledge is invented as much as it is discovered, and new ideas “nibble at the edges” of common knowledge until values considered permanent and fixed fade into antiquity just like any other obsolete tool. Burke said that our system of knowledge and discovery has never been able, until recently, to handle more than one or two ways of seeing things at a time. In response we have long demanded conformity with the dominant worldview or with similarly homogenous ideological binaries.

james_burke_historian My favorite line from the book has to do with imagining a group of scientists who live in a society that believes the universe is made of omelettes and goes about designing instruments to detect traces of interstellar egg residue. When they observe evidence of galaxies and black holes, to them it all just seems like noise. Their model of nature cannot yet accommodate what they are seeing, so they don’t see it. “All that can accurately be said about a man who thinks he is a poached egg,” joked Burke, “is that he is in the minority.”

You may have noticed that when we browse the news or type into Google we tend to seek confirmation more than we do information. We predict our current model will remain untarnished. When we want to make sense of something, we tend to develop a hypothesis just like any scientist would, but when we check to see if we are correct, we often stop once we find confirmation of our hunches or feel as though we understand. Without training, we avoid epiphany by avoiding the null hypothesis and the disconfirmation it threatens should it turn out to be valid.

Since the 1970s, Burke has predicted we would need better tools than just search alone if we were to break out of this way of thinking. His new app aims to do that by searching Wikipedia “connectively” and producing something the normal internet searches often do not – surprises, anomalies, and unexpected results.

With the app, one would be able to pick two seemingly unrelated ideas, people, objects, events, inventions, works of art, or whatever, and then watch as the artificial intelligence carves a visual path through the articles on Wikipedia and forms a series of interactive nodes linking them. Each node can then be explored or summarized, and the whole chain can be saved or shared. Users would also be able to carve their own paths, visualizing the possible links at each stage, or choose a single topic and watch as the app delivers a selection of possible endpoints, some expected, and some bizarre.

“It’s a way, in a sense, of turning the fairly linear material in Wikipedia, that is to say much of what you find in Wikipedia tends to be connections between people that you would have expected, such as chemists knowing chemists and so on, and to turn that into more of an interactive knowledge web,” said Burke. “If that were to happen, that would be an intriguing enrichment of what Wikipedia offers.”

When I got a chance to play with the preliminary version of the app, I started with Charles Darwin. After typing in his name, a hexagon appeared with six possible paths I could take. Those paths could be reset as many times as I wanted, but I chose to go off in the direction of natural selection which collapsed the other branches and created a new hexagon with the Charles Darwin node still attached. The new hexagon offered six new paths, and on I went down a chain of connections until I arrived at Frankenberry Cereal. That might seem like just a bit of fun trivia, that Darwin and Frankenberry are linked together in an academic six-degrees-of-separation sort of way, but along that path I learned how advances in biology led to the mass production of gelatin. That took me to the history of pectin, fruit roll-ups, and something I had never heard of before called “Frankenberry Stool,” the pink poop that comes from eating too much monster-based manufactured breakfast which caused a short-lived health scare in the early days of artificially dyed food.

In the 1990s, Burke began working on a Knowledge Web, a mostly invite-only, experimental interactive media project built on the same principles as his approach to the history of science, innovation, and change. The K-Web allows users to visualize and navigate information outside of the way it is presented in books or libraries, and to move between nodes connection in a dense, interconnected sprawl, like neurons wired together into tethered constellations of association and influence. Today it features 2,800 people linked 30,000 ways, but the Connections app would apply the tools developed in that project to the megastructure of Wikipedia, adding five million new nodes with a yet-to-be-estimated number of new links between them.

Richard Ingram, a professor of Educational Technology at James Madison University is heading up the dev team working on the project. Ingram said that should the Kickstarter be successful, a portion of the revenue from app sales will be donated annually to Wikipedia itself and “James himself asks that he receive no compensation.” Instead , he wishes for sales to go to his non-profit to help distribute the app so that it can be used in education.

