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Peer Review and the Scientific Process
Renegade:
Here's a fun site:
http://lesswrong.com/
About Less Wrong
Interested in improving your reasoning and decision-making skills? Then you've come to the right place.
Less Wrong is a large, active website for people who try to think rationally. To get a quick idea of why rationality is important and how to develop it, try reading Your Intuitions Are Not Magic, The Cognitive Science of Rationality, or What I've Learned From Less Wrong.
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It's kind of off-topic, but still relevant to the general topic of reasoning and logic.
IainB:
Here's a fun site:
http://lesswrong.com/
About Less Wrong
Interested in improving your reasoning and decision-making skills? Then you've come to the right place.
Less Wrong is a large, active website for people who try to think rationally. To get a quick idea of why rationality is important and how to develop it, try reading Your Intuitions Are Not Magic, The Cognitive Science of Rationality, or What I've Learned From Less Wrong.
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It's kind of off-topic, but still relevant to the general topic of reasoning and logic.
-Renegade (October 16, 2013, 11:15 AM)
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I would suggest, given our natural human irrationality, that it is not off-topic at all.
We have to learn to use rational-critical thinking. It's not something we are born with, but a skill that we have to learn - like riding a bike. That's why they started teaching it as an "O" (Ordinary) Level syllabus in UK secondary schools some years back (better late than never). They found - perhaps unsurprisingly - that it was definitely a transferable skill and that it helped students to not only improve their grades in other "O" Level subjects, but also to be able to better cope with university 101 material.
I gathered from my reading that the idea for introducing it to secondary schools was partly because the results of tests on student intake to universities showed that they lacked (amongst other things) rational-critical thinking skills - so, to work around the problem, universities started teaching it as part of entrance foundation courses at university and then later addressed the problem directly by shifting the rational-critical thinking training to secondary level. That way, all children could thus benefit, whether they went on to university or not, and, as I noted above, they found that it was a transferable skill that benefited secondary student grades on other "O" Level subjects.
You arguably could not have a rational discussion about Peer Review and the Scientific Process if you were not employing critical thinking - i.e., reasoning and logic.
I have used that site you point to (http://lesswrong.com/) quite a bit, to check/help improve my own reasoning skills, and have pointed other people (including my then 11 y/o daughter) to it as well. It's rather useful.
To understand a deeper potential significance of this, consider The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-28). In this case, the Intellect is one of our servants.
Why would we deliberately continue to squander, cripple or imprison our intellects in ignorance, shuttering it up, uneducated, in a dark box, throughout the duration of our lives, when once we can understand this simple truth: that everything of ourselves has been given to us - a gift of Life - and that it is up to us to make the fullest use of our gifts, and that it is never too late to start?
As I wrote above:
"However, the depressing reality seems too often to be that many people are so unable to think rationally for themselves that they seem gullible to this kind of barrage of logical fallacy. One's head would be full of a confusing and probably conflicting mass of invalid premises, with ergo no real knowledge or understanding of truth."
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This is a very old idea and the stuff of wisdom. Fiat lux - literally, "Let there be light".
From the third verse of the Book of Genesis. In the King James Bible, it reads, in context:
* 1:1 - In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
* 1:2 - And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
* 1:3 - And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
* 1:4 - And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
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I would prefer to exist in the light, and am still working on it.
Renegade:
We have to learn to use rational-critical thinking. It's not something we are born with, but a skill that we have to learn - like riding a bike.
-IainB (October 16, 2013, 09:13 PM)
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There are a few skills that are innate (a priori).
A (Given)
A --> B (Given)
-------
B (Follows)
A & -A (False)
etc.
But beyond a few simple things like that, well, nope. They need to be learned.
To understand a deeper potential significance of this, consider The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-28). In this case, the Intellect is one of our servants.
Why would we deliberately continue to squander, cripple or imprison our intellects in ignorance, shuttering it up, uneducated, in a dark box, throughout the duration of our lives, when once we can understand this simple truth: that everything of ourselves has been given to us - a gift of Life - and that it is up to us to make the fullest use of our gifts, and that it is never too late to start?
-IainB (October 16, 2013, 09:13 PM)
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+1
Though it is very hard for a lot of people to go back to learning.
And logic skills do get rusty. It's always useful to brush up. I know I need it in some areas.
I would prefer to exist in the light, and am still working on it.
-IainB (October 16, 2013, 09:13 PM)
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+1
Harder than it sounds. :( Much harder. Fortunately a lot of things get easier once you set yourself on the right path.
IainB:
...Though it is very hard for a lot of people to go back to learning. ...
-Renegade (October 16, 2013, 09:27 PM)
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If one operated on the basis that one did all one's schoolin' an' learnin' when one was young, and that's over now, then that might implicitly assume that one will not learn anything new from that point onwards.
That looks like a false premise to me. The human mind is an adaptable learning machine. Sure, if one unconsciously "turned it off" at (say) age 25 or so, then it might feel a bit rusty to make the effort now, but it doesn't necessarily preclude one's learning something new. I reckon that intellectual laziness probably enters into it as well.
I've always been an information junkie and what shocks me is how ignorant I still am and how much more there is to learn/understand/experience. A single lifetime won't have been long enough.
IainB:
I had thought that zoology (the scientific study of the behaviour, structure, physiology, classification, and distribution of animals of a particular region or geological period) used well-established, tried-and-tested scientific processes to arrive at its conclusions. Well, that may be so, but it apparently doesn't stop the BBC broadcasting staggeringly misleading content in a "documentary" on the subject: Mythical Attenborough Fail
I always reckoned that David Attenborough's work was the absolute last word in factual natural history documentaries, but this is the second instance I have read about/seen where one of his proggies was seriously "off" in the science department.
Look at the complaint:
Complaint Summary: ‘Tree of Life’ false, misleading and non-scientific
Full Complaint: The programme makes extensive use of a ‘Tree of Life’ pictorial device depicting species as branches on a tree, with the vertical dimension showing time. All thousands of branches are continuous and ultimately end up together in the present time. This is false, because we all know most species died out long ago (so the vast majority of branches shouldn’t reach the present). It is also misleading, as the viewer will think the present time is much richer in species than the past. It is finally non-scientific, using an antiquated metaphor long ago disproven by the likes of Stephen Jay Gould. Please insert a correction/disclaimer at the beginning of future broadcasts and for the rest of the first showing of the series.
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Maybe the BBC is in the vanguard of the Post-Modern Science movement (aka "made up Science") that I posted about here: Re: Peer Review and the Scientific Process (in Post-Modern Science ).
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