Todd Suomela's Library tagged understanding →  View Popular, Search in Google

"Consequently, operational closure need not be a tragic thesis that we are forever doomed to completely misunderstand one another. Our ability to enter into the world of others– animal, social, human, and technological –can grow and develop, even if it will never be complete."

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"We are a charitable trust that equips people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in public discussion."

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The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.

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"The underlying issue seems what they call the correlation heuristic: people think that the behavior of a stock (the amount of water in the tub) should be similar to the behavior of its inputs (the rate at which water pours from the faucet). This is especially a problem when it comes to understanding climate change. In another experiment, most people thought that stabilizing emissions was sufficient to stabilize the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; if you think about it, though, you should realize that if you want the level to be stable, inflows have to equal outflows (and right now inflows are about double outflows)."

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"Accumulation is a fundamental process in dynamic systems: inventory accumulates production less shipments; the national debt accumulates the federal deficit. Effective decision making in such systems requires an understanding of the relationship between stocks and the flows that alter them. However, highly educated people are often unable to infer the behavior of simple stock–flow systems. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that poor understanding of accumulation, termed stock–flow failure, is a fundamental reasoning error. Persistent poor performance is not attributable to an inability to interpret graphs, lack of contextual knowledge, motivation, or cognitive capacity. Rather, stock–flow failure is a robust phenomenon that appears to be rooted in failure to appreciate the most basic principles of accumulation, leading to the use of inappropriate heuristics. We show that many people, including highly educated individuals with strong technical training, use what we term the “correlation heuristic”, erroneously assuming that the behavior of a stock matches the pattern of its flows. We discuss the origins of stock–flow failure and implications for management and education."

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Three foci of current research: meaning in explanation, methods for support, ontology of causation.

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"The goal is not to convert people to the other side. Rather, it is to overcome the mutual bewilderment and demonization that can happen when each side hears the arguments of the other. It is to get over the kind of assumption that anyone who holds those other positions must be stupid or evil."

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"The notion of interpreter is equally straightforward: in an era of increasing specialization, the world needs generalists who can connect increasingly isolated spheres of research in order to make sure they can talk to one another. Philosophy’s ability to synthesize and generalize about different strands of work enable it, Habermas claims, to help connect the arts and the sciences, literature and biology, logic and experimentalism.

How would anthropology work as stand-in and interpreter? "

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"There isn't very much transparency about the deep structure of almost any complex modern society. For most people their primary impressions of the society's functioning comes from the mass media and their own personal experiences. We each see the limited bits to which we are fairly directly exposed through our ordinary lives -- the newsroom if we happen to be a beat reporter, the university if we are professors, the play-and-learn center if we are in the business of preschool education. We gain a pretty good idea of how those networks of institutions and organizations work. But it's very difficult to gain a birds-eye picture of the social system as a whole."

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"I think we would be better served by making clear that scientific thinking is just thinking, and the sort of thing that everybody does all the time."

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"After it was all over, everyone pronounced the occasion a great success; not because any substantive problems had been solved, but because a set of intellectual problems had been tossed around and teased out by men and women at the top of their game. The pleasure was palpable and a bit esoteric, for only a small number of people in the world care whether originalism is a textualist or an intentionalist enterprise; but we all cared and we were more than willing to do the hard work involved in trying to get things straight. We were all willing and eager, that is, to do academic work."

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In the wave of criticisms about America, one thing gets lost that explains American adult knowledge - America is the only major country that requires almost all its college and university students to complete a full year of science. So the scientific literacy of U.S. adults is higher than the general adult populations of other developed nations.

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"I realized I wasn't scared of stats: just bored and annoyed and wondering, indeed, what they had to do with various things. Keeping track of lots of data makes for pretty graphs and useful trends. Those kinds of stats are cool. But statistical analysis of data doesn't always make sense to the people using it. Not just because it's complicated, but because it's not always informative of what they're looking at. It has to make sense in context. You have to be able to actually answer the question "what's stats go to do with it?", and not just use it rhetorically like I did in most of this post. "

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