I asked how Burke hoped people would use the app, and he said, first of all, if the campaign falls through, no one will use it for anything, but if it does, he said fun and silliness in his view are justified ends unto themselves. Aside from those goals though, he said he had “always found that reading in widening circles around a person and seeing what contacts they made, the people they knew, the influences they caused or suffered, quite often the most interesting things happened when you went to an anomaly, an outrider if you like.” For example, an engineer might only have friends who are also engineers with the exception of a painter or a pilot. “Go there, because the whole process of change, and prediction, and handling innovation, which is why I started the K-Web and this app in the first place, tends in general to be a surprise.”

This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

purchase.

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

The Connections App Kickstarter Page

The Connections App Website

The Knowledge Web

A prototype of the app

Connections

The Day the Universe Changed

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Published on November 17, 2016 12:01

YANSS 088 – How to bridge the political divide with better moral arguments

In this divisive and polarized era how do you bridge the political divide between left and right? You do you persuade the people on the other side to see things your way?

New research by sociologist Robb Willer and psychologist Matthew Feinberg suggests that the answer is in learning how to cross something they call the empathy gap.

When we produce arguments, we do so from within our own moral framework and in the language of our moral values. Those values rest on top of a set of psychological tendencies influenced by our genetic predispositions and shaped by our cultural exposure that blind us to alternate viewpoints. Because of this, we find it very difficult to construct an argument with the same facts, but framed in a different morality. Willer’s work suggests that if we did that, we would find it a much more successful route to persuading people we usually think of as unreachable.

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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

This episode is also sponsored by Casper Mattresses. Buying a Casper mattress is completely risk free. Casper offers free delivery and free returns with a 100-night home trial. If you don’t love it, they’ll pick it up and refund you everything. Casper understands the importance of truly sleeping on a mattress before you commit, especially considering you’re going to spend a third of your life on it. Get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting www.casper.com/sosmartand using offer code “sosmart.” Terms and Conditions Apply.

secrets-crimes-audiotape-logo-300 Secrets, Crimes, & Audiotape is Wondery’s signature audio drama franchise. Every week, we will bring listeners captivating stories of crime, love, mysteries, conspiracies and more. With well-recognized actors and stories based on both new and established characters, Secrets, Crimes & Audiotape aims to start a new golden age of audio drama in the US. Like your favorite TV drama or comedy, with actors you know and love, but using only sound and your imagination

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Links and Sources

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From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?

Robb Willer’s Academic Website

Robb Willer’s Personal Website

YourMorals.org

Jonathan Haidt’s TED Talk

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Published on November 04, 2016 11:29

YANSS 087 – The Paranoid States of America

In this episode, we explore why Americans love conspiracy theories, how they flourish, how they harm, and what they say about the culture.

Jesse Walker is the books editor for Reason Magazine and author of the new book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. Walker’s articles can be seen in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many others. He blogs at The Perpetual Three Dot Column.

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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

purchase.

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

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Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions

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Published on November 04, 2016 11:27

YANSS 086 – Change My View

For computer scientist Chenhao Tan and his team, the internet community called Change My View offered something amazing, a ready-made natural experiment that had been running for years.

All they had to do was feed it into the programs they had designed to understand the back-and-forth between human beings and then analyze the patterns the emerged. When they did that, they discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed.

In this episode you’ll hear from the co-founder of Reddit, the moderators of Change My View, and the scientists studying how people argue on the internet as we explore what it takes to change people’s perspective and whether the future of our online lives is ever thicker filter bubbles or the increasingly effective process of whittling away our worst ideas.

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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

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ChenHao Tan’s Website

Alexis Ohanian

Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing A Crime

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Published on October 09, 2016 09:00

YANSS 085 – Memory Illusions

Julia Shaw’s research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief.

Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime.

In this episode, you’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth.

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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud