Thinking about Thinking
 

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-that-we-know/

"May 25, 2012, 10:51 am
Daniel Kahneman on the Trap of ‘Thinking That We Know’
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The National Academy of Sciences did a great service to science early this week by holding a conference on “The Science of Science Communication.” A centerpiece of the two-day meeting was a lecture titled “Thinking That We Know,” delivered by Daniel Kahneman, the extraordinary behavioral scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics despite never having taken an economics class.

The talk is extraordinary for the clarity (and humor) with which he repeatedly illustrates the powerful ways in which the mind filters and shapes what we call information. He discusses how this relates to the challenge of communicating science in a way that might stick.

Please carve out the time to watch his slide-free, but image-rich, talk. It’s a shorthand route to some of the insights described in Kahneman’s remarkable book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (I’m a third of the way through).

Here’s the video of the talk (which is “below the fold” because it’s set up to play automatically):

... As I noted via Twitter during the meeting, this talk and many other engaging presentations at the event illustrate the importance of adding a fresh facet to the popular notion that today’s citizens, and particularly students, would do well to improve their capacity for critical thinking:

“Critical thinking has to include assessing one’s own thinking.”

There’s more on the meeting at the Age of Engagement blog of Matthew Nisbet of American University, one of the presenters. And review Twitter traffic using the #Sackler tag set up for the conference."

A link from your link....

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Truth is a philosophical concept, and the shared search for agreed and objective truth is the central mission of science. But the sense of truth is a subjective experience, which falls in the domain of psychology. Carefully reasoned argument is one way to induce a sense of truth, but it is not the only way, or indeed the most common. The distinction between different modes of thinking – fast and automatic vs. slow and controlled – provides a framework for understanding the variety of experiences of truth.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Not too much into philosophy but the above seems OK from my perspective.....

What were those bank buildings saw on TV the other day that are leaning over, [not falling over, yet] in Spain maybe, gave me vertigo looking at them, in fact made me feel mildly sick in the stomach. Still just imagining them has mild residual affect the same. Of course they are structurally sound, a bit of architecture.

yes, that business of the interactions (relationships?) between logic and perception and anecdote/evidence was interestingly opened up I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/bo...pagewanted=all

It's available for e-readers too.

Mislead into believing language determines reality, or ought so, and learning environments especially, because they deliver it this way.

Why would someone considered to be or self-describing as "feminist" [whichever it really was?] or learned in feminism be necessarily more concerned with, or better at apprehending discrimination and injustice or doing something about it? The ideological delivery system, via the humanities or whetever, has to be considered to be biased right off the bat, with cultural and associated linguistic determinism. As have said before, anything more than a spontaneous grunt, enter the world of contrivance. Language and its word-concepts are meant to lead, as employed for general use. That soliloquy is horribly unfashionable is testimony to this. Post 1984 it'd be unexpected if it came close to being pathologized.
If had to generalize a roughly species-wide flaw, it'd be the never-ending range of pathologizing for behaviour controls, mostly informal but certainly formal also. There is no limits to this, no shortage of lack of imagination for making a cultural deposit in the bank of indifference. It looks to be as if the compliance and convergence imposed by the language mechanism is a problem. And as it may be with a heavy investment the momentum has more of the same and repetition being the answer. Language is one tool of many, it isn't the maker of everything good, or human. Not everything, or even most things, are spoken and described into existence, which is something required in appreciating that things can be spoken out of existence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/bo...pagewanted=all

"The participants were then asked which was more probable: (1) Linda is a bank teller. Or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. The overwhelming response was that (2) was more probable; in other words, that given the background information furnished, “feminist bank teller” was more likely than “bank teller.” This is, of course, a blatant violation of the laws of probability. (Every feminist bank teller is a bank teller; adding a detail can only lower the probability.) Yet even among students in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, who had extensive training in probability, 85 percent flunked the Linda problem"

"Mislead into believing language determines reality, or ought so, and learning environments especially, because they deliver it this way.

Why would someone considered to be or self-describing as "feminist" [whichever it really was?] or learned in feminism be necessarily more concerned with, or better at apprehending discrimination and injustice or doing something about it? ""

Actually I think you are reflecting _his_ case, but from a different angle?

(and yes, exemplified in in "You don't have to be female or black to recognise patronising behaviour".)

>>>Actually I think you are reflecting _his_ case, but from a different angle?


Nah, was just enjoying being confused.

Have a think about this below maybe. Given that some confusion of types is enjoyable and part of emotional and intellectual enjoyment, consider the encroachment of cultural values and norms on such a thing. The question I ask is should all confusion come with discomfort?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_confusion

"Confusion (from Latin confusĭo, -ōnis, noun of action from confundere "to pour together", or "to mingle together"[1] also "to confuse") is the state of being bewildered or unclear in one’s mind about something:[2]

"Acute Mental Confusion" is used interchangeably with Delirium[3] in International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems and Medical Subject Headings to describe a pathological degree in which it usually refers to loss of orientation (ability to place oneself correctly in the world by time,[4] location,[4] and/or personal identity[4]) sometimes accompanied by disordered consciousness[4] and often memory (ability to correctly recall previous events or learn new material). Confusion as such is not synonymous with inability to focus attention, although severe inability to focus attention can cause, or greatly contribute to, confusion. Together, confusion and inability to focus attention (both of which affect judgment) are the twin symptoms of a loss or lack of normal brain function (mentation).[citation needed] The milder degrees of confusion as pathological symptoms are relative to previous function. Thus (for example) a mathematician confused about manipulation of simple fractions may be showing pathology which would not be diagnosable in a person without training in this area. Thus, as with the case of delirium, the minor degrees of pathological confusion cannot be diagnosed without knowledge of a person's "baseline", or normal, level of mental functioning.[citation needed]

Confusion may result from drug side effects.[5]"

Yep, that's another aspect.

In the case of this speaker though, he is focusing on how "regular" (there I've said the dreaded norming word) people function within their own belief systems about how and what they know about their own processes of knowing and (more importantly) how it affects their success or otherwise in communicating with others who might have different systems of knowing.

This is vital stuff for scientists et al to appreciate and be able to take into account as they discuss their work.

This thread has really got me thinking.

Partway through, but I think the first key point is:
- truth and validity are strongly associated
- judgement of truth biases judgement of validity.

funny that I'm listening to "please read the letter that I wrote"

Haven't watched the video yet, but it is extraordinary the evidence which exists which demonstrates the way we humans perceive reality has more to do with the way we perceive reality than what reality actually is.

*Shamelessly stealing the ideas of others*, human beings are better described as Pan Narrans (the story-telling Ape) than as Homo Sapiens (the rational man).

Our concept of reality is shaped by a natural process (evolution of the brain) which should not be assumed to be optimized for understanding reality, but rather for making a "type-of-sense" of reality. Sense depends on an internal consistency, and science certainly is consistent. That doesn't mean it's accurate, it just means that it looks acurate to us.

The really great thing about science is that it can, if given the chance, address this very issue. What I really love about science is not the questions that it answers, but the questions that it raises.

Why are we so sure about the things we are sure about?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...-to-be-a-baby/

"
...
And this brings me to my question: How do babies pay attention? What is it like to look at the world like an infant? The question is particularly interesting because the ability to pay attention, focusing that spotlight on a thin slice of the stage, depends on the frontal cortex, that lobe of brain behind the forehead. Alas, the frontal cortex isn’t fully formed until late adolescence – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – which means that it’s just beginning to solidify in babies. The end result is that little kids struggle to focus.
This has led the UC-Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – I’m a huge fan of her latest book, The Philosophical Baby – to suggest that babies don’t have a spotlight of attention: They have a lantern. If attention is like a focused beam in adults, then it’s more like a glowing bulb in babies, casting a diffuse radiance across the world. This crucial difference in attention has been demonstrated indirectly in a variety of experiments. For in ... "